Ask Lemmy

A lot of black mirror stuff.

Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.

Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we'll even be able to eliminate measles...again.

external gestation...a womb with a view

severe genetic manipulation... designer babies

digit/limb/organ regeneration

living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met

Robocop Bell Riots suppression?

Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity

Exoskeletons like Ripley's in Alien. We've got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.

Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.

Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!

Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.

Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.

Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.

Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.

Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries

Low yield fusion plants. I'd like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it's much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.

Most of the stuff in Jules Verne's books, even Paris in the Twentieth Century.

(Well, the moon gun would need to be a very long railgun, not a gunpowder cannon, if you want crewed capsules, but still.)

Sex robots!

I'd really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I'm losing hope.

I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn't be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.

I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it's shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we're in is just part of a larger cycle.

I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don't think it will be "downloading minds" or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.

I'm pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.

We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.

Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!

The Oscilation Overthruster.

I'm hoping we'll get a couple of big medical breakthroughs on nuerodegenerative diseases and cancer in the same way HIV is now much more manageable than it once was.

If anyone said space harpoons/orbital bombardment, they'd be wrong - we already have that technology deployed in orbit right now.

I think genetic engineering is the most high-potential tech right now. They're already using it to cure sickle cell, and my (total non-expert, probably way too hopeful) pipe dream is that we could basically treat it like we can open a terminal on the body some day and change whatever we want.

Edit: I just want to point out that I'm imagining curing cancer, reversing aging, etc. Not like, additional orifices or anything.

Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.