I’d like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. Don’t misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
Being able to photosynthesize. It wouldn’t be that hard either, we already can, just not to make food.
I don’t know how plausible this is, but a way for trans men and trans women to exchange sexual traits. There might be an answer elsewhere in that there are animals that can change sex in certain conditions so there is some biological evidence of possibility in a singular case. However it seems anti-poetic that we have genetic females who want to be genetic males and genetic males who want to be genetic females and the answer that we currently have as society is for them to go fuck themselves.
I guess for more realistic, then deep dive VR.
How about a UBI? Do social policies count as technologies? They do in 4X games, so I’m going with it.
I would categorize UBI as a policy/law, more than a tech thing.
A fully open source tech manufacturing company such as chips, gpu, ram, motherboard, connectors, ssd .etc you get the idea.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed “old world”.
Hell yeah but it is all a pipe dream anyway cause no corpo or billionaire is gonna do it.
I imagine it would probably take someone obscenely rich choosing not to be rich anymore in order to make it happen. Which seems unlikely.
Unlikely is putting it mildly
Earth unity. Whatever they did to make humans stop attacking each other was crazy.
We probably need another species to compete against to unite us. I’d put Billions into nasa to find aliens so we can fight them.
We probably need another species to compete against to unite us.
Nah, the US would use it as an excuse to demand a world government under their control.
I’m only downvoting you because that’s basically what OP said, not be cause you’re wrong.
If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?
Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.
Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.
Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons
That Venutian amoeba will have to take one for the team. OUR team.
When the aliens show up and demand who’s responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods
Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.
Nanotech robots for garbage recycling.
Imagine if we dumped our trash into one end of a big fuckoff machine and out the other end it came out in microscopic pieces into hoppers for reuse or correct disposal.
Throw in an old appliance and out the other end comes the aluminium from the body, the steel, the copper from the wiring, the silica… you get the idea.
But they’d just realize we are all garbage and then gray goo the entire earth
Nah thats the dystopian version, op specified “Exotic” thats the one that doesnt go wrong and kill us all.
“Exotic” isn’t synonymous with “safe”
Dont tell me how my hypothetical science fiction invention works, you dont understand the hypothetical sciemce fiction research we would be hypothetically doing.
Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.
This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.
And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It’s obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That’s $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
No you’ve got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.
It’s a proper hostage situation, once you’ve got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.
This would be a really cool idea for a novel or mini-series IMO.
Oh yeah. I’d consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.
…although I bet they’d still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.
I think if mining economy worked like that, Saudi Arabia would have gone bankrupt by cratering the price of oil.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn’t immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I’m not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That’s why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
Or it’ll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It’s all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
Those machines that can make food instantly for sure. Put a few of those bad boys in the right place and we’ve solved world hunger. Also, healthy tasty food for those of us who can’t cook and can’t afford to eat at restaurants.
Granted, people in the restaurant would largely lose their job, but we can retrain them for something else like we did with stagecoach drivers, telephone operators and honest politicians before them 🤷
Replicators! Yes!!
Some restaurants probably will still exist as a premium option. And chefs can create recipes and sell them online.
They’ll probably add DRM to it. Crap! 😬
Atomically Precise Manufacturing!
Might actually happen in the upcoming decades.
FISH!
I’d say budget 3D printed meals are around the corner.
Proper gourmet replicated meals, 60yrs.
Farmers would also loose their jobs.
Eh, most of those are kinda dicks anyway 🤷
And I say that as someone whose family has been mainly farmers all the way back to the 1400s lol
I hate it when my job gets loose.
Opps
Cybernetics hands down.
Also clean energy but personally virtual reality 100%. Give me that SAO experience, damn it. Just without y’know the bad stuff
Regrowing teeth
Current against foetal alkohol syndrome
- Space tether.
- Nuclear fusion.
- Home assistant robots
Bacta Tanks. Maybe a few days in one would fix my back.
Nano-tech medicine, for sure. Injectable swarms of individually dumb, tiny robots which are controlled by an external AI doctor.
Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.
Although only use it when you need it.
I’d invest my billions with this guy
Giving it all away to mutual aid groups to have them figure out local issues.
