TECHNOLOGY
Computers
By 2010, a single light fiber, half the diameter of a human hair, will be capable of carrying a million GBPS (Gigabits per second), a transmission equal to approximately 100 million voice channels.
In 2035, scientists will construct a "Quantum Computer System" capable of solving "multistate" problems that otherwise would require an excessive amount of time and equipment. What will actually contribute to the creation of this new device will be new mathematical and algorithmic theories in programming that will come into existence ten years prior to the machine's existence.
Hard-disk computer storage systems will be replaced in 2008 with electromagnetic/chemical storage systems. These will mimic the way "memory cells" currently operate within the human brain. Changes in the "stored" state will be achieved by electromagnetically altering the chemical makeup of molecule chains. This will result in a quantum leap in speed as well as in the amount of information that can be stored and retrieved. The older technologies (nickel-sized disks) will be relegated to permanent storage requirements instead of dynamic.
A special-purpose computer processor chip called a "Cascade Chip" will be introduced between 2024 and 2025. Its primary purpose will be in support of robotics. When married up with "jell-like" chemical memory agents, it will allow new artificial intelligence operations not available at this time. Advances in computer design will continue to flourish between now and the year 2050, providing unbelievable increases in memory, power (speed), and communications capability.
By 2050, computer memories will experience a fiftyfold increase, with a fivefold reduction in size. Beginning in 2005 with a multicolored/multifrequency recording technology, the expected norm will be a transfer of data through dual-switch processors at 1 megabyte per 8 nanosecond rates or faster from disk to processor.
Floppy disks will be replaced with hard disk drives using removable and rewritable disks one-third the size of today's hard CDs by 2008. The standard RAM on the average machine will be 128 MB, with 256 MB the industrial standard on business machines (all on a single plug-in module.)
In the year 2015, most home computers will be interfacing with the Internet through a newly developed telephone relay system that will operate at three times current ISDN speeds. This will help eliminate some of the current communication problems, which will worsen through the year 2019 and cause computer operators to continue to vacillate between hard lines and satellites.
By 2025, there will be over 600 million Internet users in homes and businesses throughout the world. By then, the Internet will be operating mostly through up-/downlink satellites and roof-mounted dishes about the size of current home visual systems in use today—in both directions. By then, satellite systems will finally be favored over hard wires.
By 2025, all software will be voice-activated and controlled, eliminating the need for keyboards and the mouse. Software will only recognize the voice of the owner and act as an integral part of the computer security and firewall system.
All computers will have full fax, data, voice, and moving picture transfer capabilities built into the motherboard by2005. Use of the phone as a communications device will be nearly eliminated, resulting in higher fees for computer linkups and usage.
By 2010, most phone companies will be offering flat-rate fees for all services, which will average $60 a month regardless of usage or distance.
By the end of 2050, the average home computer will have 1000 times the current processor power, being equal to about eight times the current supercomputer operating capacity. They will operate at room temperature with interlaced quad-processors of ten megabytes each. Internalized communications within the box itself will be based on optic fibers and light links. All of the hard connections will be severed, with all links to printers, keyboards, plotters, etc., by burst, extreme high-frequency wideband broadcast methods.
By 2011, computers will be required in all elementary schools. Courses in information accessing will be taught at all high schools, and college students will be expected to use computers and the Internet for all their research, report writing, and dissertations by the year 2020. As a result, they will also be tested on their ability to root out fact from fiction.
By the year 2020, there will be a substantial rift between computer-literate and computer-illiterate social levels within American society, as well as within other countries. This will have a decisive and very negative effect on wages, employment, schooling levels, and competition in the job market, which will further result in an increase in negative social pressures and declining attitudes. Deliberate acts of violence against computer system facilities will rise dramatically.
Engineering
A new home sound system will be unveiled by one of the leaders in the sound industry between 2002 and 2004. It will produce sound that is controlled by computer to simulate 360-degree surround sound, or 3-D sound simulation. The computer will use sensors to detect how many people are in the room and where they are located in comparison to the shape of the room and the furniture in it. It will then alter the sound being emitted from ten or more speakers, changing their wave fronts to give an impression that one is always standing in the middle of an orchestra pit.
By the year 2010, most newly constructed homes in the United States and Western Europe will have seasonal, self-regulated window glass that will bring more light into a room during winter months, and less during the summer. This will result in a minimum reduction in home energy consumption of 20 to 30 percent. The technology will also bring about major changes in building construction, allowing for the use of glass as a roofing material throughout the home, and self-darkening walls made from glass for bedrooms. You'll be able to regulate when you can or can't see through the walls, which will also increase security.
Medicine
By the year 2006, synchronized x-ray particles will permit cell-by-cell pictographs of most cancer growths within the human body. This, along with computer tomography, will allow for the destruction of cancer cells with tumor-specific radiation treatments in hard-to-reach places. These techniques will minimize damage to surrounding healthy tissue cells. In effect, the computer-driven x-ray device will destroy each cell of a tumor by having memorized its actual location within the other cells of the body.
Within ten years (1998 through 2008), there will be a silver bullet cure for most cancers, as well as the development of a vaccine for AIDS.
By 2010, surgeons will be performing complex micro and macro operations without having to break the skin of the patient. They will be doing this with a whole range of electromagnetic tools that operate in the same way as normal tools. These specialists will be able to perform some types of internalized surgery by using magnetic resonance imaging in conjunction with powerful high-speed computers, narrow-spectrum particle beam generators, and incidence trajectory, to vaporize, cauterize, or alter internal organ cells., By 2020, they will be using modifications of these machines to eradicate narrowing of the arteries (on an emergency basis only—because by then this will normally be done with intravenous), internal eye repair, and radical brain surgery.
Contrary to some of the bad news in previous chapters, there will be great strides in medicine. They will be slowed somewhat by the economic crunch, but it is because of that crunch that many successes will take place. Those of us in the West will have to begin looking at alternative methods of healing that are cheaper and more readily available.
The vaccine developed for AIDS won't be a complete cure, but it will nearly arrest the AIDS disease. Most of those who contract AIDS will be able to live full and productive lives without the debilitating effects. This significant discovery will center on a natural defense that can be keyed or initiated within the AIDS virus itself, through genetic manipulation. Unfortunately, the discovery will bring a new set of problems that will begin to emerge sometime just prior to the year 2025.
By 2035, we will lose our current lines of defense against the common flu. There will be a major epidemic sometime near that time frame, during which tens of thousands will perish. This will prompt the discovery of a completely new technology for addressing the antibiotic requirements of humankind. It will probably also be based on a form of genetic manipulation a step removed from that devised to address the AIDS problem. What is most interesting here is that the method developed will essentially simulate the AIDS virus, only in this case, it will have a positive effect.
By the year 2020, a new understanding about healing and medicine will be born out of increasing problems within the health care system. Inpatient care at a hospital facility will be viewed as necessary only in the most severe of cases. People will be encouraged to seek out alternative means to deal with chronic pain or common ailments. Herbs and diet will be recognized as having the most significant impact on preventative medicine. Outpatient programs for preventative medicine will expand five-fold in that period of time.
A completely new approach will be developed with regard to surgery. Medications will be developed between now and the year 2025 that will in effect reduce the necessity for open-heart, pancreatic, thyroid, gall bladder, or other forms of organ surgery to less than 15 percent their current levels.
The preferred form of surgery (any surgery) will be microscopic, or in the least invasive way possible. As a result, most surgery, even the most radical, will be done on an outpatient basis by the year 2035.
Just before 2020, a teaching hospital somewhere in the central Atlantic states will discover that two "practices" customary in current surgical procedures have actually been responsible for nearly a third of the deaths during surgery over the past twenty years. It will be something simple—like the kind of plastic wrap used to store sterile instruments, or cotton fibers—but a major cause of complication (shock to the system).
By the year 2025, forms of patient-selected suicide will be openly discussed as an option for those with terminal diseases or who are beyond the age of sixty-five. It will take an act of Congress, as well as a U.S. Supreme Court decision to validate a person's right to die—which will take place sometime in the year 2020. Most of the philosophic arguments "pro right to suicide" will be based on future findings that support a belief in life after death and reincarnation (or multiple incarnation states). Surprisingly, most of these arguments will be theologically based.
By 2030, neutral DNA tissue will be specifically engineered and grown for transplant purposes. At first, thetissues will be used for plastic surgery and cosmetics. Custom or designer replacement body parts, based on the DNA of the intended recipient, will be available by the year 2040.
By the year 2020, new molecular-neuro/electrical chip transmitters will be developed that will be capable of transmitting across breaks in human nerve fibers. Although they will only be able to demonstrate gross muscle motor control at first, by the year 2035, molecule-sized transmitters will be implanted under the skin to transmit and activate portions of the body that have previously been deficient as a result of major nerve damage or trauma.
There will be semi-permanent makeup (cosmetics) by the year 2015. Once applied it will remain in place until a chemical debonding agent is used to remove it. The makeup will be impervious to body oils, water, wind, perspiration, or almost any agent other than the specifically designed de-bonding agent.
A cosmetic that can change the color of your skin will be available in pill form by the year 2025.
Nuclear Weapons
A new form of nuclear weapon will be demonstrated by the year 2030. It will use plutonium as a detonator, and antimatter stored within an electromagnetic bottle as a source of fuel.
Its radioactive contamination, size relative to previous weapons, and visible fireball will be much smaller than ever seen before. However, its destructive power will be awesome—easily a thousand times its equivalent size in older technology.
A primitive nuclear weapon (suitcase bomb) will be taken from a terrorist organization in Western Europe sometime between 2009 and 2011. Its actual destination will have been the United States.
Expect a big increase in brownouts by between 2015 and 2020. The primary problem will be aged and worn-out equipment and infrastructure. People living in the South will be the most affected, and can count on new regulations on power usage. Repairs and equipment replacement will extend well into 2115.
The first operational fusion device to produce usable electricity will become operational between 2030 and 2035. Its initial energy output will be 35-40 percent above the energy required to sustain itself. It will be based on a completely new technology than exists today, one that suggests a different approach to electromagnetic containment.
Efficiencies in the transfer of electrical power from solar collectors to storage systems will quadruple by the year 2009. This will be accomplished through the creation of new plastic-metal films, constructed by combining a highcharge-carrying molecular metal with a high-temperature electromagnetic conductor. The substantial increase in efficiency will make the use of solar energy more financially acceptable to the person on the street.
Telecommunications
By the middle of the next century, we will no longer be communicating by phone. Computers and virtual reality will make it possible for those with a lot of money to relax in a comfortable chair and talk to someone, regardless of distance, just as though they were sitting across the room. Those without a lot of money will be wearing a set of goggles that give the impression of standing in front of the individual to whom we are speaking.
A portable communications device will probably be worn on the wrist and look very much like a watch by2035. It will be powerful enough and smart enough to interact by voice commands. No matter where we might be standing, it will notify us of a call, to which we will be able to respond. The exchange might go something like the following:
Device: You have a caller, Sir.
Joe: Connect. (My wife's face appears on the dial.)
Joe: Hi, Sweetie.
Wife: Pick up some of those carrot burgers on the way home tonight.
Joe: OK. See you soon.
Wife: Love.
Joe: Love.
Joe: Break. (Screen vanishes.)
We will also be able to interact with people in the office, or our boss (the actual machine that runs it). We'll be able to connect with the other intelligent machines in our life, such as our personal transporter or our house. We could tell the transporter where to collect us and it would show up there on its own, or maybe have the house check up on the kids:
House: Kids are in their rooms studying at the moment, Sir. (Yeah, right.)
By the year 2050, these machines will be so powerful and have capabilities that are so much greater than our best and brightest computers today, we'll wonder how we ever got along without them. "User friendly" will have a whole new meaning by the end of the next century.
Spaceships
By the year 2025, we will be flying into and out of space in a plane very much like today's Concorde. The only difference will be that it will carry much larger payloads and a lot more passengers. A discovery that will make this possible will be made on the research-oriented space station.
One of the first things we will learn to do in the near vacuum of space is to grow new metal alloys that have crystal orientations not possible in metals formed on Earth. The crystal properties will allow for the creation of new engines and skins for our planes, which will be able to dissipate huge amounts of heat from reentry and atmospherics. These new metals will also have some interesting stability advantages with regard to electronics and how we are able to run things.
The first spaceship to Mars will be constructed in orbit by the year 2050. The engine will be an atomic hybrid, capable of pulse drive, and will propel the ship to Mars in a record four months or less. The crew will land on the surface in a glider-like plane with a wing construction similar to a very large parasail. A small but very dependable solid-fuel rocket will bring them back to the ship. Once the uniqueness of the first trip wears off, there will be at least six more trips to Mars within a ten-year period. A station will be built on the planet's surface before 2075. We will find that we have the ability to produce our own construction materials, oxygen, and water from elements present on the planet. Most of the station will actually be constructed underground.
Why go to Mars?
Research mostly. The first three visits to Mars we will bring back a minimum of six new alloys, and at least one addition to the periodic table of the elements. We will also confirm that at one time, a million years earlier, there were other humanoids that visited Mars and died there.
By the year 2080, we will be producing almost as much power on the edge of space as all the nuclear reactors operating on Earth today (in 1998). We will beam most of this power back to the surface for use in our factories and to heat cities in winter.
By the end of the twenty-first century, we will truly be "children of the stars."