Future Tech Today

"Science fiction has a robot fetish: robots that make your breakfast, robots that make war and yes, robots that make love. But while ASIMO may be able to do your taxes and pour a mean Tom Collins, it has the romantic appeal of a vending machine. And not those sexy vending machines in airports that sell overpriced iPods."

Joe Blancato and Jordan Deam draw a line between now and then, stopping along the way for lasers.

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Pedant response No. 1

Don't you mean drive along the Y axis?

I think the chance that a black hole created at CERN can consume the planet is as likely as me winning the lottery 10 times in a row. Possible but atrociously improbable.
I would of course be quite mad to win a gazillion billion dollars only to fall into a singularity while a happy observer from far away watches as I red-shift to infinity towards the event horizon.

In any case even if Black Hole would actually be produced, they would be of subatomic dimension, and since the subatomic world is a world where there is relatively a lot of empty space (maybe we should ask Rick Moranis to shrink us so we can see...), the chance of a tiny weenie black hole coming in contact with something before it evaporated. Yes even Black Holes have a 'boiling point'. Of course, if some of you nerds have read books by our favorite ALS-suffering scientist Stephen Hawking, you already know this. Naturally he could be wrong, and he actually was proven wrong about some theories on information loss in black holes recently.

In any case do not worry. If it happens it'll be quick. Have a nice day.

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"some scientists claim living a healthy life to 1,000 is possible"

As a scientist myself I know that scientists often make nice promises like the one stated above. Sometimes we get some tiny and yet very fascinating results in our research. Then our imagination festers and we start making science fiction in our heads. Unfortunately when we have to put theory into practice we often smack our faces into very high brick walls.

We can make an example that touches the environment, energy and fuel crises. They have been promising us Nuclear Fusion as an energy source for the past 50 years and now the prospectives in such regard are that we will have Nuclear Fusion replacing fossil fuels in power plants in 50 years from now. I am talking about 'hot' fusion. Cold fusion, it seems, is a possibility that has been dropped altogether.

So 'Some scientists' say a lot of things, but often they have no more value than the gibberish uttered by Geordy LaForge on the Enterprise.

Don't listen to entropy3ko's pragmatic assessment of what science has delivered in the past. We're not living in the past or the present anymore. We're living in the future.

Archon:
Don't listen to entropy3ko's pragmatic assessment of what science has delivered in the past. We're not living in the past or the present anymore. We're living in the future.

I knew I was living in the future when the liquidators down the street put surplus Roombas in the front window. Used droids, hmm... I wonder if any speak Bocce?

-- Steve

Fascinating stuff and it's got me doing some more research about it now, the laser particularly scares me as it's silent invisible death but i can see it would have great military applications particually in missile defence (looking at the MTHEL more here).

But all in all it's a really exciting time to see all these sci-fi concepts actually being realised.

Anton P. Nym:
I knew I was living in the future when the liquidators down the street put surplus Roombas in the front window. Used droids, hmm... I wonder if any speak Bocce?

Moisture vaporators and Roombas: two devices separated by a common language.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17171083/

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=060628204537.2422eofv&show_article=1