Last week, I TiVo'd a three part series on the Discovery Channel called 2057, a special looking into what technology might look like in 50 years, and how it will integrate into every part of our daily lives. I've only gotten through the first episode dealing with the body, but I've got to say it's really cool (or quite scary if you're paranoid about Big Brother). Sensors built into everything from your clothing to even your toilet to monitor your health. Actual printers (yes, printers) that can essentially print you a new organ. Flying ambulances that pick you up in an emergency equipped with the ability to pull out all your blood and replace it with supercooled fluid to basically put you in suspended animation until you can be treated in the hospital.
The rest of the series deals with city life and the world--how we communicate, how we travel, etc. I'm actually looking forward to what they say about space elevators, because the idea of basically a ribbon of cable tethered to the ground and extending all the way into space seems so bizarre. This will make those romantic trips up some mountain in the Rockies down right tame. Just don't forget anything on the space station before you go back down.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Whoa! Talk about serious vertigo...
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3 comments:
Damn elevators would block your view though. I think this is a stupid idea.
In the novel '3001', Arthur C. Clarke's second sequel to '2001: A Space Odessey', He focuses a great deal on the great space elevators idea. He theorized that they would all be cased in diamond, as it is the hardest substance known to man, and there is a greater then good chance the astroid belt between Earth and Mars is filled with huge chunks (like continent sized) of diamonds. Something about the way the rocks were formed I guess, and by then we would have fleets of ships to mine them... And yes the elevators traveled up to cities many hundreds of miles above the planet. They each extended from somewhere along the Earth's equator to keep the Earth balanced, and those countries that could house them became the most powerful in the World.
Ooh, I hope I didn't ruin the episode for you Swany... Let me know what they theorize.
Damn, Wander! That's like telling a kid who's never seen Star Wars that Darth Vader is Luke's father.
Seriously, though, perhaps Clarke wasn't too far off. They didn't mention diamonds, but physicists working on the space elevator today think that the ribbon that stretches up into space would have to be made out of carbon nanotubes, which perhaps has some molecular structure similar to a diamond. They also predicted cities being formed up there, just as Arthur C. Clarke, although some time much farther in the future.
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