That has a real chance of existing? Something with clean power.
That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.
So many stupid problems could be resolved with miniaturized fusion cells
That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.
Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.
Is transmet trending somewhere? I haven’t seen it quoted or memed in years but now twice in two days.
Not that I’m aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.
To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.
I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.
Guessing not the replicators from sg1.
Cooking is super fun tho
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.
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?
I’m only downvoting you because that’s basically what OP said, not be cause you’re wrong.
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.
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.
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
Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons
Now Mr Ozymandius with this one cool trick you don’t even need to find the aliens.
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. I would fund so many community libraries. Don’t misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
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
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.
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.
And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.
This seems like it would never be lucrative in any way shape or form.
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.
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 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.
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.
They don’t have to sell all the platinum immediately. Just like DeBeers has mountains of diamonds they keep locked up in warehouses to keep the price controlled.
Two chicks at the same time.
Chicks dig guys with money!
Good point. I’m going with “giant robot”. Chicks dig giant robots.
Well yeah… but we call them gold diggers, not chicks.
I know that not most woman aren’t in to a men just for his money, but the kinda chicks who will double up on a guy like me are!
Great! You still have billions of dollars left.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There’s even people who are poly for free. I don’t know how many do group sex but it’s not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Go watch Office Space, dude.
Is that where it’s from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I’d bring up that it’s a weird one, given it’s in the responses to every question like this.
Back in its time it was an insanely popular movie and most everyone knew a few quotes from it, at least. That was one of the most remembered ones.
Somebody tell us the dude’s cousin’s story. Usually you need a certain level of privilege to drop out.
An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
Have you ever heard of de’beers diamond hoarding story. Thats like what i expect would happen to humanity if we gained the ability to live forever, ‘manufactured scarcity’.
A tumultuous time of oligarchic rule with infighting to control the life extending technology. Eventually ending in a winner take all dictatorship. The masses would never see their lives extended (greener pastures visions may be made in the beginning). In fact common peoples lifespans would likely shorten as the controlling elite no longer required the same sort of widespread healthcare present even at todays standards, (depending upon where you live).
The elite would form a supplicant circle around the eventual dictator who maintains control, drip feeding the life extending technology to those who serve their dictatorship best.
Within a couple generations they won’t be a dictator but our Monarch, and the common people will obey, and descend to a miserable condition.
I may have let my imagination loose today a bit…
Similar to the book/show altered carbon except in that the poor people have a knockoff way to extend life
Oh cool, an Acme version! I didn’t imagine that!
Honestly I’d be horrified knowing that without aging, a traumatic, fatal, accident becomes more and more likely as time passes to the point of being inevitable. Always on edge for that moment when it all suddenly comes to an end.
That sounds like the gambler’s fallacy to me. Time alone wount make an accident more likely, it just means potentially mpre opportunities wheee an accident could occur. Sitting on your sofa today or 10,000 years from now makes no difference if the environment is the same. If you’ve played the lottery 10 times before you likely won’t win if you play again, if you play 100,000 times you still won’t win.
You shouldn’t be any more anxious about an unexpected accident than you are right now. Just without the worrying about factoring in aging.
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.
I’d invest my billions with this guy
Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.
Although only use it when you need it.
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.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn’t civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I’d said we should do fusion power or something.
Doors that go “swish” when they open.
Make them open and close in a circular pattern like a camera aperture and I’m in
I would fund a truly fair AI and a very gentle, but firm, self replicating robot army to enforce it’s benevolent will on everyone.
So basically SkyNet, after I make a pointer arithmetic mistake.
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an “AI” controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won’t work because you’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you’re trying to “fix” traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn’t really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it’s as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a “pick one” situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and the metrics you’re using don’t really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that’s considered “normal” in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they’d still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your “cars not driving” metric, that’s anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That’s not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It’s a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
The specific numbers dont matter.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You’re arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren’t car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren’t originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that’s a remotely reasonable argument? It’s utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid1, we’re literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
1. It’s not, just build other infrastructure instead of more roads. From a strictly capitalist perspective it pays for itself when more space can be used for taxable business instead of the dead weight of parking, and those businesses are more accessible to foot traffic making them more profitable and therefore generating more taxes. Not to mention the maintenance costs.
Stupid integer overflow!
Curing aging.
That would leave the time to see all the other inventions to come. It would also cure age related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Cancer.
Is Cancer age related? I thought it could happen to anyone. But much more likely to happen when your older.
Well yes, but a) the immune system gobbles up bad cells, but becomes less efficient as it ages b) point mutations accumulate with age => increases the risk of cells going haywire.
Regrowing teeth
Current against foetal alkohol syndrome
Faster-than-light travel. Which is physically impossible, but whatever.
Physically impossible as per our current understanding of physics, mathematics, and technology.
Maybe not, if we where to find a cheat way with wormholes.
Every single suggestion so far has been positive, life-affirming, and productive, so I’m going to be Gru here for a change:
Bolos. AI tanks with no crew and heavily (Greek) Spartan-centric model training.
I’ll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.
We should start a company.
Don’t worry, I’m here to help :)
