db

1. Infinite energy supply, whether from vacuum energy, zero-point, or anything else. A lot depends on inexhaustable energy.

2. Solve the problem of collecting or producing “exotic matter” (e.g., with negative mass). This is the major hurdle blocking us from superluminal (faster than light) travel.

3. Determine the molecular mechanisms underlying senescence and defeat them (e.g., immortality).

4. Develop noninvasive methods for direct stimulation of the nucleus accumbuns and the ventral tegmental area so that states of sublime bliss and the highest consciousness will be everyone’s birthright, and people will live aesthetic rather than acquisitive lives.

5. Feed everyone, for god’s sake, instead of having families sleeping on steam grates while 1% of Americans control 40% of the Earth’s resources. This necessarily involves developing consciousness to a point where it can generate more emotions than greed and envy.

6. Drastically reduce the population, learn to stop casually wiping out whatever is in our way, use technology to make Earth become heaven.

7. Educate all persons so that they are civilized and cultured, instead of turning our great universities into fancy vocational schools to crush spirits and grind out “human resources.”

8. Stop preaching facile baloney about the brain being a computer, and figure out what consciousness actually is.

9. Increase our skill at genetic engineering, and use it so that there will be no more people facing a lifetime of loneliness because no one wants to touch them.

10. Using both scalp electrodes and deep brain electrodes, summate the brain activity of groups of people, and use this data computationally to produce a new kind of music.

11. Develop robots that will cheerfully handle all of the tedium that the great cultures of the past relied upon slaves to do. End wage slavery in favor of lives of creative expression.

12. Stop the cycle of people eating swill from MacDonalds from the moment they’re born, then spending the rest of their lives going to doctors and hospitals and having GERD.

13. Create neural interfaces (“skullcaps”) to computers so that typing becomes a useless skill and fades away.

14. Discover if there is an interstellar community, and if so, join it. Read that again.

Come on. If “enhancing virtual reality” and “securing cyberspace” are our loftiest dreams, we should be extinct.

db

Indeed David, It would be most enlightening to read your Technological- to do List.

You have a good start with “Solar vs. Nuclear Fusion”
I am glad you reminded us of “the nitrogen cycle” -mostly air, reported as getting hotter. Your link to Socolow allows us to get his a rough skeleton of the fertilisers -water pollution (in the intensive farming model over the last few decades). At current rates of population growth some consider this model to have reached it’s limit and no longer a viable responds to human requirements.

It could be amusing to compare Socolow’s 4 main categories (well presented on the whole via your link on Sciencebase with Dale Carnegie’s list of Human Desires (from around the time of the great depression 1929) The first four are given here.

1 Health & the preservation of life.
2.Food
3. Sleep
4.Money & the things money can by
“Better to be rich and in good health than poor & in ill heath!” Shultz’s “Charlie Brown”

To your remark on Virtual Reality & Exploring Natural Frontiers -your made a point alluded to in my above comments on real world problems. Let’s add another black mark aimed at the games version of virtual reality and its influence fragile minds (not differentiating the real world of common human perception from virtual-digital world.(I trust engineers “safely engineering for safety are not in this category. ). It is perhaps not too much to expect that this highly lucrative activity contribute to objective study in these fields.

On CO2, scepticism, I repeat, as on my blog, I simply cannot follow the sceptics down this lengthy path, at least on engineering policy-of course I not single individual nor country can properly address the magnitude of GHG mitigation required estimates. CO2 is a focal point, it could be Cost too(Stern). There is a special which I’m sure you know. (Coal Page40-43). Faced with a local finding of the reported biggest reserve in Europe(EU) I first shuddered, wrote a poem in my then got involved in this possibly “depressing” topic, Coal, Combustion, CO2… My sceptical nature made me check rapidly what others were saying. On the whole even in company websites no major discrepancy was found to contradict Nature’s German correspondent’s article. Capture & Sequestration is a must by common accord for this most abundant fossil fuel. Now speed with which “the industrial-financial system can swing into full play is shatteringly slow – Commentators at -The Institute of Material, Mining & Minerals (IOM3) often refer to the efficiency of development (Research to Market),in wartime compared with the luxurious pace enjoyed by our post WW2 generations.

As you pointed out, the original Tech-to-do- list you presented (for want of the original report) does appear very wishy-washy indeed.

db