Marshall Brain's Blog

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2004 Wish List

There are lots of people out there making their predictions for 2004. For example:

• Charles Arthur
• Eric Hellwig
• Robert Cringely
• LinuxWorld
• etc.

Instead, I'd like to make some requests. These are things that I wish would arrive in 2004:

• One thing that would be nice to see is repulsorlift technology. This is the technology that allows vehicles to float in the Star Wars movies. Land speeders float a few inches off the ground:
  
  
  
  Repulsorlifts allow droids and speeder bikes to float several feet off the ground, and allow spacecraft to float into low earth orbit. Cheap repulsorlift technology would solve lots of urban transportation problems, and also make it easy to win the X-prize.
  
  
• Of course, to really solve urban transportation problems we need the transporter room to finish its development cycle:
  
  
  
  The idea has been around for 40 years, and there's realistic mockups that have gotten widespread media coverage. How much longer is it going to take?
  
  
• If you want to talk about things with long development cycles, there's fusion power:
  
  
  
  In this case, there's even a working prototype 8 lightminutes away. We just need to take the prototype and miniaturize it a bit. How hard can it be?
  
  
• Assuming that repulsorlifts and transporter rooms will take several years of further development before commercial devices are available, then the automatic/self-driving car would be nice :
  
  
  
  Eliminate the steering wheel please, so we can lie down and sleep, or work on the laptop, on the morning commute.
  
  
• Using the laptop from a car assumes an easy-to-use high speed wireless service. The 3G version of cell phones is supposed to solve this problem, or we could tweak 802.11, or invent something else. I don't think anyone really cares as long as it is free and ubiquitous -- like oxygen.
  
  
• To have real self-piloting cars you need vision systems, and once you have them you might as well create humanoid robots and get it over with. And while we're at it let's redesign the economy so we can all go on perpetual vacation.
  
  
  
  
  
• Burt Rutan (known for his round-the-world-non-stop Voyager airplane and his X-prize entry) recently had this to say about the growth of virtual reality:
  "The ability to go out and buy an orgasm with a beautiful woman with no risk of disease will also create the kinds of things that you will need to truly make it so that you don't have to take a business trip -- the feel of that handshake, all the senses you have of knowing that you are there. Phenomenal amounts of money will be dumped into phenomenally good virtual reality, so we won't have to go to the damn airport in the first place."
  Now that the idea is out there, along with a source of funding, one would expect to start seeing preliminary prototypes any day now.
  
  
• Of course, for true virtual reality without compromise you need the Vertebrane system, and it would be nice to see that pop out in 2004 as well.
  
  
• With all of these new diseases like SARS floating around, along with old ones like the flu and TB getting worse and worse, it would be nice to have a way to know if people are contagious. We take the glowing fish idea and extend it so that everyone who has a communicable disease glows in the dark. It might be nice if they beeped too. That way you could steer clear until they get better. Better yet, it would be nice to have a device that can detect medical problems and actually heal them with "healing rays" of some sort:
  
  
  
  
• Then there's the old favorites -- the ability to read minds (a definitive end to terrorism), the ability to predict the future (ditto), the ability to manipulate things with your thoughts (get rid of all those remotes) and so on.

Any day now...