Marshall Brain's Blog

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Idea 1 - Instant buildings

Need a Building? Just Add Water - has several nice photos too.

Anyone who has ever watched a plaster cast being put on a patient understands this idea already. The way doctors used to make casts is to take strips of fabric impregnated with plaster of paris. They would dip the strips in water and apply them to the cast like paper mache.

The inventor has taken that idea to a much grander scale and added air as well. Here the fabric is stronger, and it is impregnated with cement rather than plaster, and air pressure is used to hold the building's shape until the cement sets. Will this technology replace Terrafoam in Manna?

Idea 2 - Instant computer

Good-bye, computer; hello, world!

Not necessarily a new idea, but one that is now actually imaginable. The idea is to run all applications like Word, Excel, Quicken, email, etc., etc. as web clients so that, on your computer, all that you need is a browser. This eliminates the need for any user to worry about operating systems, hard disk space, backing up, etc.

Idea 3 - Instant sunlight

Sunlight in a tube

The idea is to pump sunlight deep into the interior of any building using fiber optics. Why? According to the article: "Indoor electric lighting is the largest consumer of electricity in commercial buildings, according to researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee." That's interesting. I would have thought it would be air conditioning.