Trek Tech That Most Needs To Be Invented Before I Die:
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Holodeck (Score:2)
Re:Holodeck (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Holodeck (Score:3)
But just think of the pranks you could play with a cloaking device!
Re:Holodeck (Score:4, Informative)
And what about all the other devices?
Scott Adams already covered this [wordpress.com] back when you were all embryos.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
You'd need to make money to pay for the energy needed to run the replicator and holodeck, assuming money hasn't been eliminated by this point (which in the star trek universe it has been.. although they never really explain how that works.. the whole "people just work for the good of society" thing hasn't worked too well in the real worlds).
The assumption would be that industry would migrate away from the jobs that are now irrelevant due to replicator and holodeck technology. Which makes for the interesting and depressing revelation that we'll probably never see either of these technologies.. as way too many businesses would stand to die. If you take what the media industry is doing and multiply that by about a thousand, you might approach the kind of response you'd get from established industry to either of these technologies.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
Holodeck + telepresence + teleconference. Work from home. Plus, by tweaking the scenario depicted, you can turn you office/factory drudgery into a fantasy. Think "grinding" in WoW or similar, but getting paid.
(Also, never understood the need for 90% of "away missions" once they had holodecks. Ie, TNG era.)
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
From the point of economics, if the cost of creating materials drops to zero (i.e. Replicators can make food, building materials, all other kinds of goods) then economics as we know it - and subsequently business - would cease to exist in a short period of time. Power would probably be an easily solved equation, since the cost of creating exotic materials for solar, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, etc would drop (and research into physics and chemistry would explode due to the removal of synthesis in the scientific method). I bet there would indeed be significant backlash (or, cynically, the inventor would be shot and his research destroyed by the industry-government establishment) in the short term, but in the long run society would have a sudden and huge shift in the way it operates.
Land would be more important than any kind of material goods, intellect/technical skills/artistry would rise in importance, and politics would remain relatively the same. Social hierarchies would change for a bit as the people who hunger for power figure out how to get back on top.
I imagine a large chunk of crime would drop off (No need to rob the store if I can get what it makes for free), except for organized crime which would just shrink (The people at the top are about power, not money. The foot-soldiers are just far less interested in playing along).
Unemployment would rise - and with it suicide rates - but it would also no longer be an indicator of what it means now. That is, unless the current power structure imprints itself during the transformative period by creating a large bureaucratic superstructure that sucks up most of the surplus population designed to prevent the shift in mobility - but that wouldn't last very long since money would no longer exist in any meaningful form.
Basically, as I see it, it sounds like what happened in Star Trek was possible because the existing power structures in society were destroyed right around the advent of warp and replicator technology. A society without a WW3-level leveling of politics as we know it would probably get to the same place, where the power was now within appointment to leadership (which would be one part nepotism and one part ability).
I actually think TNG deals with this in a few episodes. I don't know about others, since all I've seen are TNG and Enterprise (and Enterprise was sci-fi for the CW audience, without the level of nuance TNG had).
---------------
Tl;dr:
Economics can be nudged, but never stopped. If prices drop to 0, society follows and the buggy whip makers will eventually get crushed if they try and stop it.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
From the point of economics, if the cost of creating materials drops to zero (i.e. Replicators can make food, building materials, all other kinds of goods) then economics as we know it - and subsequently business - would cease to exist in a short period of time.
Except that the guys with power probably liked things the way they were, and now they have a limitless supply of guns and bullets to use on anyone who tries to build an unauthorized replicator.
Re:Holodeck (Score:3)
The laws might prop up the business model, and make life suck for a number of people (especially consumers), but they have already failed at doing what they once were. They're just trying to buy enough time to survive while they adapt, now that they've realized the need.
I expect any kind of change like that to go through similar practices: after all, the Luddites destroying tractors didn't prevent the mechanization of agriculture. Society as a whole routes around these defective chunks. It's just really annoying waiting for the legal and business worlds to catch up.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
I had the same argument with Hot Pockets and the Internet as the keys to success. Unfortunately, the replicator breaks down, and the holodeck sometimes tries to kill you.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
This in contrast to pizza delivery and world of warcraft?
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
I thought we're all on a holodeck already.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
Warp Drive - so you can escape the in-laws real fast
Transporter - so you move the in-laws out of your house
Replicator - for feeding the in-laws
Holodeck - so you can escape the in-laws without pissing of your wife to much
Phaser - in-law + alcohol - "Set to stun"
Cloaking Device - hide from in-laws
Synthale - why?
"Fully Functional" Androids - can they beat up in-laws or can I have a couple of female ones with long red hair?
Holodeck for me.
Re:Holodeck (Score:3)
I can’t believe you missed that opportunity –
"Fully Functional" Androids - don’t come with in-laws
Also, “Phaser - in-law + alcohol” sounds like a good recipe for goin’ out back and putting holes in shit just for the heck of it.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
With a really good holodeck you won't be able to tell you are in one.
Don’t tell anyone, but we’re actually in one right now.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
Fully functional androids is guaranteed to happen eventually. Real dolls exist now [youtube.com] and it's only a matter of time before they're androids. The market is there, and at $10,000 each [bbcamerica.com] it'll be very profitable to any company able to make fully functional androids.
Re:Holodeck (Score:2)
Re:Holodeck (Score:5, Informative)
Holodeck never made sense. How can beams of light have a physical presence?
The holodeck used a combination of force fields, tractor beams, replicated matter, and projection. Stuff in the distance was just projected onto the walls. You walked around suspended on a force field that moved to give you the impression that you were travelling large distances when you were actually staying on the spot (with the aid of tweaks to the artificial gravity). Anything that you picked up would be replicated and then disintegrated when it went out of range.
This means that the prerequisites for a holodeck are:
The ability to manipulate gravity with very fine-grained control.
Force fields.
3D projection.
Enough computing power to model 3D worlds accurately.
Matter rearrangement (replication / disintegration).
Re:Holodeck (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holodeck (Score:5, Funny)
See the Star Trek Technical Manual for the full explanation.
RTFSTTM? That's gotta be the best comment in this thread.
Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:2)
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:3)
One only kinda breaks several known laws of physics, the other completely breaks them. BIG difference...
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:2)
One bends space, the other turns matter into energy and then back into matter.
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Put more eloquently; "one bends space around you, the other bends you around space"... No word yet on how the Soviet Russian version will operate, but it perhaps involves creation and use of a 12th dimension: The State.
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:2)
Arbitrarily bending space to suit our wishes, as far as we know, is impossible; the other is (or should be), at least in theory, possible. Although of course there are all sorts of concerns with it... there’s a fuckton of energy bound up in matter, to begin with, and of course the energy being moved couldn’t violate causality (though it could probably be moved across great distances with more ease than a human, not requiring food, water, air, etc. and traveling at the speed of light). Plus you’d need some serious encryption (it’d suck to get rematerialized on the other side and discover that some asshole from SecondLife replaced your nose with a giant penis), and by that time who knows if RAR with AES-256 will be good enough...
Actually forget transportation, it’d be much more useful as a cosmetic surgery tool or for putting people (convicts?) into long-term hibernation without needing annoying things like refrigeration or life support.
Stasis prison (Score:2)
... or for putting people (convicts?) into long-term hibernation without needing annoying things like refrigeration or life support.
A bad idea, as has been explored in sci-fi. Prison systems today (especially in the US) are generally broken, but they do tend to be undesirable to potential (and released) criminals. They act as a mild deterrent. (They also act as a crime university, but I digress.) Take that away, and crime (and recidivism) rise.
And how are you going to determine that someone has "served" a life sentence? Are you going to merely keep them the 200+ years sentenced and then let them loose? That doesn't sound like a good idea to me! (Family and appropriate friends form the most viable framework for rehabilitation; they do no good if they're all dead.)
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:3)
"Arbitrarily bending space to suit our wishes, as far as we know, is impossible"
What? Space is already curved. We're curving it with each movement we make. We just haven't figured out how to massively curve it, in an energy efficient way. Its engineering, not physics ( unless you want to point out that we have no known way of generating this amount of energy, in which case that is the physics problem).
Now transportation... That sounds really difficult. With quantum entanglements and probabilistic states of energy, spin and what not, I wouldn't be surprised if it was proven to be incredibly unlikely to transport a macroscopic object with out loss of information. Free lobotomies with each trip!
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:3)
Transporter: Destructively analyze your physical makeup, encode it, transmit and reassemble at remote location. Speed is approximately that of light, although time for disassembly/reassembly creates some overhead. Range is limited by the power of the transmitter.
Warp Drive: Create a localized bubble of spacetime distortion, and ride the wave it creates, enabling speeds greater than light. It's actually *slower* to beam somewhere than it is to warp.
The Transporter is most like the Matter Replicator. Matter replicator is basically a stored database of Transporter buffer data that you can select from and create as many copies as you like.
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:2)
Re:Warp drive / transporter difference? (Score:2)
If we're talking the Star Trek transporter, then it didn't travel faster than light and had a maximum range of 40,000km. It worked by deconstructing you at a quantum level (a molecular level for the cheap cargo transporters - do not use with humans!), turning that into energy, transmitting it, and reassembling it at the far end. In (very) slightly more realistic physics, it entangled each particle in your body with another at a remote location, then decohered one version leaving the other as an exact duplicate. This is theoretically possible with our current understanding of the universe, but it's pretty difficult to do with a single particle: doing it with every particle in your body is a massive engineering challenge and seems very unlikely to ever be possible.
Other teleporters, from other science fiction works, typically function differently. They work by creating wormholes or translating the body through a fourth dimension. These may or may not be faster-than-light, but a slower than light version involving wormholes is also probably possible with current physics and is a much smaller engineering problem (i.e. really hard, we don't know how to do it, but we think it might be possible, although not in the near future).
Faster than light travel, by any means, is theoretically difficult, and no one really has any idea where to even start there.
Dr Missing Options, please report to sickbay (Score:3)
How about all the life-extending tech in the sickbay? I for one would like to live to 150, I am sure all those medical tricorders, gene manipulation, teleporter-based surgery, and fancy spraying thingies would come in handy for that.
Re:Dr Missing Options, please report to sickbay (Score:4, Insightful)
See, there you have a people that can disassemble and reassemble a human atom by atom. They can command stupendous amounts of energy, toy with anti-matter as if it was candies, possess nanobots and computers so stupendously powerful that frequently they'll have to fight off incidental self-awareness and to top it of they can also create force-fields wit a superb resolution as well as create new objects out of thin air (and a lot of energy).
And all they manage is to make you life 150 years tops? really?
Re:Dr Missing Options, please report to sickbay (Score:3)
That always seems pretty strange. In a few episodes, they use the transporter to repair damaged people, but there's somehow no mode that automatically repairs cell damage, reconstructs telomeres, resets enzyme balances, and so on. All of these things are pretty trivial extensions of things that they demonstrate are possible with the transporter, but they somehow aren't used.
It's a shame, from a storytelling perspective, that they decided to make the transporters work like that, and not by wormholes or similar. That technology would not give so many other side effects. For one, the replicator is a trivial offshoot of the original series transporter, but didn't appear for about a hundred years.
Replicator (Score:4, Insightful)
The replicator would solve all the world's hunger and resource problems.
Re:Replicator (Score:2)
Just what I was thinking. One serious and seven joke alternatives.
Re:Replicator (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Replicator (Score:2)
Not true. A replicator that can replicate itself would fully solve this problem. What's the point of wealth if you have every material good you need?
Re:Replicator (Score:3)
At least in Star Trek world, the replicator is a very cheap technology - it's what Picard uses to get his cup of Earl Gray tea and he doesn't even reuse the mug. If replicators dramatically lowered the cost it would make the current aid money stretch much, much further. I'm sure we'd still have rich and poor as people's time would not be infinite, but there's two measures of poverity - in relative terms to everyone else and in absolute terms. If replicators could give you food, clean water, medicines (though not doctors), shelter and so on for near free the lives of the "poor" would improve immensely. So yeah it's a problem we might be able to solve without them, but replicators would be a lot easier.
Re:Replicator (Score:2)
Well, just to carry your point to its logical conclusion: if someone stabs you with a knife - to your death - and takes your wallet, then this person is better than you, because they've seized the opportunity of the moment and you did not.
Re:Replicator (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really believe that a person who doesn't work should be as wealthy as someone who works hard? That an alcoholic bum is equal to a brain surgeon or rocket scientist?
Um, actually I think your problem is that you misunderstand the term “wealth inequality”. It is the concept that the average guy working his ass off in Africa still doesn’t make enough money to feed himself, much less his family. And it’s a problem.
Granted I don’t agree with what socialists claim the answer to the problem is, but I won’t deny that it exists.
Re:Replicator (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really believe that a person who doesn't work should be as wealthy as someone who works hard?
Just for arguments sake: Why shouldn't he? Please try to argue that without assuming a priori what should be the result of the argument, namely that being wealthy is a sign of being more valuable.
The whole idea of wealth actually rests on this circular argument. And we don't even have to think hard to know that it isn't even remotely true. I'm sure everyone here can immediately come up with some names of people who contributed vastly to humanity and weren't wealthy (Mozart, most artists in fact, but also a good number of ancient philosophers, writers, scientists) as well as a lot of wealthy people whose "value" to the rest of us is largely in providing entertaining gossip (inherited wealth, mostly).
In fact, "working hard" is the least reliably successful way towards wealth.
Comparing middle-class "wealth" to street-bum "wealth" really only distracts from what "wealth inequality" is about, namely the fact that the majority of all wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer people.
That said, I'm myself far from a socialist. I do believe that my knowledge and effort justify me having more stuff to play with. However, I also believe that fighting over the 20% of the nation's wealth is not what it should be about, and that very few of the people earning 100x my income and more are as much ahead of me than I am of even the people that earn 1/10th of me. And that is the inequality that needs to be fixed. This spread has nothing whatsoever to do with opportunity, skills, hard working, study or anything else.
Re:Replicator (Score:3)
I'll take an example from an industry I know, electricity prices fluctuate wildly at (in Australias eastern seaboard) 5 minute intervals. This is bad for business as customers want fixed prices, retailers want guaranteed margins and generators also want guaranteed margins. Price uncertainty at this level kills wealth creation. Contracts for differences guarantee the customer a fixed price for their consumption and both retailers and generators a guaranteed margin on electricity used by those customers.
Yes, I know. I used to work at the stock exchange for a short time. I know what it was originally designed to do. The problem today is that a tiny amount of trade actually serves that purpose. Depending on your market, anywhere from 90% to 99% of all trade is speculation. Again, that originally served a purpose (providing liquidity), but it has long since gone out of balance. What "balance"? Well, if the prices are not driven by the underlying real-goods market, but almost entirely by speculation, then speculation has grown too large because it should not be an end in itself, and definitely not define the prices, it should provide liquidity.
Nonsense. Subtracting the cost of these services from the productive sectors of the economy reduces the ratio of wealth consumption to wealth creation in the economy:
Nowhere did I say to reduce the costs. Nowhere did I say providing these things for free. My argument runs the other way around: Provide people with enough wealth to purchase these things at market value. My rough guess at the cost is that the top 1% wealthy would have to suffer a 1% decrease on their wealth to finance such a system. Which would increase the demand for those base items, increase profits for those producing them, which enables them to buy other survives. It is "trickle up", if you want. Contrary to "trickle down", this has be shown to work. Repeatedly.
but I think I'm arguing with the wrong person if I want a fight over whether or not the finance industry should get public funds ;)
Absolutely. I'm all with you on the "let them fail" part. In fact, I think they should've let the banks fail and jail their managers for a criminal conspiracy at the expense of all of us. Unfortunately, the commons has become the least well defended area of law. It is practically open to plunder from everyone, with no punishment or even deterence. And here I was thinking that every capitalist knows "the tragedy of the commons" and thus knows that you can't leave the commons free to abuse by everyone, or you will destroy it.
If you have ten bucks, it's not good for much except buying something to consume. If you've got ten thousand bucks, you've got enough money to start a business and start creating wealth. Banks participate in the wealth creation process by collecting many small accumulations of wealth into one spot so that it can be used for wealth creation rather than for (immediate) consumption. This is a crucial component of any economy without which wealth creation becomes enormously more difficult.
Again, in theory and in former times, that was so. Today, it isn't. The main contributing factors are a) constant debt and b) leverage.
With a) I mean that everyone is in debt all the time. If not directly, than as a tax payer because almost no country on earth is not in a deficit. Being in debt constantly means that debt accumulates via interest. This destroys the economic advantage of debt as providing liquidity and enabling investment, because you (or the economy as a whole) enter a downward spiral. Why do you think we have this insane obsession with economic growth, despite everyone who knows some math knowing that exponential growth can not be sustained indefinitely? Because the combination of constant debt and interest means our debt growth exponentially, and the only way to keep ahead of it is exponential economic growth. Whenever we can't s
Re:Wealth Inequality (Score:4, Interesting)
"Wealth Inequality" is by its own just as shallow a cry as whatever you think of what I said. It forbids people from even attempting to give reason why there is such a thing as "inequality" in wealth.
The term itself says everyone has the same exact worth, regardless of skill, industriousness or beyond.
THIS is where I have a problem. That is exactly why I said "opportunity" in my previous post. You have no opportunity (real or imagined) to be industrious and earn a living accordingly.
However the "I've been told I can't" line is used by people who are enslaving others all the time, including those crying "Wealth Inequality". You can't earn more than X without being penalized.
To be clear here, I'm all for opportunity equality, however we're so far away from this that it sickens me. My kids don't have the opportunity that others have, simply because someone else thinks they have more opportunity already. I tell them otherwise, that problems are simply opportunities in disguise.
To be fair, comparisons between people is never "fair". I would suck as a jockey, is that fair I can't earn a living being one? (Being 6'5" and 250lbs) Not really. That is a limitation I have to live with.
The moment you start looking at "outcomes" instead of "potential", you're doomed to arbitrary limits that don't exist in reality.
Re:Wealth Inequality (Score:3)
To be clear, when most people say "Wealth Inequality", they mean "opportunity Inequality".
I've met people living in the third world that work longer and harder than you ever will or could imagine in conditions that you would never be able to tolerate, just to earn enough to buy food we would never eat. Take that same person and put them in the United states and they'd be a billionaire. That's opportunity inequality. This is why documented and undocumented immigrants have died just to get here, and why those that have gotten here have flourished.
Most people meant both (Score:3)
Certainly, many people work far more in many third world countries than in developed countries, you need oportunities to improve yourself, but you need a baseline level of wealth equity to find a market for your skills or products. For socialists and comunists equity is the purpose of the system. For a marquet economy, equity is a requisite for the marquet to work correctly. Wealth inequality introduces too many problems in the system in the same way that unmatched impedances introduce problems in electronic devices.
Re:Wealth Inequality (Score:3)
Short of slavery, nobody will pay as little as they want
I'd argue that in some cases people may actually be paying less for labour than they would be paying to keep slaves.
Think about it ; slave-keeping nations often had laws concerning the treatment of slaves. You had to accommodate them, feed them, their families, etc.
These days all you have to do is pay them minimum wage. Employers don't even have an incentive to keep their labour around full-time anymore, because doing so entitles them to more benefits. The wages they are receiving are probably less valuable in the free market than the benefits of reasonable accommodations, food, and the services that go along with them, and providing such things for themselves is almost certainly more expensive than it would be for their employer who has access to economies of scale.
While I obviously don't advocate slavery, it may well be a good idea for employers to provide a "company town" or even apartment blocks ; and be able to provide their employees with greater benefits at less cost to themselves.
Re:Replicator (Score:3)
Not enough power in the world (Score:2)
Re:Not enough power in the world (Score:2)
Re:Replicator (Score:2)
Serious question? The replicator would solve all the world's hunger and resource problems.
Yes, but the Holodeck would solve the world's population problems -- and thus free up more food!
Well, Duh... (Score:2)
'Transporter' is the obvious choice. With those things available we can trade sitting in traffic for standing in line at the corner transporter booth. Plus, they will once again give Superman a handy place to change out of his Clark Kent identity.
Android: redundant (Score:2)
Re:Android: redundant (Score:2)
They meant Android as in the phone operating system. In other words, we will finally have a device that is equally good at storing/accessing information and staying connected to other people. Today every device in existence tips one way or the other and fails at doing both well. In my opinion the future can't get here fast enough!
Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:5, Interesting)
I voted for the replicator. End scarcity. That'd be pretty wonderful.
The idea of a teleporter actually frightens me, though. I can't shake the idea that you're actually destroyed in the teleporter, and when you're recreated at the other end, there's an entirely different "you" created, with all the memories of the final copy. However, the "you" that got into the teleporter ceases to exist. And this terrible death happens to you over and over, with the "new you" and the outside world utterly oblivious.
It kind of recasts Star Trek into a horrible, inadvertant tragedy. Yes, yes, I know. "It's just a show, I should really just relax."
Re:Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:3, Funny)
Holy shit, did I type "teleporter" when I meant to say "transporter?" If you'll excuse me, I'll just toss my geek card into this shredder right over here...
Re:Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:2)
that term is ok as long as you're also a Blake's 7 fan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake's_Seven [wikipedia.org]
Re:Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:2)
The idea of a teleporter actually frightens me, though. I can't shake the idea that you're actually destroyed in the teleporter, and when you're recreated at the other end, there's an entirely different "you" created, with all the memories of the final copy. However, the "you" that got into the teleporter ceases to exist. And this terrible death happens to you over and over, with the "new you" and the outside world utterly oblivious.
I really enjoyed this Outer Limits episode [wikipedia.org] that seemed to touch on that very concern.
Re:Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you classify a person as matter. We're made of matter but I think it's more accurate to describe a person as a state or configuration; mutable; destructable; transferrable.
By the way - it's already happened. How many cells in your body remain from birth, from a decade ago? Most of your body has been destroyed and recreated many times.
It's fun to think about. Our instincts about identity completely fall apart beyond a certain point. Like the way we think of the world, the way we think of ourselves is merely a model with finite accuracy and relevance.
Re:Very Afraid of the Teleporter (Score:2)
Or worse, due to a major glitch, there are TWO of you (which happened to Riker), or you get split into a "wolf" and "sheep" personalities (which happened to Kirk).
Before I die? (Score:4, Interesting)
An immortality device, then I can wait for the other devices.
Re:Before I die? (Score:2)
What makes you think we're going to let you use our immortality device.
Think about it.
It just can't be for everyone.
Where will the rich people's kids live?
Re:Before I die? (Score:2)
We will eat the rich! or ... maybe I'm rich and I will eat your kids.
More Power Scotty, (Score:5, Interesting)
How about something to power the list above. You cannot change the laws of physics.
Re:More Power Scotty, or Laws of Physiks (Score:2)
How about something to power the list above. You cannot change the laws of physics.
Exactly!
After all, we all know that Newton is a heretic and the sun orbits the earth.
Nasty bugger that Galileo. ...
Wake me when you stop wasting time on string theory.
Re:More Power Scotty, (Score:2)
Re:More Power Scotty, (Score:2)
the dilithium and matter-antimatter reaction assembly (M/ARA) are of course a given for powering at least four of those choices
Peace and the end of Money (Score:2)
oh, that isn't tech?
Um, ok, then, Warp Drive, cause otherwise humanity is doomed.
Transporter (Score:2)
I would crash so many parties for the free food
Transporters/Teleporters! (Score:2)
I am tired of commuting and I have no patience any more! :P
Re:Transporters/Teleporters! (Score:2)
I chose transporter for the same thought. Having worked at home for four years, business decisions recently placed me in a new job with a commute to work, just so I can sit in a cubical, typing on a laptop doing the same crap I was doing at home. Thankfully I now get to waste over an hour of my time on a highway that has at least 1 accident a week, burning fuel that keeps getting more expensive while my pay check remains the same amount. To those who worry about the whole "I'm dying in the transporter operation", first off you are reborn, yay! and if not, at least it was quick. I suffer a slow death of a thousand cuts from the daily commute and no rebirth to make me whole again. Secondly, I would not know I was "altered" by a transport thus there would be no change sensed by my Self. I'll take that over remembering each and every miserable slog up and down the friggin highway each and every day (though in the US of A it is now obligatory to say 'but I am thankful for my new job, all praise the corporate teet').
Multiple choice would be warp drive, just because I would love to see other stars, other planets, explore the galaxy. I grew up on SciFi, Star Trek, and the belief that anything is possible when one's mind is put to the task. Without the roadblocks of politics and hubris I think we could have already been to other planets within our own system (or beyond). We will break the light barrier, because our minds have the capacity to create beyond this moment of reality.
Pick the one that CREATES energy... (Score:4, Insightful)
One has to assume that all of these lovely devices consume MASSIVE amounts of energy in order to function, and we as a species are already having problems managing the "scant" resources we have. Make the warp drive, even just one, and we get MUCH further toward the rest of the tech than the other way around.
Also, reaching other planets and/or system to obtain more resources is possible with this tech.
Re:Pick the one that CREATES energy... (Score:3)
The replicator is the one that creates (usable) energy. A replicator transforms matter from one form to another. A simple replicator would only rearrange atoms (think a nanoscale reprap). An advanced replicator would rearrange nucleons to create new elements, allowing it to take any form of matter as input. If you fed it anything other than iron as the input matter, then some of the transforms would consume energy, some would produce it (for example, creating carbon from hydrogen releases quite a lot of energy, creating gold consumes a lot).
As long as you provided enough matter, it would not require an external energy source, although it may produce lumps of iron as a waste product.
warp drive (Score:3)
Re:warp drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:warp drive (Score:2)
We don't have the technology to get more than about a dozen people a year into space, so even with warp that would be the numerical limit on our exploration / migration possibilities.
Transporter. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Because they're effectively immortality-by-copy. If you can store someone's transporter data, you can recreate them even after they die. It's arguably not the same causal person - but it would function exactly the same, making the story of one's life much more enduring than what we call a lifetime now.
Even if it were not used like that, merely being able to keep a copy of the minds of those who have died would be a complete transformation of the field of history - being able to have the actual perspectives still available for later generations, rather than have each generation editing what is allowed to carry forward. Being able to truly remember the past through the direct thoughts of those who have lived it for generations later would do much to dispel the constant inter-generational idea of dismissing previous generations mistakes as "they just didn't think like we did."
That said, transporters are also horrific, in the sense of this video:
John Weldon's "To Be" [youtube.com]
But if you can start to accept the idea of "dying" and being reborn as part of your daily routine, sort of like we accept brain cells (a little part of our core 'us') dying as part of living, then it can allow you to accomplish much with your new definition of self.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Transporter. (Score:2)
If transporters were immortality devices, there would be no sick bay. They'd just stick people in the transporter and fix the errors.
He wasn’t suggesting that, he was suggesting doing a nightly backup. If real-you gets dismembered, we just restore you from backup. Sure, you don’t have that day’s worth of memories, but after going through that sort of trauma you probably wouldn’t anyway.
Of course in the Star Trek “canon” it wasn’t possible to store a transporter buffer (well, I’m no expert, but I don’t think it was possible). Maybe due to the presumably immense amount of data... though if they’d wanted to use it as a plot device I doubt that minor detail would have stopped them.
Warp Drive = Colonies & Aliens (Score:3)
Warp drive for sure. I want us to meet aliens before I die. Plus, with the ability to set up colonies or asteroid mines, ship things back to Earth, and explore stellar phenomena, we solve the eggs-in-one-basket problem and open up new and interesting careers, cuisine, materials, and resources. Not to mention whatever awesome technologies and research we get from aliens.
I don't need a fully functioning Android (Score:2)
I have an iPhone.
Oh, you meant the other type of android!
Androids! (Score:2)
Like Data [startrek.com] from TNG. Not the primitive ones we have now. :)
Other worlds (Score:2)
I would have said Androids, but then I got married :-D. Now I just want us to visit other worlds.
Immortality through digitialization... (Score:2)
They'd stick my head in an MRI machine capable of scanning 1/2 the width of a neuron and then translate all those connections into a pattern that could be imprinted on the gate array.
In fact, I'd keep a back up brain in a vault with a 1 way data connection that would keep it synchronized with my current brain. That way if something bad happens to body/brain, there would be a fall back system.
This would solve/create a whole host of problems!
Fusion power (Score:3)
I'd be delighted to see commercial fusion power. It's a technology that's been just ten years away for the past thirty years.
Deflector Shield (Score:4, Funny)
I imagine warp drive wouldn't be that useful without inventing the deflector shield first.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Warp drive? (Score:2)
Re:Warp drive? (Score:3)
Re:Warp drive? (Score:2)
It still violates causality. It’s the Universe’s equivalent of insider trading.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:2)
I thought canon was you made the speed of light faster so you were never above it.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:3)
You are still leaving and entering light cones (and thus causality cones) that you can't enter or leave, breaking causality.
Warp drive would prove not only Einstein wrong, but demolish most of physics as we know it. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but it would be very interesting to watch, and it's not something that someone will come up with in his garage.
Re:Warp drive? (Score:2)
Why the hell are you trying to rationalize this question? It simply asks you which tech you would like to see... not what is most likely to be possible!
You must be new here. Welcome!
Re:Warp drive? (Score:2)
Re:Replicator and an unlimited and free power sour (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the gap between the haves (those with a replicator and power source) would be transcendentally elevated above the have-nots to such a degree that the have-nots would likely be regarded as a subordinate species, lest the guilt from living such a lavish life while others suffer in abject poverty cause a plague of suicides.
If you have a replicator that can replicate (with relative ease) another replicator and power source, AND you can secure enough of the technology to create a self-sustaining project for making and distributing the devices, then you will change the world. Otherwise, the world will only change in the regard that some will live better and others will live worse, just like every other technology.
Re:Replicator and an unlimited and free power sour (Score:2)
Still, it's a nice change for those who get to be the haves!
And every time this stuff gets cheaper, you lower the bar for entry, and the level of competence of civilization to make life livable gets lower. It used to be you had decent water only in the most advanced civilizations. Now only the most inept governments fail to provide at least that to their populace. I have better hopes for tech than I do for competent rule of law in Africa.
Re:Replicator and an unlimited and free power sour (Score:2)
This rabbit hole is miles deep... I will leave you with one final thought: years ago baby formula manufacturers decided they would try to work up a humanitarian marketing strategy and so they started giving away formula to impoverished African people for free. A few months passed, the Africans were loving it, and then all of a sudden they pulled the plug on the program. What happened? The African children who were part of the program plainly starved to death, as the mothers lost the ability to produce milk naturally in the months that they fed their children from formula.
Technology can help if applied right, and hurt just as much if applied wrong.
Re:Replicator / Transporter (Score:2)
For that matter, holodecks used replicator/transporter technology.
Re:peace-loving (Score:2)
Re:Missing option: society (Score:4, Insightful)
I rather think the society needs at least one future technology for it's base - fusion reactors. Because energy is the foundation of all wealth, and you don't have an enlightened society without universal wealth (I'm not talking gold toilets, I'm talking water, food, house, and health).