UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

IN BRIEF

Samsung SmartThings has released its “Future Living Report,” a forecast of the next 100 years. Among its many predictions are “smart homes,” undersea cities, “synthetic telepathy,” and 3D-printed gourmet meals.

TIME AND AGAIN

Forecasting the future has been one of humankind’s favorite pastimes. We’re usually pretty bad at it, but there’s always been a Cassandra or a Delphic oracle, a Sibyl or a Nostradamus willing to make the attempt.

Images of a futuristic city from Metropolis(1927).

But in more recent times, the art of predicting the future has almost become a kind of mathematics—very disciplined and scientific.

In the early decades of the last century, a number of scientific prophecies were made about what the future—our present—would be like; some of these were naively optimistic, a few were dead-on accurate, others hopelessly wide of the mark.

It’s always been fun to see how these old dreamers envisioned their future. For example, in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis, the future was an immense urban jumble of Art Deco architecture, complete with multi-tiered highways and giant machines run by an oppressed working class. The famous science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, imagined that we would be living under something called the “Air Dictatorship”—a kind of technocratic world state ruled by air power.

Others focused more on the technological aspects of the future, and the many scientific wonders and gadgets to come. The old comic strip Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had some interesting things to say about this—predicting, among other things, text messaging, cell phones, surveillance drones, and even the Hyperloop, the pneumatic transport system proposed by Elon Musk.

And it is along these lines—though with a more official and academic imprimatur—that Samsung has released its “SmartThings Future Living Report.” It’s a serious look at the topography of the future, at least in terms of its technological promise, and what that will mean for our lives and how we live them. It’s an extrapolation of current technological trends, as all such predictions inevitably are; but it’s less extravagant than most, more restrained and rooted in scientific realities, and it has a convincing ring of truth to it.

Which is exciting, because if the folks at Samsung are right, it means that over the next century or so we’re going to be in for a very interesting ride.

Some of the future predictions found in the Buck Rogers comic strip. Credit: rolandanderson.se/Hyperlooptech.com

Some of the future predictions found in the Buck Rogers comic strip. Top: drones; bottom: transportation via pneumatic tube. Credit: rolandanderson.se/Hyperlooptech.com

SMART LIVING

According to the report, we can expect some pretty remarkable changes to our homes and our personal spaces, to say nothing of those ordinary, overlooked things that make up so much of our daily routine. As human populations soar, our cities and homes will have to adapt; interior living spaces will change as a cloud changes, easily reconfigured and rearranged to suit our fickle tastes, or accommodate different purposes.

Imagine walls and floors made of a malleable “skin,” and embedded with tiny sensors and actuators so that the shape and size of living spaces can quickly change, or even be divided into smaller rooms; imagine fully programmable “smart homes” that can be controlled remotely, and provide feedback to their owners—yes, there’ll even be an app for that.

Virtual decorations will alter with changing tastes, moods and whims; and the entire interior surface of the home will be implanted with LED technology—television screens and computer displays will form and unform in any room, as needed. Even our furniture will be adaptable, molding to custom fit our bodies, responding to changes in posture, or disappearing altogether when not needed.

A drone flying house. Image credit: Taylor Herring/Samsung

It will be the ultimate evolution of the “Internet of Things.” Misplaced something? Can’t find your keys? No problem. Just use an online search function to find it. Hate the color of that accent wall? Delete it. Need more storage space? Watch new shelves appear, as if by magic.

And the amenities are fantastic. Every home will come standard with a 3D printer; they’ll be able to churn out just about anything you could wish, using downloadable patterns, probably including even complex electronic devices. They may even print out your meals, designed and programmed by the world’s master chefs.

Walk-in “medical pods,” meanwhile, will contribute to the decentralization of healthcare—their imaging sensors will diagnose your ills and, for the more easily treatable maladies, dispense drugs, inject antibiotics, and recommend health regimens. It may even be possible to undergo remote, robot-mediated surgery, in the comfort of your own home.

This barely scratches the surface. Imagine homes whose very building material is salted with dormant limestone-producing bacteria, which awaken upon contact with moisture and repair any cracks or structural damage.

There will be “digestion tanks” full of anaerobic bacteria, to dispose of our waste; and our homes will produce, store, and reuse their own energy, using “microbial fuel cell stacks” and more efficient solar panels to generate electricity, and power-banks like the Tesla powerwall to store it against future use. Personal homes will be almost fully independent of a dangerously overtaxed energy grid.

One hundred years in the future, our houses will be, in almost all respects, semi-living, artificial organisms—closed systems with a metabolism, sensory apparatus, immune response, and an approximation to a nervous system.

We’ll be living in homes that are practically alive. An uncanny thought.

See Part II: The City of the Future, here.

IN BRIEF

Physicist Gerald Jackson thinks he can build an antimatter drive capable of taking us to the stars in less than a decade; all that’s needed is a little ready cash. To that end, his company, Hbar Technologies, is crowdfunding this lofty ambition with a Kickstarter campaign.

HAVE ANTIMATTER, WILL TRAVEL

Gerald Jackson, a former physicist at Fermilab, has a big dream. He thinks that, given unlimited funds, we could have a fully demonstrable, antimatter-propelled spacecraft prototype ready in less than a decade.

But since he doesn’t possess unlimited economic resources, and since the likelihood of any government underwriting a prohibitively expensive program in antimatter propulsion technology is pretty remote, he’s decided to turn to the guerrilla funding tactics of the 21st century: He’s starting a Kickstarter campaign.

The idea is to raise $200,000 to crowdfund initial antimatter propulsion research for Jackson’s company, Hbar Technologies.

It’s an ambitious goal, but the potential rewards are staggering. The creation of a functional antimatter engine would mean drastically reduced travel times for space probes, both within the solar system and in the interstellar spaces beyond. With potential velocities of 40% of the speed of light, it would mean that the stars would suddenly come within our reach; a journey lasting as long as the voyage of the New Horizons probe to Pluto would take us, not merely to the outermost bodies in our solar system, but to whole systems of planets circling nearby stars.

Some experts assert that a more realistic estimate of such a spacecraft’s speed would be about 0.10c (10% of the speed of light), but even this would represent a fantastic speed that is utterly beyond anything we have today, and it would still put a probe in the Alpha Centauri system (the closest alien system to our own) in just 40 years.

The problem is twofold: devising a lightweight propulsion system that doesn’t outweigh the payload by orders of magnitude; and actually getting one’s hands on significant enough quantities of antimatter, a notoriously difficult substance to come across (which, incidentally, is fortunate for those of us made of normal matter).

Jackson thinks he has a solution to the first problem. “[M]y Hbar partner, physicist Steven Howe, and I came up with a very light propulsion system whose mass was comparative to the payload—an antimatter sail,” he explains.

Schematic diagram of the Hbar Technologies concept for an antimatter space probe. Credit: Hbar Technologies, LLC.

MAKING ANTIMATTER

As far as the antimatter production problem—that may be a bit more difficult. Antimatter on Earth can only be found where humans have created it, deep in the hearts of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators—one antiproton at a time.

Jackson and Howe estimated that only 17 grams of antihydrogen would be required to power their antimatter drive, which doesn’t sound like much; however, less than one gram of the stuff has been produced, and none of it has been contained for much more than a day. So to sum: It’s very difficult to store, and its production would require a multi-billion dollar particle collider solely dedicated to churning out antimatter day after day—a fantastically expensive project.

Still, Jackson continues to dream, and it is of such stuff that the future is built. He thinks he’s solved the containment issue, and he wants cash to build a proof-of-concept. The rest, he hopes, will follow in due time.

The glare of Alpha Centauri, one of the brightest stars in planet Earth's night sky, floods the left side of this southern skyscape. Credit: Marco Lorenzi (Glittering Lights).

The glare of Alpha Centauri, one of the brightest stars in planet Earth’s night sky, floods the left side of this southern skyscape.

Credit: Marco Lorenzi (Glittering Lights).

MEET THE CRAFT

Briefly, the spacecraft design outlined by Jackson and Howe is as follows—the probe will consist of four parts: A carbon “sail” coated with depleted uranium, a storage unit containing the requisite antihydrogen in solid form, an antiproton-powered electrical energy system, and a robotic imaging and instrument package (the science payload).

The actual motive principle behind the antimatter drive is a curious one. The antihydrogen is used to induce fission, and will produce 2 GeV (2 billion electron volts) of power—far in excess of anything standard chemical rockets generate. Upon striking a depleted uranium foil within the spacecraft, the antiprotons cause the uranium to fission, producing two “daughter” byproducts which are emitted in opposite directions.

One of these byproducts slams into the uranium-coated sail, imparting its momentum to it like wind bellying the cloth sails of a terrestrial clipper ship. The other byproduct is exhausted like a conventional rocket propellant—that process of “leaving something behind” quoted in the film Interstellar as the only way mankind has ever found of getting from one place to another in space. So there are really two propulsive engines at work simultaneously, which (theoretically) cause the spacecraft to accelerate rapidly to appreciable fractions of the speed of light.

It’s an interesting proposal, and well worth investigation. Perhaps, with Kickstarter funding, Jackson and Howe can start the serious business of making this science fictional technology a reality. That said, they estimate a further $100 million is needed to develop an Earth-based test to prove that the technology actually works…so that may only be something our progeny get to see.

“Crowdfunding may be a good way to show interest in the project when it comes time to find bigger investors or governmental support,” says Jackson.

After that, with sufficient will, and a couple of billion dollars burning a hole in one’s pocket, dispatching antimatter probes capable of 0.40c to the near stars shouldn’t be a problem at all.