Wattpad brings you a guest post by Bill Gourgey, author of “Glide,” on sci-fi inventions we all wish were real. Watch out for the release of his sequel, “Glide 2: New Logic”.
How many times has your cell phone died and left you stranded? Ever found yourself looking around the room and wishing you’d chosen a different outfit? What about that frustrating feeling of remembering someone’s face but not their name? Or staring at yourself in the mirror and wondering what it would be like to have the perfect body? Ever had such a bad day that nowhere on Earth seemed far enough away?
Oh, the woes of being human. Isn’t it ironic that such intelligent beings are so prone to error? Lucky for us, we have our technologies and inventions to prop us up when our physiology lets us down. Here are some of the cool new technologies to look out for over the coming decade or so, inventions that might seem like science fiction today, but will be as commonplace tomorrow as…as a cell phone!
No-charge-required Devices
Will there ever be a time when our electronic devices are so efficient that they will never need an external charge? Wysips, a French company, thinks so. They have developed a transparent photovoltaic film that sits on top of a cell phone’s display, protecting its surface while charging the phone. The company hopes that future versions of the technology will charge the device so fast it will be able to work almost indefinitely. As battery efficiencies improve, and solar cell yields increase, it’s only a matter of time before the photovoltaic film is built into the display and you’ll never have to charge your phone again. And, what’s good for the phone is good for the tablet, and laptop, and so on. Unless you’re a vampire—the Anne Rice kind not the Stephanie Meyer kind—and can’t bear the sun. But then, you’d have a whole different set of problems to solve, like how to blend in…
Programmable Clothing
[Via CuteCircuit News]
…for the vampires (and mortals) among us, a change of clothes is just an upload away. Clothes have always been a leading means of personal expression, and perhaps nothing in the world of emblematic clothes rules our wardrobes like the trusty old T-shirt emblazoned with a favorite band, character, drawing, or just a pithy phrase to capture our mood. Most of us have a pile of old Tees that are just too memorable to get rid of, but too worn out to wear. It won’t be long, however, before that collection is resurrected and reduced to one. In the near future (very near), one T-shirt is all it will take. One Tee to rule them all, one Tee to find them, one Tee to bring them all…OK, I’m a shameless Lord of the Rings fan. But Tolkien might not have appreciated the ingenuity of his countrymen at London-based Cute Circuit, who have developed a T-shirt OS—that’s right, a T-shirt Operating System! Presumably, this new OS will allow you to upload just about whatever imagery you want to your T-shirt, with the ability to change it dynamically throughout the day. How real is it? Check it out for yourself at Cute Circuit’s website. Since first generation OS’s are notoriously error prone and hackable, I might wait for a later generation. After all, who would want their T-shirt hacked right in the middle of a ___ (fill in the blank for any number of awkward moments)…
Internet-enabled Contact Lenses
[Illustration by Kagan McLeod via Daily Beast]
…but if your T-shirt did get hacked in the middle of a final exam and your mind went blank with embarrassment, no worries, you might be one of the lucky few who could rely on your internet-enabled contact lenses to present you with the answers. I’ll admit, this invention’s a little far out there, but not that far out. Consider Google’s Goggle announcement, which intends to bring us fully internet-enabled glasses in the very near future. What’s more, the famed physicist Michio Kaku reports in his book, The Physics of the Future (a must-read for gadget lovers), that internet contact lenses will be possible sometime in the next two decades. These contacts will recognize people’s faces and display information about them. What’s to say they won’t recognize exam questions and display the answers? Prelims and Finals just got a whole lot easier! Well, not yet. So keep those noses to the grindstones because very few of us can get by on our good looks…
Cosmetic Gene Sequencing
[Image from Life Technologies website]
..or can we? It’s hard to believe that we might someday choose the features of our children, Brave-New-World-style, but according to the NY Times (In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future), “With a steep drop in the costs of sequencing and an explosion of research on genes, medical experts expect that genetic analyses of cancers will become routine.” And if we can spot and analyze the genetic markers for cancers, we can certainly spot the genetic markers for big teeth, or acne, or greasy hair, or (look in the mirror…no don’t!). Already, companies like Life Technologies and Illumina have built Desktop DNA Sequencers that allow doctors to sequence genes right on their desktops. While the accuracy rate needs to improve dramatically before we can successfully resequence a genome and not end up looking like Frankenstein, there is much progress being made and it won’t be long before Congress is debating the ethics of cosmetic gene sequencing. The thought of Congress debating anything makes me want to put them all on a permanent recess to a galaxy far, far away…
Planetary Getaway
…which might not be so ridiculous. It was hard to miss the big 2012 debut of Planetary Resources, a company funded by Google billionaires and advised by James Cameron of Avatar fame. And so I present to you another technology—asteroid mining—that might seem like a twinkle in some investor’s eye, but my guess is these guys will get somewhere in a hurry. Billionaires like to remain billionaires in their lifetimes (immortality is another invention topic for another day) and so the promise of big returns must be evident. Even if it’s a few decades away, whatever space vessel is used to transport Bruce Willis-style astronauts (Armageddon) to nearby asteroids will surely be available for tourists. Pandora anyone?
While some of these technologies may be hard to imagine as anything but far out science, they are all being researched today and are in some stage of commercial development. How quickly they’ll make it to market in the form of viable products is anyone’s guess; but hey, who in the 1950s would have imagined that we’d all be walking around using cell phones with more logic packed into them than NASA’s entire space program? Alright, who besides Gene Roddenberry?
Bill Gourgey is a native of Washington, DC. He writes fiction and poetry. His first novel, Glide, tells the tale of a legendary inventor who struggles to contain the fallout when the dark side of his world-saving invention is exposed. The sequel to Glide will be available soon. You can buy Glide online or read it on Wattpad.