Reality Askew

So had this idea of a substance that could run between the layers of say armor on a tank.  It would remain in a gelatinous state until exposed to oxygen and then immediately harden.  So if a tank or armored vehicle were attacked, the holes would automatically fill in and become solid again.  To keep the system ready, you could simply refill the glue/gel reservoir.

This same system could be used on aircraft wings to repair damage to wings and control surfaces.  There could even be a laser matrix projected grid over the surface that the glue/gel would use as a guide for the repair.

Of course the implications for space would be great except for that whole oxygen catalyst thing.  Maybe the stuff for space would trigger on lack of oxygen or cold?

In typical fashion I woke up this morning with an interesting thought; what if an alien race appeared and brought us a gift of technology, something such as teleportation.  What if it wasn’t a gift but a crashed ship and the only thing remaining were two teleportation chambers.  Scientists would have just enough technological know-how to replicate them, all the time patting themselves on the back for being so clever.  Humanity would trip over themselves to put teleportation devices on every corner of the world.  We would likely do this without fully understanding how it worked.  Sure teleportation would be amazing but it would likely take us several decades to fully understand how it worked, if ever. But what if this “gift” were in fact a Trojan horse of the worst kind.  Imagine every time you use the device the alien race were replacing a few atoms with their own.  Ever so gradually we would start becoming like them.  This change, gradually introduced over time, might be so slow it would be chocked up to some quirk in evolution.

One of my daughters was rehashing a vivid, if not disturbing, dream she had last night and it got me to thinking.  What if we could control our dreams or at least direct them in a certain direction.  So you would maybe place leads on your head or heck have a special pillow that would somehow influence or suggest to our minds what to dream about.  Hey honey tonight I think I’m going to sit on a beach in Maui watching a sunset all night.  Or maybe fly over the grand canyon.  If we could do that we might also be able to learn stuff while sleeping as well.  Go to sleep and learn piano, or calculus? :)  Why waste 6-8 hours of our lives when we could be enjoying it or actually getting something out of it.

I was watching the movie Lone Survivor the other day where the Seal team was stuck in a major firefight in Afghanistan on some god forsaken hill.  The part that struck me was the damage those guys took from bullet wounds and kept going.  Simply amazing.

But my thought this morning (love those waking up ideas) was why can’t we develop some sort of light weight material that is either completely bullet proof or slows the bullet down significantly?  Sure the former would be best but might not be entirely possible.  The material I had in mind would be some sort of composite with overlapping layers on a molecular level.  I mean imagine taking something as strong as say a spiders web and figuring out how to do the same thing but infinitely smaller and tighter.  The ultimate goal would be to create a material like spandex that is light-weight but almost impervious to bullets and shrapnel.

Typical manufacturing concepts wouldn’t work given the composition of this.  Instead I would imagine it would have to be poured into a mold of some sort.  To maximize comfort/functionality you would likely do a body scan of the recipient and then the mold would be an exact fit.

What if you could also generate power from the wearers body heat and then convert that into electricity?  This could conceivably power anything from a communication/navigation device to  some sort of body regulating medical device.

I read something the other day that said we were almost at the point where people could control things by thinking of them.  For instance, you place a device on your head and it reads your brainwaves/electronic pulses and when you think “play music” it could translate that and actually tell a media device to play.

Now take that a step (more like jog) forward and why couldn’t we develop a device that can read someone’s thoughts from a distance?  At first this would likely be pictures or interpretations of pictures and sounds based on patterns the devices detect.  This would likely be accomplished with the use of some sort of directed laser (love lasers :) ).  Actually the first prototypes would probably need more than one laser triangulated on target.  Future versions would be able to do the same thing using some sort of spread spectrum thing based on cranial shape, size, etc. If you combined the laser aspect with say maybe inverse sound waves you might get a better resolution of picture/sound?

Imagine the implications this would have on human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a country’s intelligence apparatus.  Actually kind of scary if you think about it.  Maybe this is one of those things that shouldn’t be.

Then again what an amazing tool for law enforcement.  Instead of hooking a suspect up to a stupid lie detector machine (archaic and ancient) they could just sit them in a special room, ask them questions and see what the person remembers of the incident.  Not only could they ascertain someone’s guilt or innocence but they could also pull that one piece of critical information from a witness, say a license plate that the witness didn’t even remember seeing.

The worst part is once this is a reality, someone will ultimately figure out how to reverse the damned thing and push pictures, sound (false memories) out to people rather than collecting it. Bad thing.

I love looking at the new apps for my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 on the Google Play store.  One thing I keep looking at never seems to disappoint and that’s the plethora of apps calling themselves “Digital Personal Assistants.” (DPA)  Yet when one digs a little deeper it’s apparent that they only deliver a ridiculously small smudge of real functionality.

What I want is a true digital assistant that can intelligently respond to queries and anticipate my needs based on lifestyle.  For instance I want to be able to ask the phone a question such as “how far away is the moon” and have it answer.  If need be the application should filter through the various Google results and determine the real answer based on verified sources.  If I ask it a philosophical question, the application should regurgitate the best answers of great minds.

I understand what I want is on the verge of artificial intelligence (AI) but honestly aren’t we at a place in time where rudimentary AI should be common place even in hand held devices?

How about the ability to ask my phone to tell me the location of my children?  It would communicate/authenticate with a similar application on the child’s phones and report back their location.

How about voice programming?  Wouldn’t it be amazing to have the ability to dictate a simple if/then statement to the phone and have it program an alert or event based on that?  For example you might tell the DPA if one the kids get home before 5pm, remind them to water the plants.  The application would then package the code and send it over to the complimentary application on the child’s phone.

The same logic could apply to other requests, such as set temperature in house to 74 degrees until 4pm and thereafter set it to 72 degrees.  The application would then send the programming over to the home automation system.

That same home automation system would detect my wife’s car pulling into the garage and then tell me as much.  Or would simply log her status and if I ashed, would say she had arrived at home xx minutes ago and was on Facebook updating status.

The beauty of my idea is that it’s not just a single application but more of a digital neural network of handheld and household devices.

Wouldn’t it be mind blowing if you were grocery shopping and the DPA told you that the refrigerator wanted to remind us we needed milk?

Now venture over to the business side of life.  Say I’m on the phone and a call comes in.  My DPA answers the phone in the background and collects information about the caller.  If it is a new contact, it would ask me if I wanted to add them to contacts.  If it were say one of the kids, it could talk directly with them and answer basic questions via voice, like what time will Dad get home?  The DPA could then look at my calendar and based on my meetings and history of driving home, make an educated guess.  Once my call had ended then it would fill me in on all of the activity/questions it had fielded and give me the option to update the kids with my real arrival time.

Technolution – Evolution & Technology

As humans have evolved over the last five-hundred thousand years or so the laws of nature have played a predominate part in the evolution of man.  For the majority of our time on earth, our very existence was based on our ability to hunt and forage.  However over the last 10,000-20,000  years we have started making a dramatic shift toward an existence not dictated by a lack of food but of one dominated by technology.  Farming has evolved as the primary source of subsistence and as such people don’t have to spend hours every day hunting for food.  Water brought to cities via aqua-ducts allowed man to spread out to regions previously thought uninhabitable.

My point is that the very latter part of our existence has changed the rules of evolution so dramatically that the path for future changes is uncertain at best.  Take for instance computers, every two years or so computers double in their computational capacity.  As software keeps pace, the emergence of new applications are starting to blur the divide between reality and virtual.

As a better example one only has to look at young children and their daily activity.  Children rarely go outside and play and instead the majority of their interaction with friends is done via the Internet or text messaging.  What effect will this have on our evolutionary development?  In the past the traits that helped a person  run, jump and hunt better was good.  Now those traits are not dominate or even relevant.  BUT will that actually translate into physical changes?

What about people and their physical traits.  For 99% of our history being fast, strong and having good vision was the key to survival and thus you survived and passed your genes on to future generations.  But now with technology will that focus shift toward people with higher intellects and an aptitude for quicker adaptation (word used intentionally) of new technology?

Of course given modern medicine, even someone who isn’t very smart is likely to live as long as someone who is, so where does this lead us when it comes to evolution?  Could modern medicine actually usher in the era of the decline of the human race?  Interestingly enough I think nature has a way of fixing itself and we might wake up 500 years from now with rampant over population and people will have to abandon technology and revert back to the basics.

I was thinking about something I had read in the past that said people with certain blood types actually react differently to certain food types based on their blood type .  For instance (making this up) a person with AB+ might do best eating carbohydrates and sugar, where another person with O+ might do best eating protein and fats.  It sounds laughable, but I clearly remember doing a quick survey of my friends and that darned book was fairly accurate.

So this got me to thinking, we know people are different in other ways too.  For instance, girls are emotionally driven, where guys tend to be visual.  Now some will argue this is environmental and I will concede that’s true to some degree, but there’s no mistaking that to a large extent we are who we are because it’s programmed in our DNA to be predisposed to like certain things in such a way and to perceive things in our own light as it were.

Herein is the heart of what I see as the next step in our life by design.  Some things can be garnered based on gender, age, race, etc and those would be easy to gather, but to get deeper they would have to look at your genetic makeup.  Even today, with our current level of technology, this concept isn’t to far fetched.

This concept comes down to precision.  Today we take SWAGs (Scientific Wild Ass Guesses) for just about everything in our world.  In the future the tolerances for everyday things will be much more exact.

So in the future you have a card you carry that has all of this accumulated information and that would represent the real you.  Imagine you walk into a pharmacy and a headache medicine is custom tailored for you right on the spot.  You go to a restaurant and the food is created so that it is perfect (for you) every time.  Shopping would mostly be done online and the few major retailers would show you things they know you will like and then custom make things so they compliment the deeper you.

While I was backing up last years photos to my network storage device it occurred to me that my iPhone has replaced the digital camera just as that replaced the Polaroids of my childhood.  What’s amazing is that my children and their children after them will enjoy an unprecedented look back at the past via pictures.  But as technology marches forward where will the next generation go with their visual recordings of their special moments?  My guess is that at some point we will all wear a device that doesn’t take snapshots but instead is a continuous video record of everything we see and do.  Then at the end of the day one could decide which portions of their day to retain for historical reference.  Imagine having a candid review of even a single important moment in your life and you can quickly see the value this would bring.  Then imagine that same system having the records from all of your loved ones who were also at that event.  You would see the world in an entirely different light.

Now most reading this will say so what, we already have video cameras, but where I think this idea differs from that dramatically is the next step.  I imagine a system that holds these life records and then can intelligently recall them with a likeness of ourselves for future generations.  So 100 years from now my great, great grandchildren would be able to query the life record of their ancestors and ask it a question.  Say this hypothetical great, great grandson asks about girls and love.  A computer generated likeness of myself could talk and interact with him and even show him some of the trials and tribulations of life.

As modern advances create new forms of artificial intelligence, it’s conceivable that my future relatives will be able to actually have a conversation with the virtual me.  The computer would put together this virtual likeness based on the life records and then decide how I might have answered any given question.  It would even be able to play back specific instances and again pull in the perspectives of others that were there.

We all hate the thought of dying, but here is a way that we could, in a manner of speaking, live on forever.

I love playing video games and I’m not embarrassed to say it, but the unfortunate side effect of sitting around killing zombies or flying my virtual Cessna 172 is that I don’t get much exercise.  Now I do “mostly” eat right so that seems to offset my slow motion life but while I was talking about this with my friend last night it occurred to me that wouldn’t it be great if there were some sort of custom exercise machine (think treadmill) that you had to walk/run on to make you character move on the screen.  With the new advent of virtual reality type gadgets, wouldn’t it be a natural evolution of gaming and exercise?

On that note, I read recently that Google is introducing glasses that have a built in screen and that there were already games coming out that combined the glasses with a smartphone app to allow people to play a virtual type game out in the “real” world.