23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021
**
**This post is brought to you in partnership between Matador
and our friends at Intel. Join us in the conversation on Twitter with
#IntelEMP.
WHEN LOOKING AT THE present as an indication of where we’ll stand a
year from now–much less a decade–feeling optimistic may not come easy.
We look out to the universe and see an infinite, lifeless abyss
enfolding upon our own small pocket of civilization, while the people we
look to for guidance and information seem to be little more than
straight-faced bearers of bad news.
Yet while we can’t predict what the future holds for our unending
political discourses, we can look at how far we’ve come with technology
in merely the last decade and realize the present we know now will, very
soon, find itself memorialized in nostalgia. Here’s some
technology emerging down the road that’s poised to change your life on a much greater scale than any outcome of a political debate.
2012
Ultrabooks
– The last two years have been all about the tablet. Laptops, with
their “untouchable” screens, have yet to match any tablet’s
featherweight portability and zippy response times. However, by next
year,
ultraportable notebooks–Ultrabooks–will finally be available for under $1000,
bringing a complete computing experience into areas of life which,
until now, have only been partially filled by smaller technologies such
as tablets and smartphones. They weigh around three pounds, measure less
than an inch thick, and the hard drives are flash-based, which means
they’ll have no moving parts, delivering zippy-quick startups and load
times.
The Mars Science Laboratory – By August 2012, the next mission to Mars will reach the Martian surface with a new rover named
Curiosity focusing on whether Mars could ever have supported life, and whether it might be able to in the future.
Curiosity
will be more than 5 times larger than the previous Mars rover, and the
mission will cost around $2.3 billion — or just about one and a half New
Yankee Stadiums.
The paralyzed will walk.
But, perhaps not in the way that you’d imagine. Using a machine-brain
interface, researchers are making it possible for otherwise paralyzed
humans to control neuroprostheses–essentially mechanical limbs that
respond to human thought–allowing them to walk and regain bodily
control. The same systems are also being developed for the military,
which one can only assume means this project won’t flounder due to a
lack of funding.
2013
The Rise of Electronic Paper – Right now, e-paper is pretty much only used in e-readers like the Kindle, but it’s something researchers everywhere are
eager to expand upon.
Full-color
video integration is the obvious next step, and as tablet prices fall,
it’s likely newspapers will soon be fully eradicated from their current
form. The good news: less deforestation, and more user control over your
sources.
4G will be the new standard
in cell phone networks. What this means: your phone will download data
about as fast as your home computer can. While you’ve probably seen lots
of 4G banter from the big cell providers, it’s not very widely
available in most phones. However, both Verizon and the
EU
intend to do away with 3G entirely by 2013, which will essentially
bring broadband-level speeds to wireless devices on cell networks. It
won’t do away with standard internet providers, but it will bring
“worldwide WiFi” capabilities to anyone with a 4G data plan.
The Eye of Gaia, a billion-pixel telescope
will be sent into space this year to begin photographing and mapping
the universe on a scale that was recently impossible. With the human
eye, one can see several thousand stars on a clear night; Gaia will
observe more than a billion over the course of its mission–about 1% of
all the stars in the Milky Way. As well, it will look far beyond our own
galaxy, even as far as the end of the (observable) universe.
2014
A 1 Terabyte SD Memory Card
probably seems like an impossibly unnecessary technological investment.
Many computers still don’t come with that much memory, much less SD
memory cards that fit in your digital camera. Yet thanks to
Moore’s Law
we can expect that the 1TB SD card will become commonplace in 2014, and
increasingly necessary given the much larger swaths of data and
information that we’re constantly exchanging every day (thanks to
technologies like memristors and our increasing ever-connectedness). The
only disruptive factor here could be the rise of cloud-computing, but
as data and transfer speeds continue to rise, it’s inevitable that we’ll
need a physical place to store our digital stuff.
The first around-the-world flight by a solar-powered plane
will be accomplished by now, bringing truly clean energy to air
transportation for the first time. Consumer models are still far down
the road, but you don’t need to let your imagination wander too far to
figure out that this is definitely a game-changer. Consider this: it
took humans quite a few milennia to figure out how to fly; and only a
fraction of that time to do it with solar power.
The world’s most advanced polar icebreaker is currently being developed as a part of the EU’s
scientific development goals and is scheduled to launch in 2014. As global average temperatures continue to climb,
an understanding and diligence to the polar regions will be essential to monitoring the rapidly changing climates–and this icebreaker will be up to the task.
$100 personal DNA sequencing
is what’s being promised by a company called BioNanomatrix, which the
company founder Han Cao has made possible through his invention of the
‘nanofluidic chip.’ What this means: by being able to cheaply sequence
your individual genome, a doctor could biopsy a tumor, sequence the DNA,
and use that information to determine a prognosis and prescribe
treatment for less than the cost of a modern-day x-ray. And by
specifically inspecting the cancer’s DNA, treatment can be applied with
far more specific–and effective–accuracy.
2015
The world’s first zero-carbon, sustainable city
in the form of Masdar City will be initially completed just outside of
Abu Dhabi. The city will derive power solely from solar and other
renewable resources, offer homes to more than 50,000 people.
Personal 3D Printing
is currently reserved for those with extremely large bank accounts or
equally large understandings about 3D printing; but by 2015, printing in
three dimensions (essentially personal manufacturing) will become a
common practice in the household and in schools. Current affordable
solutions include do-it-yourself kits like
Makerbot, but in four years it should look more like a compact version of the
uPrint. Eventually, this technology could lead to technologies such as
nanofabricators and matter replicators–but not for at least a few decades.
2016
Space tourism will hit the mainstream.
Well, sorta. Right now it costs around $20-30 million to blast off and
chill at the International Space Station, or $200,000 for a sub-orbital
spaceflight from
Virgin Galactic. But the market is growing faster than most realize: within five years, companies like
Space Island,
Galactic Suite, and
Orbital Technologies
may realize their company missions, with space tourism packages ranging
from $10,000 up-and-backs to $1 million five-night stays in an orbiting
hotel suite.
The sunscreen pill
will hit the market, protecting the skin as well as the eyes from UV
rays. By reverse-engineering the way coral reefs shield themselves from
the sun, scientists are very optimistic about the possibility, much to
the dismay of sunscreen producers everywhere.
Back from extinction. Image by
JenJeff.
A Wooly Mammoth will be reborn
among other now-extinct animals in 2016, assuming all goes according to
the current plans of Japan’s Riken Center for Developmental Biology. If
they can pull it off,
expect long lines at Animal Kingdom.
2017
Portable laser pens that can seal wounds
– Imagine you’re hiking fifty miles from the nearest human, and you
slip, busting your knee wide open, gushing blood. Today, you might stand
a chance of some serious blood loss–but in less than a decade you might
be carrying a portable laser pen capable of sealing you back up
Wolverine-style.
2018
Light Peak technology, a method of super-high-data-transfer, will enable more than 100 Gigabytes per second–and
eventually whole terabytes per second–within
everyday consumer electronics. This enables the copying of entire hard
drives in a matter of seconds, although by this time the standard hard
drive is probably well over 2TB.
Insect-sized robot spies
aren’t far off from becoming a reality, with the military currently
hard at work to bring Mission Impossible-sized tech to the espionage
playground. Secret weapon: immune to bug spray.
2019
The average PC has the power of the human brain. According to
Ray Kurzweil, who has a better
grip on the future
than probably anyone else, the Law of Accelerating Returns will usher
in an exponentially greater amount of computing power than every before.
Web 3.0
– What will it look like? Is it already here? It’s always difficult to
tell just where we stand in terms of technological chronology. But if we
assume that Web 1.0 was based only upon hyperlinks, and Web 2.0 is
based on the social, person-to-person sharing of links, then Web 3.0
uses a combination of socially-sourced information, curated by a highly
refined, personalizable algorithm (“they” call it the
Semantic Web). We’re already in the midst of it, but it’s still far from its full potential.
Energy from a fusion reactor
has always seemed just out of reach. It’s essentially the process of
producing infinite energy from a tiny amount of resources, but it
requires a machine that can contain a reaction that occurs at over
125,000,000 degrees. However, right now in southern France, the fusion
reactor of the future is being built to power up by 2019, with estimates
of full-scale fusion power available by 2030.
2020
Crash-proof cars
have been promised by Volvo, to be made possible by using radar, sonar,
and driver alert systems. Considering automobile crashes kill over
30,000 people in the U.S. per year, this is definitely a welcome technology.
2021
So, what should we expect in 2021? Well, 10 years ago, what did you
expect to see now? Did you expect the word “Friend” to become a verb?
Did you expect your twelve-year-old brother to stay up texting until
2am? Did you expect 140-character messaging systems enabling widespread
revolutions against decades-old dictatorial regimes?
The next 10 years will be an era of unprecedented connectivity; this
much we know. It will build upon the social networks, both real and
virtual, that we’ve all played a role in constructing, bringing ideas
together that would have otherwise remained distant, unknown strangers.
Without twitter and a steady drip of mainstream media, would we have
ever so strongly felt the presence of the Arab Spring? What laughs,
gasps, or loves, however fleeting, would have been lost if not for
Chatroulette? Keeping in mind that as our connections grow wider and
more intimate, so too will the frequency of our connectedness, and as
such, your own understanding of just what kinds of relationships are
possible will be stretched and revolutionized as much as any piece of
hardware.
Truly, the biggest changes we’ll face will not come in the form of
any visible technology; the changes that matter most, as they always
have, will occur in those places we know best but can never quite see:
our own hearts and minds.
**
**This post is brought to you in partnership between Matador
and our friends at Intel, whose technology enables so much of the
lifestyle in which we thrive. Join us in the conversation on Twitter
with #IntelEMP.
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