Cheap, abundant power to start with
Unlike a battery, a fuel cell -- which extracts energy from pure hydrogen -- does not run down or require recharging. The technology is pollution-free, and once it’s applied to transportation it should make electric cars seem like an environmental hassle by comparison.
You’ve probably heard that micro fuel cells are expected to replace current batteries. But did you know that the Solar Hydrogen Energy Corporation (SHEC) has developed a process to use the heat energy of the sun to extract hydrogen out of water?
Even ordinary algae have the ability to convert water and sunlight into hydrogen gas, eliminating the main expense of fuel cell technology. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a process that deprives algae of sulfur and oxygen, conditions under which the plants generate hydrogen.
New fuel cell tech has important implications for spacefaring too -- risky and controversial plutonium-based electricity-generating devices used in
won’t be needed with the next generation of hydrogen fuel cells.
The digital map of dreams
Warmed up now? Good, because some stealth trends are more problematic, even unnerving.
A team at Stanford University has developed a methodology for linking on-chip microelectronics to axons of the brain. After the nerves regenerate, the chips can record neural signals.
This and related developments prompted British Telecom’s Martlesham Heath Labs to design the "Soul Catcher," a micro-memory chip that will record life in real time.
"This is the end of death," claims Dr. Chris Winter. "By combining this information with a record of the person’s genes, we could re-create a person physically, emotionally and spiritually."
Emotionally and spiritually? Maybe -- if neural signals are all there is to a person.
The related immortality claim seems equally dubious, but it's more likely we could use the technology to voyeuristically relive other people’s lives, uplinking their "soul catcher" recordings to computer or video.
Sort of like those websites where you check out a camera set in someone’s apartment -- only the webcam is in the brain.
The little doctors...
Maybe the soul catcher is more in the far end of the spectrum -- more a stealth possibility than a trend -- but I’ve always felt that "nano-explorers" within the human body were inevitable.
In an unusual partnership, NASA is working with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to develop new nanotech biomedical technologies for use on Earth and in space.
NCI is attempting to define cancer based on the particular molecular characteristics of tumors, while NASA is seeking to develop a new form of patient care -- "microscopic explorers" that would travel through the human body looking for disease.
Why NASA? In addition to the obvious terrestrial applications, the new biotech makes it possible to diagnose and treat medical problems in space by injecting tiny self-guided "doctor" machines in astronauts.
... and even smaller
Since each nano-probe will have to have its own minute onboard computer, the nanotech doctors will likely have to employ new "quantum computing" capabilities coming on line that will offer supposed "infinite speed."
Conventional computers are based on binary "switches," but quantum superposition computing uses atoms considered in their quantum state: when they are not interacting, the atoms exist in both states at once.
A string of quantum bits offer every possible on-off combination and could simultaneously carry out every calculation a computer needed, hugely increasing available power and memory.
New advances in chip compression may mean that quantum computerized nanotech chips will indeed be smart enough to search through your body, restoring it cell by cell if needed -- perhaps applying a recent discovery at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Medicine:
A single human gene, p21, acts to cascade the diseases of aging through the body, from cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer’s and arthritis -- old age in general -- by stopping cells from dividing or growing as they age.
In the UIC experiments, Igor Roninson, professor of molecular genetics says, "turning on this one gene brought about changes in numerous other genes that have already been implicated in aging."
The defeat of death
Combined with nanotech, manipulation of the p21 gene – and of telomerase, an enzyme that confers "replicative immortality" on cells -- may lead to relative immortality.
Immortality could be a done deal, especially if you collate all the foregoing with UC Berkeley's application for a patent on the first "bionic chip", part living tissue, part electronic circuitry.
"It's a key discovery because it's the first step to building complex circuitry that incorporates the living cell," said UC Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Boris Rubinsky, who created the device with graduate student Yong Huang.
Bio-chip augmentation could serve as a permanently implanted mechanism that, besides providing human-computer interface, releases the nano-probe "doctors" into the bloodstream as they’re needed to renew your cells.
First question in my mind: who gets the relative-immortality treatments? Since they’re not likely to be cheap, the probable answer is "the wealthy."
Meaning hundreds of years of Donald Trump? Of Barbra Streisand? Of Kid Rock? Mortality looks better and better…
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