K sez:
- Within 5 years the exponential progress in nanoengineering will make Solar power cost-competitive with fossil fuels
- Within 10 years we will have a pill that allows us all to eat whatever we feel like and never gain any unwanted weight
- In 15 years, life expectancies will start rising faster than we age
- In about 20 years 100% of our energy will come from clean and renewable sources
- a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
The only way photovoltaics can overtake liquid hydrocarbon fuels is if the price of crude continues upward to $1000 a barrel (give or take).
I'd like to see the magic diet pill, but I'd much rather see something done about hair loss. There are plenty of ways to lose weight.
Kurzweil has been powering down supplements in an attempt to live forever, and I'll predict that he'll wind up shortening his life as a result. He's also said that all of our brain contents would someday be downloadable into a computer (that's #3 and #5 on this list), showing that he read too many comic books and pulp sci-fi as a kid.
In #1 he makes an unlikely claim about photovoltaics, then pretty much repeats himself in #4. Obsession, or dementia?
#5 is another comic book reader response. There was a book a few years back about the chess-playing machine from a hundred years ago, which turned out in retrospect to be a fraud (a human chess player was hidden inside). Chess programs have improved. Have poker programs? ;') Creativity may be simulated eventually, but I very much doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Here's five from me:
- Within 5 years fuel economy will rise at least 15 per cent, and electric vehicles in a number of forms will outshine progress made on fuel cell vehicles
- Within 10 years genetically-engineered food will be commonplace, and considered healthier than fresh, organically-grown produce picked by people with TB
- In 15 years, life expectancies will start to move back up, after having fallen for up to five years
- In about 20 years, our energy will come the same sorts of sources as now, with some additional sources such as plasma waste disposal and neighborhood natural gas-powered fuel cells
- In about 20 years, typical CPU sizes will be smaller than the Mac Mini, use a superconducting substrate, and be cheap enough and sufficiently multifunctional that they will be found in each room of the house (and then some).
The World Question Center 2004Zangger's First Law
Most scientific breakthroughs are nothing else than the discovery of the obvious.
Zangger's Second Law
Truly great science is always ahead of its time.
Although there seems to be a slight contradiction in my laws, historical evidence proves them right:
- The Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1847 reduced the death rate in his hospital from twelve to two percent, simply by washing hands between operations -- a concept that today would be advocated by a four year old child. When Semmelweiss urged his colleagues to introduce hygiene to the operating rooms, they had him committed to a mental hospital where he eventually died.
- The German meteorologist Alfred Wegener discovered in 1913 what every ten year old looking at a globe will notice immediately: That the Atlantic coasts of the African and South American continents have matching contours and thus may have been locked together some time ago. The experts needed sixty more years to comprehend the concept.
- When Louis Pasteur stated that bacteria could cause disease, colleagues treated the idea as "an absurd fantasy'!
- The theories of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were called "a case for the police" during a neurologists' congress in Hamburg in 1910.
- Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, only eight years before Orville and Wilbur Wright left the ground in an aeroplane, remarked: "Machines that are heavier than air will never be able to fly!"
- German physicists Erwin Schrödinger's PhD thesis, in which he first introduced his famous equation, was initially rejected.
- When the Spanish nobleman de Satuola discovered the Late Ice Age painted cave at Altamira, established scholars described him as a forger and a cheat.
- The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean Francois Champollion in 1822 was still rejected by scholar twenty years after his death.
- And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died.
- Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Bronze Age Mycenae and Tiryns in Greece was considered by English archaeologists in The Times' as the remains of some obscure barbarian tribe' from the Byzantine period. In particular, the so-called prehistoric palace in Tiryns was labelled "the most remarkable hallucination of an unscientific enthusiast that has ever appeared in literature."
Scientific breakthroughs will always be held hostage to the lag needed to overcome existing beliefs. Lucius Annaeus Seneca realized this already two thousand years ago, when he said: "The time will come, when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things."