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Which Science Fictional Scenario Is Most Likely to Happen in Your Lifetime? Science fiction is full of fantastic and horrifying scenarios, many of which seem like they could come true any time. But which of them is really going to materialize — and which is most likely to happen in your lifetime? Vote in our poll for the science fictional scenario that you're most likely to live to witness for yourself: Which Science Fictional Scenario Is Most Likely to Happen in Your Lifetime? Global Pandemic Moonbase World War III/Nuclear Apocalypse Suspended Animation The Singularity Something Else (See Comments) Martian Colony...

Ray Kurzweil, the prominent inventor and futurist, can't wait to get nanobots into his brain. In his view, these devices will be equipped with a variety of sensors and stimulators and will communicate wirelessly with computers outside of the body. In addition to providing unprecedented insight into brain function at the cellular level, brain-penetrating nanobots would provide the ultimate virtual reality experience. In an interview with GOOD magazine, Kurzweil says: "By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want...

In the early 1950s the same thought occurred to many people at once: things are improving so fast and so regularly, there might be a pattern to the improvements. Maybe we could plot technological progress to date, then extrapolate the curves and see what the future holds. Among the first to do this systemically was the US Air Force. They needed a long-term schedule of what kinds of planes they should be funding, but aerospace was one of the fastest moving frontiers in technology. Obviously they would build the fastest planes possible, but since it took decades to design, approve,...

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees...

The limits of human knowledge Will humanity reach an intellectual plateau or will there come a singularity? I argue the former. Every person has a limit, and most people in the Western world are near theirs. The average all-humans IQ will increase, but only until most cultures are roughly energy sufficient. Additionally, as rampant leisureliness sets in, people do less and have fewer children. Conclusion: mankind will top out in a couple of hundred years; the period of rapid technological improvement will peter out and the era in which we live will come to be seen as strange and unusual....

You can manipulate a black hole as much as you like but you’ll never get rid of its event horizon, a new study suggests. This may sound a little odd, the event horizon is what makes the black hole, well… black. However, in the centre of a black hole, hidden deep inside the event horizon, is a singularity. A singularity is a mathematical consequence, it is also a point in space where the laws of physics do not apply. Mathematics also predicts that singularities can exist without an associated event horizon, but this means that we’d be able to physically...

Chemists claim to have created the world's first DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts. The finding could lead to improvements in gene therapy, futuristic nano-sized computers, and other high-tech advances, the Japanese researchers say.

WHAT do you call a surgeon who operates without scalpels, stitching tools or a powerful headlamp to light the patient’s insides? A better doctor, according to a growing number of surgeons who prefer to hand over much of the blood-and-guts portion of their work to medical robots controlled from computer consoles. Many urologists performing prostate surgery view the precise, tremor-free movements of a robot as the best way to spare nerves crucial to bladder control and sexual potency. A robot’s ability to deftly handle small tools may lead to a less invasive procedure and faster recovery for a patient. Robots...

When you ask a man on the street where revolutionary advanced robots are being developed, he is likely to name Japan and the United States. Japan is well known for such amazing mechanical creations as ASIMO and HRP, as well as robots that dance, engage in martial arts, transform, and play musical instruments. In the United States, the success of iRobot in both military and consumer markets is legendary. The DARPA Grand Challenge demonstrated advanced work on autonomous vehicles. GM has its own autonomous vehicle and expects driverless cars to be on the roads in a few years. (Lexus...

Human race will 'split into two different species' The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection will mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000. Go to the link in the header/excerpt for more, or the link in the...

Science Fiction has a lousy record of predicting the future. In the 1930s, for example, it was widely held that by 1970, toga-clad descendants of the Depression Generation would be living in giant art deco cities full of speeding Dymaxion Cars and dining on food pills. In the '50s and '60s, it was rocket belts and atomic-powered flying cars we were supposed to be enjoying by 2000. And today? In almost every extrapolation of the future I've read lately, the ultimate fate of mankind is uploading -- the transference of consciousness from biological to digital substrates. Such uploads, it is...

The universe has been complexifying and increasing in novelty since its birth, crystallizing into the culmination point and pinnacle of universal evolution. It started out with an explosion of pure energy, the Big Bang. Over long eons that energy coalesced into matter, and that matter brought forth the constituent molecules that formed life. Like a lens, this evolving life focused reflective consciousness within ourselves, compelling us to study ourselves and the world in which we live. This evolving process appears to be progressing at an exponential rate and is leading to a crown of perfection. This moment has been designated...

Chips push through nano-barrier New materials have had to be developed to shrink the transistors The next milestone in the relentless pursuit of smaller, higher performance microchips has been unveiled. Chip-maker Intel has announced that it will start manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide. Shrinking the basic building blocks of microchips will make them faster and more efficient. Computer giant IBM has also signalled its intention to start production of chips using the tiny components. "Big Blue", which developed the transistor technology with partners Toshiba, Sony and AMD, intends to incorporate them into its...

In a feat once as unlikely as the miller's daughter of fairytale fame spinning straw into gold, scientists in the United Kingdom have spun fine threads of biocompatible silicone that contain living human brain cells. The cells remained alive and capable of growth afterward, they say. "This has far-reaching implications and will enable significant advances to be made in technologies ranging from tissue engineering to regenerative medicine," Suwan N. Jayasinghe and Andrea Townsend-Nicholson state in their report. It appeared Nov. 13 in ACS' Biomacromolecules, a bimonthly journal. "The ability to electrospin biologically active threads and scaffolds of living organisms will...

A new robot, dubbed "Starfish" because of its size and shape, has the unusual ability -- in the mechanical world, that is -- of fixing itself. The Starfish is programmed to recognize its parts, but not how they're arranged or meant to be used. It figures that out for itself, using trial and error. Cornell University researchers have created a robot capable of self-awareness, learning and adapting -- all keys to the intelligence and technology needed for robots Latest News about robots to function in adverse and changing environments. The Cornell researchers, who published their findings in the Nov. 17,...

Physicists at the University of Chicago have discovered that air bubbles retain a "memory" of how they are formed (Phys Rev Lett 97 144503). Their study revealed that the initial conditions of bubble formation can affect the dynamics of the singularity that occurs when a bubble pinches off a nozzle. This could have profound implications for our understanding of other phenomena that involve singularities including the formation of black holes or supernovae. A singularity occurs when one or more of the physical parameters in a system approaches infinity. In bubble formation, this occurs at the moment of pinch-off, when the...

The robots are on the move--leaping, scrambling, rolling, flying, climbing. They are figuring out how to get here on their own. They come to help us, protect us, amuse us--and some even do floors. Since Czech playwright Karel Capek popularized the term ("robota" means "forced labor" in Czech) in 1921, we have imagined what robots could do. But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ) trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland....

Georgia Tech invention captures cell properties and biochemical signals in action ATLANTA (July 24, 2006) — To create drugs capable of targeting some of the most devastating human diseases, scientists must first decode exactly how a cell or a group of cells communicates with other cells and reacts to a broad spectrum of complex biomolecules surrounding it. But even the most sophisticated tools currently used for studying cell communications suffer from significant deficiencies. Typically, these tools can detect only a narrowly selected group of small molecules or, for a more sophisticated analysis, the cells must be destroyed for sample preparation....

Immortality is within our grasp . . . In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme...

SINGULARITY: UBIQUITY INTERVIEWS RAY KURZWEIL [Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers and futurists. His latest book is the just-published "The Singularity Is Near."] UBIQUITY: How is the new book doing? KURZWEIL: Very well -- it's in its fourth printing, and has been number one both in science and in philosophy on Amazon. UBIQUITY:: It's an amazing, magisterial piece of work. KURZWEIL: Thanks, I appreciate that. UBIQUITY:: Why don't you talk a little bit about the notion of "singularity"? Set the premise for us. KURZWEIL: Sure. It's actually a complicated premise, but there are several key ideas....