Ask The Crew: What Futuristic Technology Are You Most Looking Forward To?

When you think about it, technology has advanced quite rapidly over the past few years. No, robots aren’t quite self aware just yet, but when you sit back and think about it, we’re not doing too bad. PVRs are now common place in many homes, OLED TVs have become a reality, and scientists are close to developing an invisibility cloak. Heck, we even have a version of Windows that doesn’t blue screen every other day. But there are some technologies that don’t seem to be developing as quickly. What happened to teleportation? What about time travel?

We want to know what technology you are most looking forward to. In the meantime take a look at what we want to see become a reality sooner than later.

Flying Cars

We were promised a lot as children. I remember quite vividly being in Grade 3 and discussing the year 2000 with my class. Laser guns, teleportation, and flying cars, we would see it all! What happened? My biggest disappointment is there are still no flying cars on the market. Sure we’ve seen a few prototypes, and I use that word loosely, but we have yet to develop a practical flying concept car.

I suppose my dream could still come true. Michael Dacre recently made headlines when his “Jetpod” crashed during a test run. If he would have survived the crash, who knows, maybe his vision would have become a reality. We’re getting there, it’s just taking much longer than anyone ever thought.

- Mike Yawney

Augmented Reality Implants

Here’s a technology I’m sure is just around the corner, and I’m stoked about it! Scifi, for some time now, has portrayed a future where we have our own personal HUDs that give us the instant threat updates as we (human, cyborg, android, terminator, what have you) battle for control of the galaxy.

My vision for our individual augmented reality implant is a touch more pedestrian: what I really want is something that can give me the name of the person I’m looking at. Sure, I guess if they’re going to create an implant or contact lens that displays names, they might as well add all that other information that we have available on the ol’ Internet.

Look at anything and the information about it is there for you. Instantly filter and search. Names, histories, relationships, Facebook profiles, whatever.

And the brilliant thing is that we’re really so close to achieving that. Layar (it’s free–download it for your iPhone or Android device) already lets you create an augmented reality based on a whole host of web databases. And Yelp‘s easter egg (Monocle) helps you to look at reviews of a restaurant just by “looking” at it with your iPhone.

I like to think of the future as just making a tiny Android phone that can be nestled into my brain. In the meantime, I think I’ll just re-read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and think about how brilliant it will be have a BrainPal sometime in the not-too-distant future.

- DM Le Bray

Faster than Light travel

Call them Warp Drive, FTL Drive, or Hyperdrive, it’s all the same thing. If the human race is ever going to see anything cool in the universe, we’re going to need a fast ride to get there. The closest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is about 4 light years away so even if we’re traveling near the speed of light, it’s going to take forever to get there. But with faster than light engines behind us, we could probably go to Alpha Centauri like we go to Starbucks for coffee. And the great thing about faster than light travel, is that we’ll have figured out that pesky time dilation problem.

In all seriousness, according to Dr. Stephen Hawking, if the human race is to survive the next 1000 years, we’ll have to venture into space and find planets to colonize because too many accidents could befall the human race on earth. And how else are we going to get to those planets? 

- Natalie Sit