Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
Asteroid mining. We’ve had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.
Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
There’s been something else new?
I saw a talk on the subject about a year back. It was discussing tokamak reactors, from an engineer working on them. The small ones can’t sustain a break even state, but they are affected by the inverse square law to a larger degree. I believe China is about to start/has started construction on a power station sized test reactor.
The pellet sort are a different type. They have different pros and cons.
external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
And then all of this gave birth to the terrorists known as the Naturalists™…
Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.
Can we get a dream recorder, please?!
Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.
Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I’d like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it’s much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
Underwater cities
With climate change and coastal flooding, it’s coming, just not in the form you’re thinking of.
I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don’t think it will be “downloading minds” or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.
I’m pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.
Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on… I can only assume the tech is much better these days.
Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).
bsg, sga all had the brain interface thing going on. especially the cylon part was all about that.
fusion maybe, but in scifi, it often requires an alien race making first contact, we wont even get to things like anti-matter tech without that intervention. SG1 is more in our time frame, but with aliens already possessing advanced tech
