Big uptick in the amount of human activity in space — tech there already, economy starting to manifest it. Like 10,000 humans in space at any given time, then 100,000, then 1,000,000, and so on
If we can get a slightly lighter solar sail material, that’s the last missing tech piece needed to send probes to Alpha Centauri. We’d need massive laser arrays so tech alone would precede economic manifestation by a while. Human laser-accelerated probes can reach 0.3 c, and arrive at the star in about 15 years. The probe’s design is the size of a thumb drive
AI is obviously making big strides
honestly my thumbs are cramping up, but there’s lots more. drone-v-drone warfare, all semi-autonomous
Growing perfect genetic match organs to implant
mRNA delivered by microplasmids is incredible. There are easily a million life-enhancing distinct uses of it that involve temporarily building any protein we want in a patient’s cells, endogenously, with controlled expression. That is crazy powerful technology
Fusion power’s like almost there. I think we’re at the “now scale it” phase
Bombarding Earth by hurling containers full of rocks out of railgun launch tubes on the moon
Sex robots
Translating to and from animal languages
Cloning, which has existed for decades now, is somehow totally invisible to media attention. Like, in the time since Dolly the sheep was in the headlines, someone could have theoretically produced an actual army of human clones and have them hidden somewhere
Telepathy via neural implants
That’s some of the sci fi stuff we either have now and just are too harried and exhausted to contemplate, or that we’re just on the verge of creating.
“How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth With ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to decipher what animals are saying. Their hope: By truly listening to nature, humans will decide to protect it.”
It’s a good idea. Forming relationships with other animal species, interpersonal relationships, will accelerate their assimilation into this civilization.
It’s a soild model for how to incentivize resource allocation. As we’ve seen with ghetto after ghetto, if there’s a wall between two populations and neither side communicates across that wall, the relationships go away and savagery becomes possible.
Communication with animals is a really good idea, if we want to save the animals. Of course, by communicating with the animals we’re sort of ending their existence as animals. But oh well. Even the Mona Lisa’s falling apart.
I can’t claim to represent anyone other than myself. I use an RSS feeder for news, articles, and webcomics. I have some ebooks from the library downloaded. I have been playing an MMO phone game for the last ~year and check on that a couple times a day. Discord. Lemmy has replaced reddit for me but I don’t spend as much time on it as I used to on reddit.
Feedly. I’ve looked around for alts, especially when Feedly started embedding sponsored articles amongst my subscriptions, but haven’t found anything I like better.
We would all be better off mentally if we filtered out those guys.
The US election season is way too fucking long. I love hearing about the losses he’s taking but the bullshit he spews still gets out there. No need for that. I miss the time shortly after Biden got in where I didn’t hear about Trump every day. Didn’t even hear about what Biden was doing! It was a mental health treat!
And Musk… just seems like I don’t really need to know what that guy is up to every day.
Oh I know it’s not all of them, but what I guess I meant was all of the major ones. Or at least, all of the ones where my shows are on that I like to watch.
Looking around my immediate environment, I see very few things that aren’t
A. already 30 years old made by companies that are essentially defunct and if the brand does even still exist it’s transitioned to another parent company as a zombie brand that produces identical temporary garbage to the rest of the industry, like my Kenmore 80 series washer and dryer.
B. Modern shit with a single-digit year life expectancy, like any computer hardware I have, my cell phone, my printer, etc.
C. Isn’t from a company that has completely pissed me off glares at my very, very last Dell products
D. I didn’t make myself from scratch, like an increasing amount of my furniture.
The only item that falls in my eye line that I can say “buy it now and your grandchildren will actually want it” is my Revere stainless steel frying pan. It’s not as ragnarok proof as cast iron but it also won’t cave in my glass cooktop. I think my grandmother bought mine in the 80’s, you can still buy them today.
I do want to mention my Kitchenaid mixer. The unit itself is well made, I’ve made at least one pizza a week with it for the past…six years? It’s a quality power tool. I dislike the company and their product range. They have a tendency to discontinue attachments in favor of incompatible and worse ones. For example, I’m aware of three different meat grinder attachments, one metal one and two plastic ones only one of which the food mill attachment is compatible with, and they did their best to prevent people from learning that, because the difference between the plastic one you probably already have, that was possibly packed in with your mixer, and the one that’s compatible with the food mill, is like, a few millimeters in diameter here and there. If I show you their marketing pictures (of white plastic on that White Marketing Void background) you couldn’t tell them apart, and the model numbers are very similar. That has rubbed me the wrong way in a bad place.
For printers, I’d like to suggest picking up a brother laser scanner/copier/printer off Craigslist.
They can usually be had for ~$100 if you just get black and they’ll last for a stupidly long time. Toner is expensive but you’ll easily get 1500+ pages out of one cartridge and it never dries out.
If you want color, look around for an HP laserjet pro. They’re usually commercial grade and while you’ll probably pay a fair bit more, I see them on Craigslist regularly for ~$150-250 depending on the model. I have one in my office and I’ve gotten several thousand pages through it with zero problems.
I just get the toner refill and old cartridge exchange from whatever local print shop. My current area doesn’t have one sadly but I still have 2 left as I normally do 5 at a time. For anyone looking for printers I recommend checking openprinting.org and grabbing one categorized under “perfectly” even if you don’t use Linux. The driverless printers will work with phones and such too.
Normal people? Probably mostly Facebook, Instagram and candy crush. You can just take a look at the top free apps in your app store but I’ll give you a spoiler: it’s 99% junk.
Okay so I actually checked. The top 3 are Temu (a ripoff shopping app), WhatsApp and Tiktok in my region
I have Feedly app and a bunch of RSS feeds about tech, world news, board games, video games, robotics, space, and pop culture. It’s great! Sure I get a few duplicate articles from multiple sites covering the same thing but it’s nice little digital newspaper. And if one site keeps publishing stupid shit I can unsubscribe from it and it’s gone from my feed.
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