There are plenty of parts of the world where governments/aid groups have to distribute food. Most of it is staples like bread and rice. We also have these protein drink things now that brag they can replace any meal. At some point the cost of those drinks will fall to making it worth giving out meal replacement drinks to people instead of bags of rice.
I’m not sure any of those are full diet replacements though. They serve as a good breakfast or lunch, but I don’t think it’s recommended you replace all meals with them. At least not in more ideal circumstances.
We’re hardly in ideal circumstances. Now, some of these meal replacements are true, well-rounded meal replacements that are full of nutrients. Huel comes to mind.
Yes, but where will the protein come from? My guess is bugs. It’s already a staple of the Cyberpunk franchise both videogame and tabletop, where most of the world eats something called scop, or single celled organic protein. A megacorp called All Foods produces a beef substitute made from genetically modified flatworms called EEZYBEEF. Or how’d you like a pizza with vegan cheese and pepperoni made from locusts?
Actually safe autonomous transport and delivery would be a great next step. But the enterprises are putting their pre-alpha releases into the public and killing people which is souring the public to the notion.
To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I’ve read. It’s not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we’re seeing steady improvements over time.
Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.
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.
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