Things I Would Like to See Happen There are some things I am looking forward to, but I may be too old to ever get to see them. I would love to see warp drive. That is the fictitious drive which powers the Enterprise on Star Trek. Since it is really being worked on it could become a reality. I have heard several different groups are working on it and it would be necessary to travel throughout space since even light speed is far to slow to travel between solar systems. An article has come out which states warp drive could be too dangerous to use. If it works the way they say, by bending space, I could understand why, because it wouldn’t be very good for planets and people living in the bent area. There are several different methods for warp travel which have been proposed. Let’s look at the method which was proposed which creates a bubble of negative energy around our spaceship. As the ship travels at speeds far faster than light, space and time are expanded behind the ship and compressed in front of the ship. The real problem is said to be when the spacecraft stops. Researchers from the University of Sydney have found out something about this type of travel and it was as the ship passes through space it picks up all sorts of particles which enter the bubble around the ship. When the ship stops these particles are released in a tremendous burst of energy in front of the ship. Gamma rays and high energy particles would destroy anyone or any living thing in front. I have always said disturbing the surroundings around the ship is the wrong way to go. What I mean is expanding and contracting space could destroy the very fabric of space and potentially could cause so much damage it might make planets in or near the path of spaceship travel uninhabitable. Warp drive would be a way of powering a ship faster than the speed of light. Thinking about using a form of warp drive to power a spaceship to get it to go faster than the speed of light using a warp drive may only be one method of powering it to these high speeds and may never be a practical one at that. Years ago, rocket powered planes were introduced and experimented with, because they could travel faster than jets and some people believed they were the way to future air transportation, but they never were practical. The Germans had some rocket powered interceptors but they would burn through their fuel in a couple of minutes or less. We experimented with all sorts of rocket planes after the war but none came into common use. Everyone knew they were fast, but they were also impractical. Today we have found a way to get even more speed from a jet, a ramjet to be specific and the theoretical speed limit could be as high as twenty times the speed of sound if perfected. One can only hope the same will be true for space travel and we will find a practical way to zip around the universe. Another thing I would like to see come to fruition is the self-driving car. We seem to be on the cusp of this happening. The idea of a self-driving car may have started in 1925 when Francis Houdina used a radio-controlled car to drive through the streets of New York City without a driver. Incredibly it had to shift gears as it drove. Many papers came out describing how a self-driving car could be built which used computer advances. In 1995 there was a self-driving car and it drove the distance from Pennsylvania to California. Self-driving cars are nothing new, but now we have the technology available at a reasonable price. Price has always been one of the barriers to installing new technology. Self-driving cars could be a boon to everyone, but it will be an incredible convenience for older people. I think the key may be voice control. We wouldn’t want people to be deprived of being able to use it because the data entry was too complicated for them or they had bad vision. People who had become shut ins would now be able to get around. No one in the general public might need a driver’s license anymore. I would also like to see the long rumored holographic entertainment center come into the home. There really has been much improvement in the concept of watching movies or television. Yes, the effects have gotten better and the television sets have become much clearer and bigger, but we are still watching things on a flat screen just as we did when television first came out. Can you imagine how much more our viewing experience could be increased with a hologram of the program standing in the middle of our living room which could be rotated so we could see every part of the scene which was three dimensional without glasses? Adding the right type of sound and maybe, just maybe the right smells would bring a whole new experience to us. Another thing I would like to see would have to be done by NASA or eventually by some other country’s space agency. I would love to be able to watch a live feed from the different rovers which have been exploring places like Mars and the moon. Why does this have to be a secret with only select photos being released to the public? I have noticed there are quite a few other people who would love this to happen. If Mars is desolate as NASA is claiming why wouldn’t they want us to be able to view the signal coming from these rovers? It does make one think there might be something on Mars and maybe even the moon which we are not supposed to see. I would have thought technology which allows us to see the people who call us and talk with them face to face would have taken off. Instead a much more primitive method has become more popular and that is texting. Maybe it is just people in my generation, but many of us where excited when scientists and engineers used to talk about future phones which would allow face to face contact. When I think about texting it seems to me to only be slightly more advanced than using a telegraph key. There are plenty of other things coming down the road from printing out devices and even homes to miniature electronics in clothes. The world of tomorrow is almost here today.
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