X-Message-Number: 29485 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Dude, where's my sci-fi future? Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 18:00:28 -0700 http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/dude-wheres-my-scifi-future/2007/05/02/1177788228142.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2 Dude, where's my sci-fi future? May 3, 2007 Sick of waiting for your own jetpack? So is Daniel H. Wilson. THE future is now, and we are not impressed. The future was supposed to be a fully automated, nuclear-powered, germ-free utopia - a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Our scientists may be building the future, but some key pieces are missing. Where are the ray guns and the flying cars? At the turn of the 19th century, visionaries such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne spun wild tales of spaceflight and underwater adventure. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback introduced the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction, Amazing Stories. By midcentury, the Apollo moon missions were fuel on the flame. As science conquered nature, we yearned to live in the perfect tomorrow. Yet today shiny robot servants do not cook breakfast for colonists on the moon. We are not living in a techno-utopia. Not yet. We can't wait another minute for the future to arrive. The time has come to hold the golden age of science fiction accountable for its fantastic promises. Now is the time to stop wishing, to stand up, and to shout: "Where the hell is my jetpack?" If the technology is possible - even remotely so - let's lay it out for all to see. IT BEGAN in 1928, when Buck Rogers appeared in Amazing Stories powering through the sky on a hot new jetpack. It was the coolest toy the world had seen. His appearances aroused techno-lust in thousands of people and inspired generations of inventors to attempt their own jetpacks. Wendell Moore of Bell Aerosystems finished the Bell Rocket Belt in 1961. Moore mounted a rocket on a backpack and tested the device himself. The rocketbelt has tanks containing hydrogen peroxide propellant and nitrogen, which when mixed at high pressure cause a jet of superheated steam that fires out of the rocket nozzles. The rocketbelt appeared in the James Bond movie Thunderball, and at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Three outfits have working rocketbelt copycats: the GoFast rocketbelt promotes a sports drink in the US; Juan Lozano is a Mexican with two self-built rocketbelts (they're for sale); and Powerhouse Productions in the US provides two rocketbelts for performances. Harnessing a controlled explosion in a backpack is no simple task. In the 1990s two business partners built a copy of the original rocketbelt, called the Rocketbelt 2000. Alas, discord broke out between the partners, and after a kidnapping and a murder, one of them disassembled the prototype and hid the pieces. They have never been found. TELEPORTATION is a real area of research and scientists are making solid progress with microscopic, inanimate objects. In 1993 an international squad of scientists watched a machine employ an obscure law of quantum physics to teleport a photon from one side of the room to the other. This heralded a new era of research in quantum teleportation. The key idea is to find a way to collect all the information about the object to be teleported and then to use that information to make an identical copy in some other place. The teleported copy does not have to be made of the original parts and pieces - all that is necessary is the information about the original object and the raw material needed to reconstruct the object. Unfortunately, it is fundamentally impossible to collect all the information about the object to be teleported. Quantum particles such as atoms and photons can exist in distinct states, like the head or tail of a coin. But they can also exist in several states at once, like a coin spinning in the air before it lands. Quantum teleportation experiments abound, but so far have only been applied to elementary particles such as photons, trapped ions, and blobs of cesium gas. These particles have very few quantum states (for example, an electron has up-spin or down-spin and a photon can be polarised vertically or horizontally). To teleport a person, the machine would have to pinpoint and analyse all of the 1028 atoms in the human body. WHILE hiding from your little brother is fun, the ability to hide from bullets can save your life. To that end, adaptive camouflage for personnel and vehicles has become a military priority. Researchers at NASA define adaptive camouflage as a camouflage that changes to match the environment. The idea is to wrap yourself in real-time images of the environment - like wearing a flexible television screen. The problem is to make adaptive camouflage show the correct image from every angle at once. Remember those cheap holographic stickers, the ones that show a different image depending on how much they are tilted? Using a similar principle, it is theoretically possible to become invisible. First, the system needs at least six stereoscopic pairs of cameras to capture a complete image of the surroundings. Second, a dense array of display elements is needed, each capable of aiming light beams on individual trajectories. The rate at which the images are refreshed must be faster than the human eye can see in order to avoid creating a flickering effect. Finally, a hardworking wearable computer has to calculate the virtual scene to send to each element of the display. Invisibility applications extend past the battlefield: for example, surgeons could see through their own fingers during operations. Unfortunately, current technology only works at short distances, in dim places and at select viewing angles. The only way to transcend these boundaries is to develop faster processors, brighter LEDs and more-flexible displays. IN EARLY science fiction pulps any adventurer worth his space boots carried a ray gun. The hardware is now available. Several classes of "directed energy weapons", called nonkinetic weapons by military types, are coming into use. The Pentagon's Active Denial System emits super-high-frequency microwaves. When the wave pulses hit human skin, they heat the body's water. The burning sensation has been compared to touching a 100-watt light bulb - the system is playing with your nerve endings, not causing permanent damage. The weapon won't fit in your holster - soldiers have to mount them on vehicles. Then there's the Vigilant Eagle, a high-power microwave device. The defensive weapon is designed to confuse incoming shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles by steering a short-duration pulse beam that engulfs the target, cooking any delicate electronics. The most compelling directed energy weapon is the laser blaster, designed primarily to zap approaching missiles. Field-tested military prototypes are pushing 25 kilowatts of power and research is under way on versions with 100 kilowatts of power. By comparison, surgical lasers use about one-tenth of a kilowatt of power to cut human skin. What's keeping a handheld laser blaster out of your pocket? Heat dissipation. Operational lasers are inefficient, converting only about 15 per cent of electrical power into laser, with the rest wasted in the form of extreme heat. More efficient diodes would lower heat output and shrink lasers so that they could be small enough to hang jauntily on your hip. THE "scientific marvel of the century" offered in comic books may be a gimmick, but defence contractors are not playing around. Visible light is composed of streams of photons that wiggle in a certain range of frequencies. An X-ray is like visible light except that it has more energy. High-energy photons (which are invisible to our eyes) tend to penetrate further into objects before they bounce off. To develop X-ray spectacles, the trick is to use light with just enough power to penetrate clothing but not enough to penetrate skin. The need for better airport security led to the "backscatter", a machine that measures the position of X-rays that "scatter back" from a person and generate a photograph-quality image. Very dense objects (like guns) show up dark; not-very-dense objects (like clothes) don't show up at all. But a backscatter machine won't fit on your face; it's the size of a refrigerator and takes about eight seconds to scan a person standing about 20 centimetres away. Research recently produced the radar scope, a device the size of a telephone handset that can sense human beings through up to 30 centimetres of concrete. Unlike the swirly sunglasses that disappointed so many of us, these gadgets work. THE idea behind cryogenic freezing is simple: in order to survive longer than our normal lifespan, we freeze ourselves and preserve our bodies for a future scientist to thaw and revive. Cryogenics is the branch of physics concerned with generating and studying very low temperatures. Cryobiology is an area of cryogenics that studies the effects of low temperatures on biological organisms, usually with the intent of cryopreservation. Cryonics (the science of freezing and thawing whole organisms) is a proto-science, based on expectations of the repair capabilities of future science. Despite the occasional caveman who is found relatively well preserved in a glacier, this is a complicated field. Cryobiologists routinely freeze and recover freefloating cells and tiny clumps such as embryos, but freezing and reviving whole organs (or organisms) is outside the reach of current technology. Scientists know, for example, that a frozen brain generally has ripped axons, hemorrhaged capillaries, unravelled myelin, extruded cell contents in the extracellular space, and other gross alterations. For this reason, experts doubt human memory can survive cryosuspension and believe cryonic suspension is almost surely a waste of money. The previous sentence is, though, in the small print of every commercial for the dozens of mainly American companies that will turn you into a human corpsicle to store your chilled earthly remains indefinitely. OURS is the first generation for which space vacations are becoming possible. The doors of the International Space Station swing wide for the ultra wealthy. All you need for commercial space travel is a cost-effective, reusable launch vehicle. NASA uses three space shuttles that are mostly reusable but not very cost-effective. In 1996 the Ansari X PRIZE competition offered $US10 million to the team with the first vehicle to reach suborbital altitudes (about 110 kilometres) twice in a row. An American aerospace engineer, Burt Rutan, won with SpaceShipOne. Small enough to fit in your garage, it is made of a light hull of woven graphite attached to a rocket motor that runs on the chemical reaction between laughing gas and rubber. The vehicle reached space twice in two consecutive weeks in 2004, leaving its two pilots weightless for a full four minutes each time. As it turns out, 110 kilometres is high enough to see the curvature of Earth and to feel weightless, two prime selling points for space tourists. Virgin Galactic promptly licensed SpaceShipOne for use in suborbital flights for tourists (tickets are already on sale). Meanwhile, the Aera company is piggybacking on the Florida Space Authority's Cape Canaveral site to launch its Altairis rocket, which takes off vertically with six passengers and lands in the same way as an aeroplane. THE US space program kick-started a food revolution. Kids were fascinated with how food got into the astronauts (and how it got back out). Space travellers have serious dietary restrictions: food has to be as light as possible because every gram counts on lift-off, and gooey foods are preferred because renegade crumbs can damage delicate machinery. In the 1960s astronauts on the Mercury space missions sucked apple sauce from aluminum tubes. Later, the menu was expanded to include "food powder", freeze-dried food that had to be squirted with cold water and then sucked through a straw. By 1973 astronauts on the Skylab space station had a kitchen and menu with 72 items. But where are the food pills? The idea is theoretically possible, but like most "technological food" it's not commercially viable. Thankfully, the US Army's Combat Feeding Directorate is working ceaselessly to keep soldiers fed. "Meals ready to eat" - individually packaged, self-heating food pouches - arrived a decade ago. A more recent innovation is the compressed meal, which is one-third the size and weight of the ready-to-eat meals but has the same number of calories. At this rate, the food pill may be on the menu soon. Under the far-reaching metabolic-dominance program, the US military is soliciting proposals for a pill that will allow soldiers to operate at peak performance during prolonged periods of starvation. Meanwhile, work is continuing on a transdermal nutrient patch that will enable soldiers to go without food for up to three days. THE film Metropolis (1926) depicted a dizzying view of future cities filled with titanic buildings connected by narrow sky bridges and a horizon buzzing with hundreds of autogyros. A similar city was depicted in a 1939 issue of Amazing Stories: enormous buildings connected by suspended roadways and riddled with giant aerodromes to house bobbing zeppelins. In these visions, each building was a city in itself, self-sustaining and receiving supplies from underground trade routes. Inhabitants did not have to go outside for weeks at a time. Smoke was eliminated, noise was silenced, and the sweet air was mechanically purified. The self-contained skyscraper city was a mute tomb of good, clean fun and hard, hard work. So where are they? While life in a fully enclosed skyscraper city is attainable today (missing only the associated speeding air traffic) it is not as luxurious as predicted. Anyone who wants to become the first citizen of the new skyscraper utopia should immediately move into an existing skyscraper; dark, cramped apartments are readily available and you can always have food home delivered for the rest of your life. In 2005, the world's tallest skyscraper was the Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan. Built in 2004, the Chinese architecture-inspired Taipei 101 is (predictably) 101 storeys and rises 508 metres. The next tallest buildings are the twin Petronas Towers (452 metres) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the Sears Tower (442 metres) in Chicago; and the Jin Mao Building (421 metres) in Shanghai, China. THE first attempts at creating flying cars were fairly simple: install an aeroplane engine and two wings on a regular car. The first attempts were also disastrous. Henry Ford's "sky flivver" flew in 1928, but production was nixed after an unlucky pilot died in a crash. In 1956, Moulton Taylor, an engineer who earlier had helped develop the cruise missile, unveiled the Aerocar. In default mode this "plane-mobile" could cruise on the highway at 100kmh, towing a tidy trailer that contained wings, tail and propeller. Once the wings were attached, the little yellow Aerocar could leap from the highway at 88kmh and cruise at up to 160kmh at about 3600 metres with a range of up to 480 kilometres. After landing, you could park the car-plane in the garage (just remember to disconnect the wings first). The Aerocar worked well conceptually, but it was too impractical for everyday use and a business deal for full-scale production fell through in the 1970s. NASA scientists working on the Small Aircraft Transportation System project are busy solving the two main problems: mid-air collisions and complicated piloting mechanisms. NASA eschews the term "flying car," preferring "personal air vehicle". Nevertheless, NASA is designing a flying car that would impress George Jetson. The agency is committed to a 15-year gestation for three successive generations of flying cars. The first, scheduled for next year, will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use. The second, planned for 2015, will be a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a Harrier jet and should be on the market by 2020. This is an edited extract from Where's My Jetpack?, by Daniel H. Wilson, (Bloomsbury, RRP $22.95). A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived. _________________________________________________________________ Exercise your brain! Try Flexicon. http://games.msn.com/en/flexicon/default.htm?icid=flexicon_hmemailtaglineapril07 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29485