Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts

Sunday, June 3, 2018

Ripe Not Hype

MCEscher envisions Dyson Spheres long before graphene.

Slowly but surely, the promise of the metamaterial graphene is being fulfilled.

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

Meanwhile, check out Isaac Arthur's far out futurism videos for ideas on what to do with all that magical metamaterial.

Scalable manufacturing process spools out strips of graphene for use in ultrathin membranes.
Apr 2018, MIT News

Saturday, March 17, 2018

The Distribution of Progress


The Spirit of Truth

In 2006, the internet becomes public access tv on steroids with the dawn of YouTube. In case you forgot:

The Spirit of Truth

Ten years later...

In India, many see fake news on YouTube thanks to cheap data plans
Mar 2018, NBC

In India, a country holding 1/3 the world's people, the internet has finally taken hold. And by that we mean they're watching YouTube and getting infected by fake viruses and engineered memes.

And it looks a lot different than the same moment in other parts of the developed world about ten years ago. It's good to remember comparisons like this, because this is how progress really works.

When we imagine the future, we see it through the eyes of our own culture. But the world is a big place, and not everyone is traveling at the same speed at the same time.

Uploading our brains to the datasphere and Christopher Columbusing Mars will not happen next year. If the whole world was made of South Korea and NASA, then yes, that might be the case. But as a whole, we are worlds apart. And the speed of progress is not distributed equally across the planet.