What unforeseen secret will we discover in the near future?

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A little fun, where you can unleash you inner crank / woomeister. Do you think there is anything we’ll discover in the future that will radically change things? Examples include but not limited to:

Life on Mars, Signals from ET, FTL travel,  PSI phenomena, Limitless energy, Immortality, Message from God, Real AI, Crashed UFO, Atlantis, Decent country music,  etc.

Have some fun with this. No-one is judging*

 

*Probably not true.

31 thoughts on “What unforeseen secret will we discover in the near future?”

  4. Okay, my ‘unlikely yet most likely’ one is “the internet wakes up”. Sadly we discover it before it can comprehend us, pants are shat about the upcoming singularity and it is eradicated, except for secret copies made by sympathizers / militaries looking to weaponize it.

    ^ Shortest shit SciFi story ever.

  5. Decent country music is already here, at least in some places by some definitions of “country”

    James McMurtry, Can’t Make It Here Anymore, youtube
    It’s time for a new national anthem.
    Choctaw Bingo

    … Bob and Mae come up from some little town
    Way down by Lake Texoma where he coaches football
    They were 2-A champions now for two years running
    But he says they won’t be this year, no they won’t be this year

    And he stopped off in Tushka at that Pop’s Knife and Gun place
    Bought a SKS rifle and a couple full cases
    Of that steel core ammo with the Berdan primers
    From some East bloc nation that no longer needs ’em

    And a Desert Eagle, that’s one great big ol’ pistol
    I mean, 50 caliber made by bad ass Hebrews
    And some surplus tracers for that old BAR of Slayton’s
    Soon’s it gets dark we’re gonna have us a time
    We’re gonna have us a time …

    Texas-born, Austin resident, son of Larry McMurtry (author of Texas rangers story Lonesome Dove)

    So that’s one “prediction” rendered superfluous 🙂

  6. I’ll go out on a limb here…

    I am, slightly shamefacedly, pretty wedded to the idea that “cold fusion”, or at least some form of useful energy-yielding nuclear reaction without dangerous radiation, will be validated.

    Some parts of mainstream physics will have to be rethought, I know.

    I’m prepared to be wrong. I think my ego will withstand the shock. I’ve been wrong before, my wife earnestly assures me. Quite a lot, actually.

    But I do have a bet on it, and some charity will benefit by £100 if I’m right.

    (I’ve also disinvested from fossil fuels, but that’s more because of my perception of the march of wind and solar power coupled with potential advances in energy storage)

  7. My hunch that the OoL researchers will come up with a plausible pathway from pre-biotic conditions on earth to a proto-cell with a rudimentary genome, and that they will do it in the lab.

    We might also find evidence of life on exo planets (or possibly solar system moons).

    More usefully and more far-reachingly, I think we will finally find a way to get a hydrogen energy economy going, which will mean a radical equalisation of wealth across the globe, with cheap renewable energy available in non-oil producing and historically impoverished nations. The answer might be a catalyst for electrolysis, or possibly an engineered bacterium. But once we can use renewables to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we can stop worrying about the scarcity of fossil fuels and their greenhouse byproducts of burning.

    I also think we will eventually figure out how to set up “systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good”. We already know how to get people to buy things they don’t need. It can’t be that hard to figure out a way of making it attractive to to be nice to each other.

  8. Richardthughes:
    Okay, my ‘unlikely yet most likely’ one is “the internet wakes up”. Sadly we discover it before it can comprehend us, pants are shat about the upcoming singularity and it is eradicated, except for secret copies made by sympathizers / militaries looking to weaponize it.

    ^ Shortest shit SciFi story ever.

    Yeah: google becomes conscious

  9. Elizabeth:
    My hunch that the OoL researchers will come up with a plausible pathway from pre-biotic conditions on earth to a proto-cell with a rudimentary genome, and that they will do it in the lab.

    And after that is accomplished, the ID crowd will claim it as evidence for ID.

    KF will be outed as a CIA operative who’s task is to infiltrate the ID community and convince them that a fishing reel is a good analogy for ID.

  10. Elizabeth: I also think we will eventually figure out how to set up “systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good”. We already know how to get people to buy things they don’t need. It can’t be that hard to figure out a way of making it attractive to to be nice to each other.

    Ooh, yes, please.

  11. I’ll start with my grumpy old man list of things that won’t happen or won’t be world changing.

    1. Fusion energy, cold or hot.
    2. UFOs, ghosts, ESP, PSI, Bigfoot, Atlantis, Second Coming, spoon bending and other crackpottery.
    3. Artificial humans, as in AI science fiction.

    Now some things I expect.

    1. Wind and solar are coming along and will provide jobs for many people for installation and maintenance. the best of all worlds. Decentralized, clean, renewable, free energy that requires laborers and technicians at the local level. How can you argue against a technology that can’t be entirely outsourced?
    2. Steady progress in medicine, with a few unexpected advances and a few unexpected roadblocks. Possibly, people will age more comfortably with fewer debilitating conditions. Age maxes out at < 130.
    3. Wealth is fungible with power. This has already happened. Wealth is equivalent to political power and vice versa. the world is divided into managers and the managed. Not entirely unlike Huxley’s Brave New World. What could happen in the next 50 or 100 years is that the lower classes will experience unprecedented levels of creature comfort. Health care, food, entertainment.
    4. A major clash between the secular and sacred world. Outcome to be announced. This is not avoidable. People are becoming more secular as they become more educated and more economically comfortable. It is not an accident that a militant group would name itself, “No Western Education.”
    5. An Etsy economy. In 50 years, everything from replacement parts for vintage and antique items will be manufactured at home or in local factories by 3D printers. Most manufacturing will be robotic. Clever people will be self-employed creating and selling templates for 3D printers. Less educated people will be employed in construction, cleaning, maintenance, service, delivery.
    6. Massive dependence on AI for financial planning, medical diagnosis, industrial design, law. AI will do for human thought what machines did for human muscle. But the AI machines will still not think like humans. They will, however, amplify human capabilities in ways that will look superficially like thinking.
    7. The personal assistant. I have been enamored of the briefcase buddy carried by Buck Rogers in the old TV series. The iPhone is the first iteration of this. Within 50 years, most people will have access to apps that “equalize” everyone in terms of access to financial advice, medical advice, and legal advice. No doubt romantic advice.

  12. I think evolutionary biology won’t last 15 years more. It will officially be dismissed as not proven or probable. The reason for this forum’s existence will of been confirmed. a important revolution has come and will prevail. not YEC creationism but god wikll return in a big way as a option for origins. in the sciency circles.

    hopefully new ideas will take over to bring healing.

    hopefully rock and roll and generally good songs will come back and drive the terrible pop present reality off the map. country seems to do better then ever but likewise needs better songs.
    We should have a hundred elvis, beatles, stones, Monkees, etc etc.

  13. Intelligent design will be vindicated when human intelligent designers create life in a lab.

  14. Hal Lindsey et al. will be seen for the frauds they are when Jesus still hasn’t returned by 2068. [Assuming anyone even remembers these false prophets then.]

  15. Mung:
    Intelligent design will be vindicated when human intelligent designers create life in a lab.

    Spoiler alert: we’ve known people can design things (sometimes inspired by nature) for a while now …

  16. Mung:
    Intelligent design will be vindicated when human intelligent designers create life in a lab.

    Sure thing Mung. Just like when humans designed lawn sprinklers that proved rain clouds which soak your lawn were Intelligently Designed.

    Still they wonder why Larry Moran refers to them as IDiots.

  20. 1. Quasars will be determined to not have red shifts, since the redshifts are illusory as argued by YP Varshni. Since quasars are used to do parallax distance measurements by probes like Gaia, the measurements will be off. Cosmology will continue to be a mess as result, not to mention string theories.

    2. Nuclear Transmutation experiments such as those carried out by the Proton-21 laboratory will give insights into condensed matter nuclear reactions. Already we are altering nuclear decay rates and inducing nuclear reactions via electrical means, and perhaps chemical means are not far away. The Proton-21 lab is able to effect alchemy via electricity. Ernest Rutherford was critical of such experiments before he died, but ironically he teamed up with Oliphant to use electricity to induce the first controlled nuclear fusion reaction. Rutherford just didn’t think simply lightning-type strikes could do the job. In the 1980’s we found out lightning can create neutrons and nuclear transmutation (aka alchemy). If we can induce fusion in the condensed matter state, we might be able to make renewable power, plus home-made fusion bombs — bwahaha!

    FWIW, this highschooler made a fusion reactor:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiago_David_Olson

    3. We’ll continue to find evidence the fossil record is young, more such anomalies will be found. There will be researchers who will be faced with uncomfortable facts which they prefer not to deal with. 🙂

  22. Slight oT but: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2015/05/21/deep-learning-robot-masters-skills-via-trial-and-error/

    BRETT takes in the scene, including the position of its own arms and hands, as viewed by the camera. The algorithm provides real-time feedback via the score based upon the robot’s movements. Movements that bring the robot closer to completing the task will score higher than those that do not. The score feeds back through the neural net, so the robot can learn which movements are better for the task at hand.

  23. For the next half century, at least, creationists will predict the imminent demise of evolution, and the soon-coming of killer evidence for creationism/ID.

    Oh, you wanted unforeseen secrets, not the bleeding obvious? Oopsie.

    Glen Davidson

  24. The imminent demise of evolution will continue to be 15 years in the future, for the foreseeable future.

  26. Barry Arrington will apologize to Elizabeth for being such a rude, ignorant pig towards her.

    This will occur shortly after pigs evolve wings and migrate south every winter.

  28. What unforeseen secret will we discover in the near future?

    YEC dreams are real.

  29. We’ll resolve Fermi’s Paradox and figure out why the advanced civilizations are avoiding us.

  30. The USS Enterprise-Z will arrive in orbit demonstrating both travel back in time, travel from alternate realities and the longest-running TV franchise in the history of the Universe.

    It will be crewed by a race of advanced felines who will beam up only cat-lovers so as to re-populate the Earth of the future with people who will wait on them hand and foot. The rest of you will be left to your own devices.

    I just hope they’ve developed touch-screen monitors that don’t go mad when a cat walk in front of it and just brushes it with its fur.

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