…I highly recommend picking one up.
Yes, this car is for real. H/T Mental Floss.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Different Kinds of "Impossible"
Michio Kaku says there are three:
Type 1 impossibilities
Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes
Type 2 impossibilities
Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes
Type 3 impossibilties
Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition
Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we’ll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.
Different Kinds of “Impossible”
Michio Kaku says there are three:
Type 1 impossibilities
Impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Might be possible this century or the next: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes
Type 2 impossibilities
Technologies that sit at the edge of our understanding of the physical world. May be realised millenia or millions of years in the future: faster-than-light travel, time travel, parallel universes
Type 3 impossibilties
Technologies that violate the known laws of physics. If they turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics: perpetual motion machines, precognition
Kaku has some interesting speculations on when we’ll be seeing things like teleportation and time travel.
Life Bots
We know that nanobots are possible because, in a very real way, they already exist.
It’s a point that’s been made before, most famously in the Drexler-Smalley debates, but it bears repeating. Single celled life is “the ultimate existence proof of the feasibility of a molecular assembler.” This is not a metaphor. Life is nanotech, literally. Our future nanobots may bear a striking resemblance to yeasts and other single celled life.
Here’s a great example:
Salmonella Bacteria Turned Into Cancer Fighting ‘Robots’
KurzweilAI.net, Mar. 31, 2008
[Notice this is dated March 31 and not the day after.]
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers are turning Salmonella bacteria into tumor killing “robots” that use their flagella to go deep into tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach, and once in place, manufacture drugs that trigger cancer cells to kill themselves.
Normally, mice with tumors all die within 30 days. After receiving this bacterial system and getting a dose of radiation, all the mice in their lab tests survived beyond the 30 days, which could translate into months or years in people.
Right Up Our Alley
For some reason, it seemes I only have a couple of hours to post this one:
Posted by Sir Richard Branson, President and Founder of Virgin Group
In my life, I’ve had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I’m delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.
Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.
Pretty big news, eh?