updated 2002-11-19. Please tell me about future events.
David also maintains related files:
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." -- Lewis Carroll, mathematician and writer (1832-1898) http://www.lewiscarroll.org/carroll.html
"Without a clear vision of the future we flounder in the present." -- Sally Ride, America's first woman in space.
constantly-updated web sites that discuss the future
[FIXME: more news at #timelines ]
paradox in the time line:
nanotech1 devices (humans, plants) exist *before* the technology to build
them was developed.
Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'.
I see things that never were and say 'why not?'
is attributed to many people, including
You see things; and you say Why?
But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
--
George Bernard Shaw 1921
http://www.bartleby.com/66/59/53759.html
expect actual published exact_quote reference
___ a1997 1943 "Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will will the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads." -- Henry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943, quoted in _The Old Farmer's 1997 Almanac_ p. 117
1620 1620 1620 "The first English-language newspaper ... was published in 1620 in Amsterdam, Holland." -- Knight-Ridder/Tribune 1995 Aug. 8
1880 1880 1996 "The average life expectancy of someone in a developed country has expanded from 47 years to 76 years in just over a century. " -- "Patterns of Aging." article in July 5 issue of _Science_
?? ?? 1894 "The horseless carriage will never catch on." -- Wilbur Wright. [Did the inventor of the heavier-than-air powered airplane really say that ?] http://www.countdowntokittyhawk.org/
1956 ??b1980 1956 "Almost 2 million [transistors] have been sold already in the first quarter of 1956. ... Between 10 and 11 million are expected to be sold by transistor manufacturers in 1956, according to industry experts. ... the government's antitrust suit resulting in many AT&T patents being made royalty free. The price of transistors today extends from $0.50 for low-quality units in lots of hundred thousands (for toy use only), through $5 for computer units, and to $50 for new experimental units. ... a radio manufacturer is considering replacing a tube with a transistor on the basis of cost alone." -- _Electronic Design_, July 1, 1956, p. 38.
1995 ? 1993 "Areal densities for magnetic storage, now in the vicinity of 0.1 GByte/in^2, are projected to be at 1 GByte/in^2 by 1995."[Shandle, "Mass Storage looks for new Solutions", _Electronic Design_, Sept. 16, 1993.]
1995 a1994 1994 "Apple's ... new computers, due sometime next year, will employ the PCI bus and Open Firmware standards" -- Paul Dreyfus, editor, _Apple Directions_ Aug. 1994.
1995 1995 1995 "I work in the telephony business ... 75% of the world's population has never made a single telephone call! " -- John Combs, 72376.3553@compuserve.com
1996 1995 1994 "In January 1994, _Network Computing_ magazine predicted that by 1996, over 50% of businesses would be storing their documents in digital form, as compared to 15% in 1993. As of 1995, however, that prediction was already exceeded -- with over 50% of large and medium organizations (500 to 5 000 + employees) using automated resume tracking systems." -- "Byte-able Resumes" article by Rebecca M. Smith, in 1996 July _Computer Bits_
1997Jan a1996 ? "I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the Hal plant in Urbana, Ill., on January 12, 1997" -- the book version of _2001: A Space Odyssey_ by Arthur C. Clarke
"Cyberfest 97 at HAL's birthplace, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will take place March 10-15, 1997. The decision to move the event to a period when milder weather would be more likely to prevail has proved wise. There are several inches of snow on the ground, and the temperatures and wind chills are abominable."
1997 a1995 April 1996 "We expect to see PCs enabled with the Accelerated Graphics Port appearing in early 1997, with volume production fueling the holiday '97 buying season." -- Intel
b1997 1997 1994 Tim Brewer: "I predict that in the next couple of years there will be a movie on angels, interviewing people who believed they met angels, ..." - 1994 Thu. Sept. 9. (_The Preacher's Wife_ and _Michael_, movies on angels released in 1997)
1997 ? 1994 "32-bit PowerPC ... The MPC505 RISC microcontroller ...volume pricing is estimated at $25 (100,000) in 1997." - EDN November 23, 1994, p. 122.
1997 aJune1996 June1996 "Current versions of the Pentium pro ... are much too expensive ... Intel plans to offer a more affordable, scaled-down incarnation [of the Pentium Pro] by the beginning of 1997. Dubbed the Klamath ... will be manufactured via a 0.28-micron process and will run at speeds approaching 266 MHz. The subsequent Deschutes chip ... will be manufactured via a 0.25-micron process, and will reach speeds of 300 to 333 MHz." -- "Penny-Pinching Pentium Pros" by Cade Metz, in _PC Magazine_ June 11, 1996.
1997 a1995 1995 "John East, president and CEO of Actel, .... plans to market 8K-gate, sea-of-gates FPGAs for $20 in 1997."-- Steven Leibson, "Are you ready" editorial in _EDN_ 1995 June 8
1998 a1995 1995 "SSA (serial storage architecture), FC-AL (Fibre Channel arbitrated loop) ... The serial interfaces will probably find such niche uses in the second half of 1996. ... Expect the applicability of SSA and FC-AL to blossom in 1998." -- _EDN_, 1995 Oct. 12, p. 74, "New Peripheral Interfaces" article by Maury Wright.
1999-03 ? 1998-03 "You're going to see cameras and videophones ubiquitous within a year." -- Don Whiteside, general manager of the Digital Imaging and Video Division of Intel in Chandler AZ; quoted in _Advanced Imaging_ magazine 1998 March.
1998-09-09 ? 1998 "RoboTour '98 visits the Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG). " -- http://www.legomindstorms.com/
1998 a1995 1995 "a new study by BIS Strategic Decisions ... 1.800.874.9980 ... by 1998, an estimated 5 957 000 notebooks/subnotebooks will ship, and they *all* will have a fast IR port (4 000 Kbps to 10 000 Kbps)." -- _Wireless Design and Development_ 1995 June, p. 34
b1998-12-25 ? 1997-12-11 "Pioneer 10... will be beyond the reach of even the most sensitive antenna by Christmas next year." "Little Pioneer 10 Finally To Lose Touch With Earth" article by Paul Recer http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci12-12.htm
1999 ? ? "In East London ... the Millennium Dome ... Measuring 164 feet in height, 350 yards in diameter, and covering the 20 acres now cluttered with diggers and cranes, the dome will be the largest in the world when it is completed in late 1998." -- http://www.millennium.greenwich2000.com/ | http://www.longitude0.co.uk/dome-zone/welcome.htm | http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&text=yes&kl=XX&q=%22Millennium+Dome%22&act=search | http://search.excite.com/search.gw?search=%22Millennium+Dome%22 | "1999 May: Compelte installation of central area ... July: Tickets go on sale to the public ... December: New Year's Eve Opening ceremony" http://www.millennium.greenwich2000.com/experience/milestones/year1999.htm
1999 a1996 1995 "Periodontal disease, most commonly known to the average person as gum disease... Richard Evans, an associate professor of microbiology with the Periodontal Disease Research Center at the School of Dental Medicine at the State University of New York, Buffalo, ... According to Evans, periodontal disease is the result of the collection of bacterial diseases in the oral cavity which eventually destroys the teeth ... Evans hopes to develop a vaccine to immunize people against the disease, allowing them to retain their teeth later in life. ... "We can already protect the animals against the disease," Evans said. He believes that if his levels of funding are adequate, a vaccine for humans will be ready within three to five years." -- "Beyond Flossing" article on p. W-2 of _Scientific Computing and Automation_ May 1995.
1999 Dec 24 ??? 1995 Aug "I am going to retire into obscurity on Dec. 24, 1999. I advise you to do the same. One week later, all programmers will have the same respect paid to them that is now reserved for lawyers, politicians, and TV evangelists. On Jan. 1, 2000, computer programs everywhere will cease to work properly because of the dreaded 6-digit date format. It isn't going to be a pretty sight. ... Some of it is my fault. I was one of those Cobol programmers in the 1960s who was sure that none of those programs and databases would last for 30-odd years. Hah!" -- Al Stevens, _Dr. Dobb's Journal_, Aug. 1995, article "Grumpy Old Programmers". http://www.ddj.com/
2000 2000 2000 ``Wireless technologies are proliferating so rapidly that astronomers fear thay will soon be enveloped in a radio ``fog'' that will cut them off from the universe.'' -- Dawn Stover, in article ``The Great Big Telescope'', _Popular Science_ 2000-01 p. 65 possibly paraphrasing National Radio Quiet Zone Frequency Coordinator Wesley A. Sizemore.
b2000 a1997 1997 "Miami paralysis researchers ... The Miami Project has raised $75 million since 1985 for spinal cord research and a facility that should be completed by 2000." -- 1997
2000-01 1998-05 According to the current Assembly Sequence (revision D), an international crew of three will begin living aboard the International Space Station in Jan 2000 /* was July 1999 */, arriving on Soyuz flight 2R. | The International Space Station schedule http://station.nasa.gov/station/assembly/flights/chron.html
2000 a1996 1996 "According to research done by The Freedonia Group Inc. <tfgi@ix.netcom.com>,... overall battery sales will increase 7.8% annually to over $17 billion by the year 2000."
b2000 a1994 1985 "by the end of the century, molecular engineers may be capable of specifying quite new types of functional proteins"-- _Evolution: A Theory in Crisis_, (c) 1985 by Michael Denton. p.324.
b2000 a1994 1994 "The Goal of Intel's MLC program is to develop gigabit flash technology by the end of the decade while reducing flash media cost to 50 cents per megabyte." -- _SolutionsOEM: A publication of Intel Corp_, Autumn 1994.
b2000 a1995 1995 "At the end of this decade and early into the next century, most portable systems will operate at around 1 V, with the energy supplied by a single battery or some solar cells." -- Dr. Pallab Chatterjee, director of research and development/technology at Texas Instruments, in short article, p. 52, _Electronic Design_ magazine, Jan. 9, 1995.
b2000 ? 1994 "Current optical [disk drive] products use lasers that emit light in the near-infrared range (780 to 830 nm wavelength). The next generation of optical drives (1995 to 1996) will use visible lasers that emit in the 670 to 690 nm (red) range. Perhaps five years away are lasers that emit in the blue region (430 nm). Optical drives with such lasers will have twice as much storage capacity (about 5 GB on a 5.25 inch disk) as those with red lasers." -- _IEEE Spectrum_, Oct. 1994, "A long road to overnight success" article by Praveen Asthana, IBM Corp.
2000 a1997 Aug 1997 "And you might expect print quality [from digital cameras and ink jet printer] to catch up to traditional film in two to three years for consumer snapshots (meaning 4-by-6 prints)." -- Bill Howard, in 1997 Aug. _PC Magazine_ p. 95.
2000-04-23 ? 1998 "ICRA 2000 (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) will be held in San Francisco, California from April 24-28, 2000." -- http://robotics.stanford.edu/ICRA2000/ | http://queue.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/icra00/
2000 a1998 1998 "In the first half of 2000, AMD plans to release its copper-based K7 processor, which should reach 1 GHz and beyond." -- _PC Week_ 1998 July 27 p. 37.
2000 a1998 1998 "Merced, due to ship in 2000, is the first processor to implement Intel's IA-64 architecture and its Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (Epic) technology." -- EE Times 1998-09-28 http://www.eetimes.com/news/98/1029news/internal.html
a2000 ? 1985 "despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine -- that is, one single functional protein molecule -- would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century." -- p.329, _Evolution: A Theory in Crisis_, (c) 1985 by Michael Denton.
2001 ? 1994 "a state-of-the-art facility for manufacturing ICs in high volume typically costs several hundred million dollars. .... If this trend is sustained, facility costs will exceed the total annual revenue of any of today's four leading U.S. semiconductor companies by the turn of the century." - Gary S. May, Georgia Institute of Technology, "Manufacturing ICs the neural way", _IEEE Spectrum_ 1994.
b2001 a1996 Feb 1996 "Borganism arose on late 20th century Earth as a response to the widely-held perception that human individuality had become impractical and unnecessary. Advocates of borganism ("Borganists") initially came from the ranks of individual humans dissatisfied with their low-bandwidth connections to other humans. " -- T0Morrow@aol.com, on transhuman@logrus.org, as a humorous essay.
2001 ??? 1997 "a 2001 lander/rover mission " http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov/MarsNews/Missions/SDTReport.html
2001 a1998 1999-10 "DuPont Co. is investing $100 million to build a new Lycra plant in Brazil ... similar to those already operating in Waynesboro, Va; Singapore, Singapore; and Maydown, Northern Ireland. Construction on the plant in Paulinia will begin next month with operation expected by late 2001" -- _Tulsa World_ 1999-10-16 page E-1.
2001 ? 1996 "It is our hope to unveil the first copy of the LARGE CELL KING JAMES BIBLE in five years in 2001. If funding allows ,it is our hope to make this large cell version available to the blind who need this format at no cost." -- http://members.tripod.com/~braille/services.html
2002 ? 1995 "Student Loans, Electronic Payment Of: The federal government has not allowed repayment of student loans by EFT transaction since June 2002, when members of the Caltech graduating class, as part of their senior prank, penetrated the Student Loan Guarantee Agency's computer system and marked every outstanding student load as paid in full."[Bruce Bethke, in his book (fictional humor) _Head Crash_ (1995).]
2002 a1998 1998 "Teledesic is scheduled to go into operation in 2002 with a network of 288 satellites in low-Earth orbit providing high-speed data connections to anywhere in the world." -- http://www.teledesic.com/overview/reuters4-14.html
2002 a1999 1998?? "architects ... have pondered the question, "How high can we go ?" The pinnacle of this age-old ambition was ... architect Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a "mile-high" [1 600 m] building in 1956, complete with nuclear-powered elevators. It was, of course, never actualized. ... In 2002, ... the tallest building ever to be erected will be completed. Construction of the Shanghai World Financial Center in Shanghai, China, began in August of 1997 after ... design ... by superstructure specialists Kohn Pederson Fox Associates (KPF) ... When completed, the structure will rise to ... 1 509 feet [560 m], making it the world's tallest building in 3 out of 4 building-height categories set by The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. ... 95 floors ... 50 m circle in the upper region ..." -- ???
2002 a1999 1996 MORO, the Moon ORbiting Observatory http://www.estec.esa.nl/spdwww/future/html/moro.htm very preliminary plans to launch in 2002 or 2003.
2002? ? 2000
... the Integrated Starter-Generator (ISG) ... is slated for use in a ``low-to-medium'' level European sedan in the 2003 model year.
... Whereas today's typical vehicle offers a total power budget of 1.2 to 1.7 KW, ISG-based systems would provide about 12 KW.
...
... Delphi and Bosch, offer alternative versions of Siemens' system. In general, such systems typically replace a vehicle's starter, alternator, and flywheel with a rotor and stator. ...
... Kregg Wiggins, ...
Siemens' engineers also believe that ISG, and products like it, could help bring about the transition to 42 V systems...
--
Starter-generator may power
article by Charles J. Murray in
_Electronic Engineering Times_
http://www.eet.com/
2002-04-17
by-wire
systems
2003 a2002 2002-06 ``ESA Develops A Smarter Way To Travel Through Space: Solar-electric propulsion can open the door to a whole new era of space exploration'' article from Paris (ESA) Jun 14, 2002'' ``early in 2003, SMART-1 will blast off from Kourou, French Guiana. Once in space, this small craft will use an ion engine to reach the Moon.'' http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-02c.html more details: SMART - 'Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology'. http://sci.esa.int/smart/
2003 ??? 2003 "an exact flying reproduction of the Wright Flyer... at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wright Flyer will fly again at exactly 10:35 am on December 17, 2003, commemorating 100 years of powered flight." http://www.countdowntokittyhawk.org/
2003 ? 1995 "the Pluto Fast Fly-by Mission... It is a joint Russia-US and possibly German mission. It'll launch in 2003, mass about 105 kilograms wet and with probe, and do closest approach in April and October of 2012." -- Ben Toyoshima, 76022.426@compuserve.com(Date: Fri, Jun 23, 1995)
2003 ? 1998 "Bell Labs researcher Lov K. Grover ... forcast ... a quantum computer [will] be built [in] five years." -- "Quantum Method Under Development", article by John Fulwider in _PC Today_ http://www.pctoday.com/editorial.html 1998 Feb. p. 96
b2003 a1995 1995 "Rich Templeton, senior VP of Texas Instruments' Semiconductor Group, committed to providing us with a $1.50 400-MIPS DSP uP by 2002. It will run on 40 mA." -- Steven Leibson, "Are you ready" editorial in _EDN_ 1995June8.
2004 a1998 ??? "Saturn's moon Titan -- which is to be visited by a joint U.S.-European probe in 2004."-- ???
2004 a1997 1996 "While today's ICs typically contain 5 million transistors with line widths between 0.35 and 0.5 um, the semiconductor industry predicts that by the year 2004, silicon foundries will be able to create ICs containing more than 100 million transistors, built with structures less than 0.15 um wide." -- "DAC issues: co-design of hardware, software, and formal specification" article by Linda Geppert in _the institute_ 1996 Aug.
2004 ??? ??? Starfire http://www.sun.com/tech/projects/starfire/ is a film showing how your office may look and work in the year 2004 using advanced user interface technologies [offline ?]
2004 a2002 2002-08-19
``Fuel cells and battery enhancements, which will let notebooks run three to 10 times longer without a recharge, will begin to appear by late 2004.
... notebooks have to more acutely adapt to contradictory demands in the marketplace. Customers want large screens, fast processors and beefy hard drives -- three components that can require substantial amounts of electricity.
At the same time, they want long battery life, a notebook that measures less than an inch thick and a carrying weight less than four pounds -- features that aren't easy to achieve in a high-voltage lap warmer.
This leaves engineers two choices. "Either you can supply more power into the platform or take more power out of it," said Mike Rocke [of] Intel ...
... fuel cells ... supercapacitors ... solar cells ... low-power screens ... new types of heat-dissipation techniques. ...
... the next great leap will come through notebooks with integrated cards that can switch between Wi-Fi and cellular. ...
... IBM has licensed the MetaPad, a full-fledged computer the size and shape of a Palm handheld, to Antelope Technologies, which will come out with a handheld computer later this year. OQO says it will come up with a similar device for around $1,000 in the second half of this year.
"There are four key technologies for the future of the notebooks. They are tiny disk drives, high-resolution small screens, dual mode wireless technology and Crusoe processors," said Ditzel, whose company Transmeta makes the Crusoe chip. Both the MetaPad and the OQO device use a Crusoe, he added.
Intel also makes energy-efficient processors and will introduce a new family, code-named Banias, early next year.
...
--
``Notebook overhaul on the horizon''
article by Michael Kanellos 2002-08-19
ZDNet News
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-951449.html
[FIXME: low-power VLSI]
more details:
``Laptop fuel cell gets air clearance''
article by Michael Kanellos 2002-10-04
ZDNet News
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-960823.html
2005 ?? 2000-01 ``Space Interferometry Mission launch: 2005. SIM will use two telescopes, 10 meters apart, to determine the positions of stars several hundred times as accurately as ever before. SIM will also pioneer a technique called ``star nulling'' ...'' -- _Popular Science_ 2000-01 p. 52
2005 a1998 1996 "By 2005 it is expected that the Transrapid, a magnetic elevated train (Magnetbahn), will cover the 280 Km distance between Berlin and Hamburg in an hour." -- _Deutsch Heute_ by Moeller, et al, (c) 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 173
2005 a1999 1997-12 "After 4 years as the secretary of the Air Force, Sheila E. Widnall ... is resuming her academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... her views as to where the Air Force is heading in the coming years. ... Widnall: ... The F-22 will not arrive until 2005 ... ... PS: ... The Air Force is reportedly developing a military space plane. ... Widnall: It's a little early to talk very specifically about that. It... involves thinking out to 2025. But there is no firm program. On the other hand, NASA is looking at future reusable launch vehicles for access to space. And I believe that there may be requirements in common. PS: So will the Air Force be the Space Force in 2025 ? Widnall: We don't know about that kind of time scale. We know where we'll be in 2015. In 2015, we'll be just bringing the Joint Strike Fighter into being. ... The military space plane is beyond that. ... Widnall: ... We're committed to making GPS the world standard for navigation. ... PS: Can GPS be used against the United States militarily ? Widnall: In its current form, it could. ... PS: With the creation of the 609th Information Warfare Squadron, the Air Force has taken the lead in combating attacks on military computer systems. ... Widnall: ... Our computers are under attack by hackers -- although I notice probes go down around college finals so I think a lot of it is what I would put in the category of "hack". But on the other hand, there are some serious efforts to gain information from the Air Force." -- _Popular Science_ 1997-12 "Destination: Space" article
"2005, the end of Hubble's planned lifespan" -- http://detnews.com/1997/discover/9702/08/02030032.htm
a2005 a1997 1996 "Electrical strip heaters that hold [the Hubble Space Telescope] its precise optical figure (by keeping temperatures at 30.4°C) are not guaranteed beyond 2005." -- "Beyond Hubble" article by Dave Dooling in _the institute_ 1996 June
2005 a1998 1997 "2005 upload single neurons (perhaps grown in culture)" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2005 ??? 1996 "sample return mission would be carried out in 2005" -- http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/MSR/cover.html
2005 ? 1995 "Time estimates vary on when first-generation assemblers will be constructed. Optimists say 10 years, Drexler said 30-40 years 7 years ago. My gut feel is that finding and fetching the asteroid will take longer than generating the technology." -- Jerome D. Rosen <rosen@pogo.den.mmc.com> (Date: 30 Mar 1995)(Organization: Martin Marietta Astronautics)(Newsgroups: sci.nanotech)
May 1, 2006 1996 "why don't we get together on the moon, say at the center of Copernicus at 0001 hours UTC, May first, 2006 AD, to have a reunion? Assuming of course that we get through the singularity with our individual consciousnesses intact." -- Dan Clemmensen via transhuman@umich.edu (Date: Sun, 5 May 1996). http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Fun/holidays.html
2006 a1996 1996 "it now seems, the evolution in computer chips will hit physical and economic limits in about ten years." -- David Galileo <MAP@snowline.net> via transhuman@umich.edu [Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996]
2006 a2003 2003 all television broadcasters are scheduled to cut over to High Definition Television (HDTV), and stop all NTSC broadcasts in 2006. -- machine_vision.html#hdtv
2006 [FIXME:] ``Within five years, we believe, the core of the world's communications networks will be based on optical technology with IP or ATM as the dominant protocol. The edge or "access space" will be based on silicon technology with ATM as the dominant protocol.'' -- written 2001 (?) http://www.transwitch.com/
2006 ? 2000
International Truck and Engine Corp ... is ... eliminating the camshafts from its diesel engines and replacing them with electronic-valve timing systems.
... in the 2007 model year ...
... every major auto and truck maker in the world is now said to be considering a switch to electronically controlled valve timing. Electronic timing ... advantages ... better performance ... lower emissions. ... It could also help with fuel economy...
... Patrick Charbonneau, vice president of engineering for International's engine and foundry division. ...
... on-site testing ... in such places as Alaska, Death Valley, and Bimidji, Minn., for temperature extremes. Engineers say they need two summers and two winters of testing to be satisfied that they've gotten all the bugs out.
...
... Eddie Sturman, inventor of the digital electrohydraulic valve that is the key to the technology. ...
The electrohydraulic valve ... Originally created for the Apollo space program ... developed by Sturman Industries ... is about six times faster than conventional hydraulic valve. ...
International is using the electrohydraulic valve to control movement of its engines' valves and fuel injectors. Control for both systems is currently provided by a Siemens electronic module containing two Infineon 167 microprocessors... at 24 MHz...
... the vast majority of the 3,000-plus patents on file for camless engine technology have used electromagnetic actuation techniques.
... engineers say that the electrohydraulic system offers better control and higher actuation forces than electromagnetic technology. ...
--
Electronic controls to replace camshafts in diesels
article by Charles J. Murray in
_Electronic Engineering Times_
http://www.eet.com/
2002-04-17
2007 ?? 2000-01 ``Next-Generation Space Telescope launch: 2007. With a primary mirror at least twice as wide as the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror, this NASA infrared space telescope ... NGST ...'' -- _Popular Science_ 2000-01 p. 52
b2007 ? 1996 "I now believe that the singularity will be reached prior to any major human expansion into space, and perhaps within ten years. ... Simple extrapolation of VR headsets, coupled with the usual increases in computational speed, communications bandwidth, and storage capacity, plus some new software, is all we need to achieve an initial collaborative mentation. Once this entity is "born" it will very rapidly increase its own capacities by improving the software, moving beyond our abilities to extrapolate in a matter of hours." -- Dan Clemmensen <dgc@shirenet.com> Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996
2007 ??? 2004 Herschel Space Telescope http://vectorsite.net/v2004m05.html#m2
[FIXME: bignums $; astro # telescopes ]... will be the biggest space telescope ever built when it is launched in 2007. ...
Herschel will be put into space using an Ariane 5 booster along with the "Planck" cosmic microwave background radiation mapping spacecraft, with the dual mission costing 1.3 billion Euros ($1.6 billion USD). The two spacecraft will be placed at the Sun-Earth L2 libration point, 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) beyond the Earth's orbit on the axis running from the Sun through the Earth. At the L2 point, the spacecraft can be more easily kept pointed away from the Sun, simplifying cooling and protecting sensitive detectors, and the Earth won't get in the way of observations. The two spacecraft will perform a mutual "halo orbit" around the L2 point."
... will operate for 3.5 years. ...
Herschel will not keep the record as the biggest space telescope for long. NASA is planning to launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as soon as 2010. ...
2008 a1997 Feb1997 "2008, when CERN finishes building the 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider." -- Ed Bishop "bishope at ms.com" in Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity
2009 ??? 1999
I feel there should be
a commemorative exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Pacioli/Leonardo book,
coming up in 2009.
...
I am working towards organizing such an exhibition.
--
George W. Hart 1999
http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/leonardo-project.html
2009 ??? 1998 "2009 Reference Mission" (a design to send humans to Mars in 2009, which has the worst launch window in the 15-year Earth-Mars cycle) -- http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov/MarsNews/Missions/human_missions/Human_Mission_Table.html
b2010 a1996 1996 "with the power that's coming down the pike, by the year 2005 (and certainly by 2010), state-of-the-art virtual reality will be like going into the Holodeck on "Start Trek". It will be everything but Smellivision -- and if there's enough demand, you'll probably get that, too." -- Clifford Meth, "Invisible Computing" article in _Electronic Design_ 1996 Jan 8.
2010 a1996 1996 "10 to 20 percent of all power today is used by computers. By 2010, it could reach 60 percent." -- "Disasters in the Making" article by Ray Alderman in _OEM Magazine_ 1996 Oct.
2011 a2008 2008 "solar flares ... are expected to cut the GPS signal for several hours in the years 2011-2012." http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept06/solar.flares.gps.TO.html
2011 ?? 2000-01 ``Terrestrial Planet Finder launch: 2011. A fleet of five interferometers, each with four 8 meter telescopes modeled after the NGST , ... TPF will detect planets as small as Earth'' -- _Popular Science_ 2000-01 p. 52
2012 Terence McKenna: Mind Contagions "I cannot see beyond the human/machine global fusion of 2012. Asking what lies beyond that is like asking someone in the 13th century to accurately envision the societies and technologies of the late 20th century. It simply cannot be done, we are lacking essential facts that will arrive each in their own good time as we move toward the Singularity." http://disinfo.com/pages/article/id1515/pg5/
CMOS ... may run out of gas by 2012 ... And whatever is to replace CMOS must be invented now, because it will take at least a decade to develop into a commercial technology, speakers said. ...
Dennis Buss, vice president of silicon technology development at Texas Instruments Inc. ...
Buss said CMOS scaling will continue to offer performance, density and cost advantages for the next decade, but that CMOS will run out of steam by 2012 when gate lengths are at 10 nanometers, or 0.01 microns. ...
But whatever technology is to take the place of the venerable MOSFET -- be it molecular structures, carbon nanotubes, MEMS, or other next-generation technologies -- must be invented now and developed full-bore over the next decade in order to be ready in time, Buss said.
...
Stanford University professor Krishna Saraswat said ... he said, pointing to optical or wireless interconnects as possible long-term solutions.
...
Saraswat pointed to two research efforts that could replace CMOS. Benzene-based molecular devices have been developed at Lucent Technologies that show excellent properties, though he noted that the results are preliminary and have not been duplicated elsewhere. And carbon nanotubes that use free space as the gate have been the subject of promising research at the University of California at Berkeley.
[vlsi]
2012 ``Bell Tolls For CMOS, With Successor Nowhere In Sight'' article by David Lammers May 16, 2002 _EE Times_ http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/OEG20020516S0024
2012 Dec 21 a1996 1996 "[the Singularity] will happen at December 21 2012 - both the Maya prophecies, Terence McKenna and the role playing game Shadowrun agrees on it! :-)" -- Anders Sandberg < nv91-asa at nada.kth.se > via the Transhuman Mailing List (Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996).
2012 ? 2003 "2012 ... the end of the Mayan calendar. Some people think that the universe will be destroyed on December 21, 2012." -- Ellie Crystal http://www.crystalinks.com/11.11.html
2012 ? ? http://2013.com/
2013 a1997 1997 "Houston plans to phase out all billboards by 2013." -- Martin S. Johncox in article "Can't see city for the signs ? Council may clear up view. Proposed ordinance would place cap on billboards, ban pole-mounted signs" article in _The Idaho Statesman_ 1997 fri Aug 8 p. A1.
2013 ? 1993
Astronomy 20-year Prediction (from 1993)
Physics News 135, July 1, 1993:
Expected developments and discoveries in astronomy over the next twenty years
include the return of humans to the Moon, a consensus on a value for the
Hubble Constant, the launch of an 8-meter orbiting optical telescope, rock
samples returned from Mars, a mission to Pluto, the observation and study
of mature planetary systems around nearby stars, and the imaging of the surfaces
of other stars. These are some of the predictions offered by various scientists
in the 20th anniversary issue of Astronomy Magazine. Many of those asked
were less certain about establishing the nature of dark matter or unequivocally
demonstrating the existence of black holes.
--
Breakthrough!
2014 a1995 1994 "Intel chairman Gordon Moore, who, [around 1974 ?], predicted the growth of chip densities in what's known as Moore's Law, says ... "Flash memory will be a bigger business than DRAM, over time. ... DRAM requires a large capacitor ... Flash memory can be scaled to any size ... as small as ... 0.1 micron, although it will probably take [until 2014] to get there." ..." -- Jan. 11, 1994 _PC Magazine_ "Trends" section p. 31.
b2015 ? 1995 "Despite its excellencies, I expect the WIMP interface to be a historical relic in a generation. Pointing will still be the way to express nouns as we command our machines; speech is surely the right way to express verbs." -- p. 264 _The Mythical Man-Month: 20th Anniversary Edition_ (1995) by Frederick Brooks. [Windows Icons Menus Pointing]
2015 a1998 1997 "2015 upload simple neural circuits (about 10 neurons)" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2015 a1997 1998 "...it's clear that nanotechnology is starting to move into the Moore's Law-like expectation pattern: technical people are beginning to agree that it's only a matter of time. And by using Moore's Law itself, you can even project a credible date of arrival, around 2015." - Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute, www.foresight.org 1998 Jan
2015 ************************* Experts: Nanomedicine vital to cancer cure UPI Oct.. 9, 2003 ************************* The new science of nanomedicine is advancing faster than even experts had expected and many predict the technology will play a vital role in achieving the federal government's stated goal of eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015. News tip: Walter Purvis... http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=2497&m=7529
2020 ?? 1999 "we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power." -- _The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence_ book by Ray Kurzwell http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0670882178/donlancastersgurA/002-9202282-0684630
2020 ?? 2000 "The Look of Science and Technology in 20 Years" article by K. J. Kearney, M. Kearney, R. N. Seitz, published 2000-06-02 http://www.megafoundation.org/UltraHIQ/HIQNews/6-2-2000_from_Mike.html
2020 ?? 2003 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/onthefuture/ [FIXME: summarize here ]
2022 a2002 2002 ``In 20 years there will be radio stations playing classic rap.'' -- unknown; quoted in 2002 ?
2025 a1998 1997 "2025 complex circuits; most of a worm ganglion (~400 neurons)" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
b2032 a1998 1997-10 " the chief of the NASA research program Mike Kaplan stated that "...we will discover extraterrestrial life in the next 25 years". " -- "Alpha Centauri A Candidate for Terrestrial Planets And Intelligent Life" 1997-10 http://monet.physik.unibas.ch/~schatzer/Alpha-Centauri.html
2035 a1998 1997 "2035 worm/simple insect insect brain (~5000 neurons)" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2038 a2037 1999 http://2038.org/ the year when the (32 bit signed int) rolls over in standard Unix timekeeping.
2038 a1998 1998 "Twenty thirty-eight. That is the Year that Medicine Conquered Cancer." -- "Don't worry, Ensign, it's only Cancer." short story by by Paul Honsinger (c) 1998 http://ktf.org/dsensign.htm
2040 ? 1998 ``The original date and time utilities introduced with the first Macintosh 128K computer in 1984, used a long word to store seconds starting at January 1, 1904. This approach allows the correct representation of dates up to 6:28:15am on February 6, 2040.'' ``Macs Ahead of Their Time?'' article NZ InfoTech Weekly March 23 1998 http://www.homeroom.net/_board/0000000d.htm
2046 a2001 1996 "Estimates for the number of persons [on Earth] on waiting lists for telephone service exceed 250 million with the average waiting time in excess of 12 months. Fixed wireless loop holds the promise of making it faster, easier and cheaper to meet this pent-up demand. Maybe 50 years from now, everyone will have access to a telephone" -- Mark Rafter, director of technology for the Unisys Communications, "CDMA Fixed Wireless Loop: A Technical Overview" article in _Wireless Design & Development_ 1996 Jan. [DAV: this seems overly conservative.]
2048 a2001 1998
>To: christlib@swcp.com >Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 00:14:09 -0400 >Subject: Re: Christlib: What is defense? >From: rrandall6@juno.com (Randall R Randall) >Reply-To: christlib@swcp.com ... >On Fri, 3 Jul 1998 19:35:47 -0700 (PDT) Hardrock Llewynyth ... >>On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, Randall R Randall wrote: >> ... >>we have the government we do, not because of any organized effort, any >>illuminatus conspiracy of those in charge or behind the scenes; but >>because that is the goverbnment the people wanted. or did not not want >>enough to make the effort to resist. > >Yes, I would say that one of the factors >involved is that technology is increasing >peoples' effective choice numbers faster >than government is reducing them, so >they tolerate levels of government that >haven't been, before. > >>the majority of people are always more than willing to hand control of >>their lives over to anyone who promises them happiness with a minimum of >>effort. those who truly wish to take control of their own lives are >>always in the minority. though they can sometimes inspire teh masses to >>their way of thinking, the masses inevitably take the path of least >>resistance in time. > >Yes, but technology is inexorably making >it easier to ignore the government than to >be upset about it. > >>look at the internet. once a great medium for free exchange, under no >>governmental circumspection, existing primarily for the open movement of >>ideas and information between mostly intelligent people. now it is all >>but dead compared to what it was. it is more and more being overtaken >by >>commercialization, regulation, and "disneyfication". > >I strongly disagree. The internet is far more >than it ever was before, and the future is >looking better and better... > >>the web, once a replacement fof gopher as a method of linking >information >>and research facilities, is now full of commercial advertisements, >>self-aggrandizement, and mind candy. real information is well hidden. >>commercial advertisement is becoming a major part of the entire net, >along >>with all the mindless pap that inevitably follows. > >But there is more information, and it is >easier to get to, than at any time in the >past, on the net or off it. > ... >I think that governments will be effectively gone >forever within 50 years. Period. ... >wolfkin@flatoday.infi.net | ICQ: 3043097 >E-Gold Acct: 100678 @ www.e-gold.com >On a visible but distant shore a new image of man, >The shape of his own future, now in his own hands. > | Johnny Clegg
2050 a1998 1997 "2050 mouse uploads" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
b2051 ? 1995 "the Shimuzu Corporation (you may see their ads occasionally in Final Frontier magazine.) This corporation has very ambitious goals to put its profits in other areas to finance Japan's rise to become one of the major space powers. They even plan to build a moonbase by the end of the first half of the 21st century!" -- Bill G. Hart, <75000.2565@computeserve.com> (Section: General Topics)(Forum: Space Exploration)(Date: Fri, Jun 9, 1995)
2053 a1998 1998 "China launches Xingyang Sujia, the first manned interplanetary exploration craft. Its destination: Mars." -- http://www.adeptsys.com/chrysalis/Pages/info/history.html
2060 a1998 1997 "2060 dog/cat uploads" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2070 a1998 1997 "2070 monkey uploads" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2080 a1998 1997 "2080 chimpanzee" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
2084 a1996 Feb 1996 "Borganism has thus come to represent one side of the ideological, economic, and occasionally military struggle that currently splits our galaxy. (Extropianism, which advocates using advanced technology to defend individual liberty, represents the other.)" -- T0Morrow@aol.com, on transhuman@logrus.org, as a humorous essay.
b2095 a1996 1995 "In a hundred years ... fullerenes and high-T superconductors, which by then will have long since become indispensable." -- bds@ipp-garching.mpg.de (Bruce Scott TOK )(Date: 4 Oct 1995)(Newsgroups: sci.engr,sci.physics)(Organization: Rechenzentrum der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Garching)(Max-Planck-Institut fuer Plasmaphysik)
2100 ??? 2000-01 ``Just as some people born in 1899 live to see 2000, some people alive today will live to see 2100. But no one really knows whether they'll number in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions.'' -- Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, researcher in human aging. _Popular Science_ 2000-01 p. 55
2100 a1998 1997 "2100 full human mind uploading" -- Joseph Strout http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/
b2101 ? 1980 "In [Forward, 1980] ... compressing a 15-billion-ton asteroid into a volume of an atomic nucleus (!), spinning it, and then ... Dr. Forward, evidently an optimist of the first rank, thinks we will be able to do this before the end of the twenty-first century." -- p. 277 of Paul Nahin's book _Time Machines_
a2100 ? 2005 "Although ... the nuclear cores were successfully ejected into high orbits, these orbits still decay. If left untouched, the highly radioactive cores will return to the Earth's atmosphere after several hundred years." -- from the 2008 version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORSAT , apparently paraphrasing a 2005 report.
2259 a1996 1992 ? "the dawn of the 3rd age of Mankind. ... 2259" -- Babylon 5 television series.
2271 ? ? "2271: The USS Enterprise is rushed out of space dock to investigate the V'Ger incident."
2109 a1998 1998 "the first Noetic Conference, moon base Olympus, 10.9.2109" http://www.adeptsys.com/chrysalis/Pages/orders/noetics.html
2380 a2002 1999 ``AD 2380: After a painstaking ten-year search, from the Tibetan highlands to the Brazilian rainforests, it's official -- there are no more human beings. ... I don't see how you can declare any entity 'human' when their brain is a gelatin lattice, and every cell of their body contains extensive extra strands of industrial-strength DNA. Not only is humanity extinct but, strictly speaking, pretty much everyone alive today should be classified as a unique, post-natural, one-of-a-kind species. '' -- ``Homo sapiens declared extinct'' article by Bruce Sterling, Nature, November 11, 1999 http://prion.bchs.uh.edu/~zzhang/1/homo_sapiens/
From Intel's "Moore's Law" page:
1. Moore's Law is Speeding Up
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted transistor density on microprocessors would double every two years [while the price halves]. This prediction, so far, has proven amazingly accurate[...]
Some say 18 months instead of two years. But according to Scientific American's 150th anniversary issue (Sept.95), this is accelerating (p.63):
"the rate of improvement in microprocessor technology has risen from 35 percent a year only a decade ago to its current high of approximately 55 percent a year, or almost 4 percent each month. Processors are now three times faster than had been predicted in the early 1980's; it is as if our wish was granted, and we now have machines from the year 2000."
-- quoted from BreakThrough
"Moore's Law -- the density of advanced computer chips doubles about every 18 months -- has a serious counter-corollary -- the cost of building the plant for the (n+1)th generation computer chip is double the cost of the plant for building the nth generation chip. With this sort of geometric progression in a stagnant economy, financial constraints will more likely stop the evolution of the computer than technological ones. " -- map@snowline.net (David Galileo) via transhuman@umich.edu [Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996]
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 From: transhuman@umich.edu Subject: >H Digest ... From: Max More <maxmore@primenet.com> Subject: >H Big numbers and supercomputers Transhuman Mailing List Further to David Cary's helpful summary of units for very large and small numbers, here's some mouth-watering stuff from the new issue of Business Week (April 29 issue). The feature is called "Speed gets a whole new meaning." The story describes the quest for ever more powerful supercomputers, the current record holder being a 281 gigaflops machine built by an Intel-Sandia team. By November Sandia labs will install a new Intel machine, a $46 million computer "capable of cracking the long-time fantasy speed of 1 teraflops. That's computer speak for a trillion calculations per second." That machine may actually manage 1.8 teraflops. The Energy department is speeding up existing commercial pressures with almost a billion (US) dollar program The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, or ASCI. (Cute, huh?) Of course they have to call it "strategic" to justify spending a billion bucks extracted by coercion, rather than letting industry do the same job over a couple of extra years. By early 2001, a 10-teraflops machine is expected, and by 2002 or 2003 a 100-teraflops machine. A 500-teraflops computer by 2005 may be possible, if funding continues. These speeds will not suffice for a number of scientific (and even industrial and entertainment) purposes. According to Business Week, no one has an idea how to manage even a one petaflop (10^15) machines yet, though need is seen for computers running in the exaflops (10^18). For instance, it's reckoned that to reliably test nuclear weapons purely through simulations, at least 100 teraflops will be needed.
| Problems | Speeds used for recent calcs | Needed by 2000 | Long-range needs |
| Computational cosmology | 30 gigaflops | 200 gigaflops | 10 exaflops |
| Interactions between atoms | 300 gigaflops | 30 teraflops | Under study |
| Molecular dynamics in biology | 30 gigaflops | 3 teraflops | 20 petaflops |
| Quantum chromodynamics | 30 gigaflops | 7 teraflops | 100 exaflops |
| PostMax's brain | --- | --- | a lot |
Onward!
Max
Max More, Ph.D. maxmore@primenet.com
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore
President Extropy Institute (ExI)
310-398-0375
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore/extropy.htm
"I like to state Moore's Law as "10x in 5" -- everything good about computers gets better by an order of magnitude every five years. ... an order of magnitude ... implies a conceptual leap." -- Alvy Ray Smith http://www.research.microsoft.com/graphics/alvy/, in "The Stuff of Dreams" article in Computer Graphics World http://www.cgw.com/ 1998-07
`` While the growth of technology is certain, the inevitability of any particular ``future'' is not. Like mathematics, perhaps we should start to use the word future in the plural, futures, in order to reinforce the fact that there are a number of different futures that might be. The specific future that we build, therefore, will be more easily seen as a consequence of our own decisions, and will, therefore, demand more concern with its design. ''
-- ``less is more (more or less)'' chapter by William Buxton
-- _The Invisible Future: the seamless integration of technology with everyday life_ book edited by Peter J. Denning, editor.
"Mice are not here to stay ... When flat-panel displays become cheap and common, they will inevitably migrate down from their vertical perch to a horizontal one, like paper on a desktop. When that happens, the pen input device will have a resurgence of popularity ... The mouse will go the way of acoustic modems and 8-inch floppies." -- p. 198, _About Face_ (1995) book by Alan Cooper.
"Congress is considering lowering (yes lowering) the threshold for export controls on computers from 7000 to 2000 MTOPS (Million Theoretical Operations Per Second). This is just twice the speed of a single 300MHz Pentium II processor." -- http://www.computerbits.com/archive/19980800/lnx9808.htm also see http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/junjul/superjj.htm .
IBM to Build 3 Teraflops "Ultrasupercomputer"
From: Edupage Editors, educom@elanor.oit.unc.edu
IBM has signed a $94-million contract with the U.S. government to build an
ultrasupercomputer -- capable of handling 3-trillion operations per second
and retaining 2.5-trillion bytes of memory. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary
calls the DOE Option Blue a "dramatic leapfrog" over existing technologies.
Option Blue's main job will be to simulate the performance and deterioration
of the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons, a function that once required
actual underground testing. The U.S. is now observing a moratorium on such
testing, and will rely on electronic modeling instead. Option Blue is the
second machine ordered by the Energy Department for use in simulated weapons
testing -- Option Red, a smaller machine capable of handling 1.5-trillion
operations per second, was ordered from Intel Corp. last year and will be
installed at the Department's Sandia National Laboratory in December.
-- from Breakthrough! #12
"This sounds similar to the ideas of J.D. Bernal, who writes in his _The World, the Flesh, the Devil_ (1929) ( http://physserv1.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Bernal/) about a possible lifecycle for future cyborg humans" -- recc. Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa at nada.kth.se> (1996)
This is intended to be a time line of events that are dated in the future. Many of them are fictional, and represent things that people *want* to happen or *fear* will happen, but have no relationship to what *will* happen. Others items come from serious trend-analysis and indicate events that the original authors really *expects* will happen. A few come from people and organizations who plan and/or promise to *do* those things. The attribution of each quote hints at which category it falls into.
As far as I know, all the predictions in this document could still come true (they are either dated in the future or they have already come true). However, it is highly likely that most will join the ranks of other erroneous predictions http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.html | http://www.renaissoft.com/april/humor/hitech.html On the other hand, it's possible that some of these predictions might actually come true in spite of of the fact that "They Say it Can't Be Done" . or they say "Give it up... You cann't do that" http://www.cs.utah.edu/%7Eratan/humor/cannot.html (a list of people who did the "impossible").
I'm still pondering how to make obvious the different categories each item falls into --
(The last category includes all the fictional accounts).
Please send David Cary d.cary@ieee.org. feedback if you have any suggestions on improving this page.
There are 5 parts associated with each item:
The date scheme in this document runs like this: "2001" means sometime during the year 2001; "a2001" means sometime *after* Dec. 31, 2001; "b2001" means sometime before Jan 1, 2001; "??" means I don't know (if you do know, would you mind telling me?).
I'm always impressed with long term plans. I have learned a lot about the sorts of things I can do in a handful of microseconds. But as you know, there are are many, many things that cannot be completed in one second, yet they are still worthwhile things to (begin) doing.
Maybe I just have a little trouble jumping from one to the other. Jumping from focusing on getting everything done in one refresh cycle ( getting a lot of stuff done in a 10 000 microsecond video refresh cycle, or getting a few useful things done in a 20 microsecond audio refresh cycle ) so I can do them all over again in the next refresh cycle. Jumping do dealing with humans, who have cycle times of days and months, and who rarely do the same thing more than 5 times in a row.
While I'm dealing with days and months one at a time, some humans plot out plans that extend for a few years or even the rest of their life.
Some really exceptional people work on projects that extend further than a single lifetime. It would be easy to laugh at them, for working towards something that is forever beyond their grasp. Yet I feel gratitude towards those people that worked on projects that now benefit me, long after those people are dead.
But it's not just a movie, it's a plan of action that is moving forward in the real world http://payitforwardmovement.org/ , http://www.payitforwardchatham-kent.org/ , http://www.univ-relations.pitt.edu/media/pcc020701/payitforward.html , http://www.globalppp.com/
Do something really big for three people ... something they can't do for themselves, ...
it doesn't have to be a big thing.
It can just seem that way, depending on whom you do it for.
-- Trevor
DAV: I really liked and recommend this movie, even though I usually don't like "tear jerker" movies. I was a little disturbed by the death of a major character, but it seems a crucial part of the plot. It helped fight my apathy and cynicism and encouraged me to look for "big things I can do for people, things they can't do for themselves". I find it interesting that some people view this movie as too sentimental, too unrealistic, and too "feel-good" (cynical people ?), while some people view this movie as too depressing, "creepy", and "letting people be satisfied with doing too little" (compassionate people ?). The "pay it forward" project is a long term project. The "pay it forward" phrase seems to be a good label / category for many good actions. On a meta level, the shows that humans *can* come up with new ideas, and every single human really *can* change the world for the better. Too often people neglect to do something good -- why ? "the reward isn't worth the cost" -- the movie shows that things *are* worth doing even without *any* reward. "I got stuck in a rut of doing the same thing week in and week out" -- the movie gives you a jolt, helps get you out of the "focus on the details" mindset and into the mindset that perhaps you could do something that has never been done before, that there's a world of opportunities open, and I need to actively pick something good today, and plan for something big tomorrow, and plan for something really big even if it isn't completed until after my death.
How many "levels" deep would it take before everyone on earth was touched ? DAV: very roughly, we have 3^n = 6 gigahumans, giving n =~= 21 levels.
Because "things" are changing so quickly, it is becoming worthwhile to hire someone full-time to peer into the future: a Technology Futurist http://www.iex.net/corning-fiber/tech/futurist.html http://metis.usa.net/corning-fiber/tech/futurist.html
"Predicting the distant future is easy. Solar power will be harnessed, cures will be found for present-day diseases, and the New York Mets will win the World Series. The real difficulty is predicting tomorrow - figuring out the next step in getting from where we are to where we are going." -- "From here to ATM", article by Arthur Miller of Motorola Inc., in _IEEE Spectrum_ June 1994.
"Technological progress cannot be predicted." -- Anders Sandberg <nv91-asa at nada.kth.se> [unknown date]
While I agree with Sandberg that the details of technological *breakthroughs* cannot be predicted, and would go so far as to say that the exact timing of anything that humans will do is impossible to predict, it seems fairly easy (Moore's law, etc.) to point out some general characteristics and current trends of gradual technological improvements. -- David Cary
"Observations of a Time Traveler" article by Lee Goldberg in _Electronic
Design_ 1994 June 13.:
"Time travel is very educational. I recommend it highly. If you can't afford
time travel, the next best thing is the aerospace industry. ... Many of these
changes are impressive, but predictable. It would have been a no-brainer
to predict the trend toward smaller, faster, cheaper, and more complex. However,
there are a few developments that I'm still having trouble comprehending.
ICs with 600 pins take some getting used to and 128-processor systolic-array
DSPs-on-a-chip give me a distinct feeling of future shock. Stranger yet,
many of the most significant advances weren't technical in nature. Take,
for instance, the phenomenon of strategic alliances."
"Do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything." -- 1 Thessalonians 5:20
"Many retailers subscribe to the services of a type of trend forcasting service such as The Doneger Group or Arkin. These offices have staffs that scout trends and keep up on current fashion shows, colors, fabrics and styles. ... To survive the present, fashion forecasters must live in the future. "Right now we are in the fall of '98", said Carmela Carratie, administrative assistant at Doneger Design Direction, a division of the Doneger Group. These trend-spotting services do not offer exclusivity on their information but share it with all vendors and retailers willing to pay the price." -- Vivian McInerny, The Oregonian Staff, in article "Separated at Birth" article in _The Sunday Oregonian_ 1997 May 11 p. L9. [DAV: this seems to be saying they live about 1.5 years in the future.]
If you are a programmer, I encourage you to look at the "Manifesto of Futurist Programmers" http://www.sgi.com/grafica/future/ at GRAFICA Obscura http://www.sgi.com/grafica/ . The programmers I know consider it either "inspiring" or "evil" (or both). It is a update (or a parody, depending on your point of view) of the original, "The Futurist Manifesto" http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html . Non-programmers generally don't "get it". There is also a Manifesto of Futurist Architecture http://www.wwa.com/~sluggo/futurism/architecture.html; I'm not sure what relation it has.
[FIXME: I thought I had other links to timelines I could stick here] [FIXME: summarize and mention future events from these timelines on this page]
Timelines are a kind of map 3d_design.html#maps through part of idea_space.html .
Here's some books that seem related, but I haven't actually read them yet:
_The Future and its Enemies: The growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress_ by Virginia Postrel http://laissezfaire.org/cu7889.html
Mandelspace http://www.well.com/user/cynsa/tom/
_Profiles of the Future_ by Arthur C. Clarke
_The Truth Machine_, an on-line novel with lots of extrapolations. (There used to be more info at http://www.truthmachine.com/ but this seems to have gone offline).
_The Book of Predictions_ ed. by Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky "the same people who put together _The Book of Lists_ and _The People's Almanac_). All sorts of people were asked to put together speculative future time lines" -- recc. Mitchell Porter <qix@desire.apana.org.au> http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch/ Wallechinsky, David. The Book of Predictions. Morrow, 1981. 20th Century Forecasts. {CB161.W25}
_The time line Book of Science_ by Ochoa and Corey.
From: Mitchell Porter <qix@desire.apana.org.au> Subject: Re: >H History question. Transhuman Mailing List Alex: ... "Transhuman" seems to be have been coined by FM-2030 (aka FM Esfandiary); witness his 1989 book, _Are You a Transhuman?_. I don't recall when or where I first heard of transhuman_ism_, but that was probably online. Certainly I heard of _post_humanism before I ever heard of the Internet; it's an ideology (mostly undeveloped) in Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist future history (see, for example, _Schismatrix_); and the word pops up in a few postmodernist academic works (for example, Ihab Hassan's _The Right Promethean Fire_). .... Some of the ideas go way back. My friend Cosma Shalizi "classes [transhumanists] with the medieval alchemists and Brethren of the Free Spirit, and indeed suspects a historical link." He's also put online some works from the first half of this century, which are definitely part of the prehistory of transhumanism: http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Daedalus.html J.B.S. Haldane: Daedalus, or, Science and the Future http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Icarus.html Bertrand Russell: Icarus, or, the Future of Science http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Bernal J.D. Bernal: The World, The Flesh and the Devil -- -mitch http://desire.apana.org.au/~qix
Transhumanism is a philosophy that humanity can, and should, strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially. -- http://www.aleph.se/Trans/
[to do: confirm that all this information is merely redundant duplicates of much better web index by Sarah, then junk my obsolete copy].
Lists of transhumans:
Ogden's third law: Governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant. ...
a director of the Immortality Institute ... a non-profit educational organization. The Immortality Institute is helping people live healthy forever.http://www.bjklein.com
On the other hand, a surprising number of people who believe in in this philosophy are also Mad Scientists (people who find a lot of humor in things that others find serious, overwhelming, or otherwise icky).
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 18:53:32 -0500 (EST) Comment: Hx: Transhuman Technlogies Sender: <transhumantech at excelsior.org> Version: Autolist v0.2 - Copyright 1995 Planet X Engineering From: Mitchell Porter To: Multiple recipients of list <transhumantech at excelsior.org> Subject: Re: Mailing lists > Of course there are already categorized compilations of mailing lists. > Creating a new one or expanding an existing one especially for > Transhumanists seems to make sense, however. > > I think if we really want to take on this task we should include more > than just the list name and a few lines of description. How about a few > selected sample postings from a period of time? I suppose what I'd really like is a page linking to up-to-date archives for all these lists, so that I didn't have to subscribe to them all. Alexander Chislenko already has a list of lists at http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/lists.html. The ASCII version includes commentary and description. I'm adding a link to his lists of lists from my list of lists. :) -mitch http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch
Extropy Online (EO) http://www.extropy.com/~exi/eo/ "Extropy Online, like the original Extropy, will cover a wide, cross-disciplinary range of topics, including anything that involves rational, scientific, and technological approaches to overcoming human limits."
Max More, Ph.D.
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore/
President,
Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org/
6. Biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what's going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new "criticality" is achieved - maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know.
A Gallery of Predictions That Went Wrong
"Space travel is utter bilge." -- Dr. Richard van der Riet Woolley, Astronomer Royal, and space adviser to the British government, 1956. The next year _Sputnik_ orbited the Earth.
...
"There is little doubt that the most significant event affecting energy is the advent of nuclear power ... a few decades hence, energy may be free -- just like the unmetered air...." -- John von Neumann, scientist and member of the Atomic Energy Commission, 1955.
...
-- _Old Farmer's Almanac_ 1997 ed. Robert B. Thomas, p. 117-118
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping... --Orville Wright
information that I will merge with the main database someday
Ethereal Outlook: Future Science & Technology http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/6810/ethereal.htm
The Gallaudet Research Institute http://gri.gallaudet.edu/ seems to be on the cutting edge of direct electronics-to-neurons connections. associated with Gallaudet University http://www.gallaudet.edu/ .
Institute for the Future http://www.iftf.org/
(fiction) http://csgrad.cs.vt.edu/~reaux/thurdis/thurdis/history/phoenix.html
lots of predictions http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/heinlein.html
________________
.A brief history of Net time
A time line of first mentions
Keith Lynch <kfl at clark.net> has been on the Net for longer than
anyone I know. He's been squirreling away email messages and
Usenet posts since 1975 and from them has constructed a succinct
time line [34] of first mentions of products, jargon, terms, con-
cepts, and items of Net culture. Some excerpts:
1981 aug "Usenet" (mentioned on the ARPAnet)
82 feb "Internet" (then called ARPAnet)
86 mar "netiquette"
88 jan Year 2000 problem (i.e. lots of software will break)
88 feb perl
89 nov world.std.com (ISP, the first directly on the Internet)
91 mar cyberspace (referring to the net, not to sci-fi)
92 mar "Web" (as in World-Wide)
92 jun "WWW"
92 nov Linux (an operating system)
93 feb Wired magazine
94 jan "intranet"
[34] http://www.clark.net/pub/kfl/timeline.html
________________________________________________________________________
-- quoted from
http://www.tbtf.com/
The Cryonics Institute http://www.cryonics.org/ relies on future technology.
"There should be an average of 31 geosynchronous orbit comsats launched every year between now and 2010." http://www.europa.com/~jpilcher/pulsr996.html
Donald Platt's Visionary Page http://www.fit.edu/~dplatt/ "visions of the future and technology in general"
http://modelsonline.org/futuretimeline.htm a interesting, short alternate future timeline.
"I think a lot. Sometimes I take a whole ``Think Week'' away from my office routine. I have a lot of people working with me who ponder the future, too. Like many businesses, ours is built on looking down the road and preparing for what we foresee. " -- Bill Gates (quoted at http://computernewsdaily.com/266_092397_134200_24244.html , http://microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1997q&a/QA970924.htm ,
"The Spirit Of Truth" http://www.ucc.uconn.edu/~jpa94001/ prophecy links
http://www.prophecysite.com/ ???
misc
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford CA, has many papers online, mostly on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. "The Sustainability of Human Progress" http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ "human material progress is desirable and sustainable ... there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability." "Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines", http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing.html I think I independently came up with the idea of a factoids file before I discovered http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/facts.txt
With a wealth of composers probing every instrument on the planet, a wealth of performers spending their lives in pursuit of mastery, a wealth of engineering effort that has stabilised many traditional instruments, has the cult of difficulty reached its limit? We must already be deep in diminishing returns? There is a similar controversy that arises amongst sports psychologists every Olympics. Will humans go on breaking world records? The issues take in drugs, genetics, technological improvement, and the greater pool of potential competitors. Some predict near stasis now for most sports, others quote that a linear trend of improvement is still implied for decades to come [18]. Given the uncertainty over future athletic performance, let us not make the mistake of predicting the asymptotic limits of human musicians just yet. However, it is clear that there are levels of virtuosity that will remain outside human manipulation. ... the time to move the hand from one location to another within the realm of physics.
It is taken as proven that there is room between ultimate human ability and human auditory capabilities- the Nancarrow Studies for Player Piano will do as the proof. No human will ever play Rhythm Study 3a, but one can certainly hear it and appreciate the distinct note streams. ...
...
... understanding of human performance limitations ...
... I confidently predict: in one hundred years time, composers with sensationally accurate computer instruments at their disposal will write transhuman works that smoothly flit between the ludicrously virtuosic and the look then play one note mentality of a beginner sight reader. Subtle deliberate mistakes will be engineered into the most exquisite and impeccable climaxes, and the critics will judge the work by the flow of its argument within multiple established models of human to inhuman transformation. ...
The data tables indicate that maximum keyboarding speed over at least a minute of about 15 Hz for the fastest humans on earth. The same for playing one note at a time on a piano keyboard and for typing on a typewriter-style keyboard. It also lists ``impossible to play'' piano compositions (which have been played by nonhuman ``player piano roll'')
[FIXME: #keyboard][FIXME: music.html]
-- ``Let There Be Light'' article by Glenn Zorpette in _IEEE Spectrum_ 2002-09``white-light LED ... By 2012, researchers pledge that the devices will reach 7 W and 1000 lm. ... The device would be brighter than a 60 W bulb and yet draw an amount of current that could be provided by four D-sized batteries.
Around then, Edison's
gas and glass,the scornful term the solid-state people apply to light bulbs, should be on its way out.In 10 or 20 years, all lighting will be solid state,asserts Masayuki Ishikawa at Toshiba Corp.'s corporate R&D center in Kawasaki, Japan.
???... no. A computer did not beat Mr. Kasparov; he was beaten by a team of scientists that used the computer as a tool. The team included four international grand masters of chess. ...
From: Eugene Leitl Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 13:16:55 +0400 (MSD) ... From: D Olsen ton.edu To: "cULT oF tHE mIGHTY pLANARIA" Subject: Educom student essay contest (fwd) Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 19:46:59 -0700 (PDT) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 14:59:51 -0700 (PDT) From: "D. Gromala" To: Undisclosed recipients: ; Subject: Educom student essay contest (fwd) $1,000 PRIZE FOR EDUPAGE & EDUCOM REVIEW STUDENT ESSAY CONTEST Edupage and Educom Review are sponsoring a student contest for previously unpublished essays discussing any educational, organizational, social, or cultural aspect of technology now or in the future. The prize for best essay is $1,000. Deadline is July 31, 1998 and entries must be limited to 1500 words or less. Each entry must be sent inside an e-mail message in ascii text (in English) addressed to editor@educom.edu. Entries will be evaluated for originality, insight, and clarity of presentation. Decisions will be made by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, the editors of Edupage and Educom Review. All decisions will be final. Entrants must be enrolled as full-time or part-time graduate or undergraduate students in any discipline at some institution of post-secondary education. ... Archive located at: http://www.excelsior.org/transhuman_tech_list/
recent ACM Turing award winner, Jim Gray, ... why sneakernet is more efficient than the internet for his data-transfer demands. ... starting about 1989, disk densities began to double each year. Rather than going slower than Moore's Law, they grew faster. Moore's Law is something like 60 percent a year, and disk densities improved 100 percent per year.discussion at http://aceshardware.com/forum?read=105038291 [FIXME: to read: interview]
Of the 5,000 languages currently spoken, he predicts that half will not survive the present century; that there may be as few as 200 languages in less than two centuries; and that, some time after that, the only language spoken may be English.-- _Language in Danger_ book by Andrew Dalby 2003 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0231129009/qid=1059794370/sr=%201-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-9646183-3965715?v=glance&s=books#product-details -- recc. http://macedition.com/cb/cb_20030811.php
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