Re: poly: Emerging Technology

Damien R. Sullivan writes:
> Has holography gone anywhere?

It is in use in many specialized applications, but it is very
difficult to use for 3D TV and such. It demands orders of magnitude
more resolution in order to get out a decent image, and it is hard to
build a device that can display holograms in real time (so far as I
know, none exist).

> Less fantastically, where are the holograms of statues and
> paintings? Photographs are considered much lower quality than the
> originals; I'd expect holography to pick up some of the slack,
> unless it's hard to make large holograms or the images looks weird
> otherwise.

Holograms don't generally look convincingly like the originals, and I
know of no "True Color" holography processes.

> Biotech: specific organ cloning. Transplants are the obvious market;

Yeah, but we don't know how to do it.

> another might be growing meat in culture. I'd think that a bunch of
> replicating muscle cells in a tank could be more efficient than a whole
> cow, and avoids lots of ethical problems for the vegetarians.

Well, again, as I've mentioned, the problem here is engineering
vs. breakthroughs. Spreading the internet to every piece of the planet
or getting a 2Mbps radio link to your eyeglasses is purely an
engineering issue -- hard problems, but no breakthroughs. We don't
know HOW to grow steak in a vat, so it isn't an obvious near-term
thing.

Perry
Received on Sun Jan 4 18:04:57 1998