Future

The United States Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has pulled out its crystal ball to look 20 years into the future. In this case, the ball is made of focus groups and the future is that of technologies available to first responders a generation from now. The idea is to anticipate the needs of first responders to make sure that the appropriate technology is available to meet future disasters and terrorist attacks.  Read More

As part of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out.  Read More

Storing data for longer than a few years is tricky enough with rapidly advancing technology, so what are you supposed to do if you need to store data for thousands or even millions of years? That's just the problem facing nuclear waste management companies, who need a way to warn future civilizations of hazardous sites that will withstand the test of time. Luckily a recent proposal may have the solution with a sapphire disk etched in platinum that could survive longer than humanity itself.  Read More

Pneumatic Futurama-style transport systems were proposed as far back as the late 1800’s following the invention of pneumatic tubes for carrying mail around buildings. Swiss company Acabion sees such vacuum tube-based mass transport systems becoming a reality by 2100 and has conceived a vehicle capable of traveling at speeds of almost 12,500 mph (20,000 km/h) on such a platform. The company envisages a global network that would let users circle the globe in less than two hours and make transcontinental journeys possible in less than the time it currently takes to get across town.  Read More

Earlier this month we took a look at Recorded Future, a company that uses information scoured from thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to make predictions about the future. Now, Yahoo’s Barcelona research lab has created a similar prototype news search engine called Time Explorer. It creates timelines based on search queries that not only provide a way to check the accuracy of past predictions, but also allows users to view predictions that are yet to occur.  Read More

There’s no doubt that most people would like to know the future. It’s a desire that has kept palm readers, astrologists and tea-leaf readers in business for hundreds of years. Now there’s a company called Recorded Future that says it can use information scoured from tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to predict the future. And before you laugh, it’s got some heavyweight backers including Google and the CIA.  Read More

For most of us here in Gizland, technology and gadgetry have become central to our very existence. Given the huge advances seen in recent years, where will be ten years from now? Frog Design has been doing some serious pondering on this very subject and has recently presented a vision of what our increasingly computer-centric lives might be like in the year 2020.  Read More