Archive for the Category » All that could be «

Allopatric speciation of fruit-flies seems to take but weeks, much less then squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods. How about us? How long will it take until we are no more alone… again ? since the fun times of Universe sharing with the Neanderthalians as the only other tool-making, walking and talking beings.

We might soon get a chance to figure it out, as some of us seem on their way to make it to Mars, after all. And chances are that if some eventually settle there, you’ll probably not get to see them every weekend. They will live their separate ways, their separate survival strategies, their separate sicknesses. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into… two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the martians communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding be so great that we’ll eventually loose all interest in each other?

In any case, this confrontation with such a similar otherness will lead us to re-evaluate all our values, and some of these to our greatest good. Rather than waiting for aliens to come, this is our chance to make some of our own.

3D with glasses? Definitely not the next step as we’ve seen it all: color filters (bu-ah!), polarising glasses (neat but don’t tilt your head), alternate hiding of right and left eye with liquid crystal glass (kind off heavy for the brain, not that much used for left and right hemisphere alterning in 48/sec tact).

No, definitely, the next step is 3D without glasses.  Or is it? Isn’t the eye&object complex rather as old as the principle behind the creation of Chauvet or Lascaux? Isn’t the next step rather 3D… without eyes.

Connecting screening devices by micro-electrodes directly to the optical nerve is the next step. Ongoing research is already done on this technology in the prospect of healing the blind.

And beyond that: wireless chips implanted directly inside the brain: this is the next big step of real multimedia experience.  Call your lover and chat from within your mind in the middle of a business meeting! Or spare at least on your next myopia operation: buy – with WiFi and HD receptors and switch between the reality in front of you and the other, the world of 3D image-flow in information space.

Really, who needs glasses?

Human powered electricity generation is not the newest of ideas. As relates Webber Energy Blog here, it has already been implemented in fitness centers in California and Hon Kong. A similar idea has been set up by  a British night club owner with a dancefloor producing electricity. But why not expand this idea to smaller and even more everyday actions and use it to power devices at the same scale. I’m thinking of these automatic watches, for instance, that mechanically store hand and wrist movement to run: they, too, already exist. Now what if, for example, you implemented this kind of pendulum energy collectors into trousers and jackets. The collected electric energy could be stored in sewn-in batteries and/or be directly used to recharge all those devices we also love to carry around: mobile phones, pods, CD-players, GPS, playstations etc. Considering all the energy wasted by traditional wall-plugged current converters, this could mean quite a step for planet care. A step, too, perhaps, for public health: If you have to move around a little more to get that pod running, you might have just the bit of necessary motivation to do so…

Now, one could consider another option: not an energy producing but an energy saving suit. Today’s technology allows for very optimal thermal isolation. Of course, hi-end material is highly expensive but imagine all the savings one could make if, instead of heating a house interior to 20°C, one would only keep it at 5°C and compensate by an skin-adhesive thermosuit, even at home and in the office. Imagine highway patrol wearing these suits instead of keeping the motor running to keep warm (yes they really do this in the US, I’ve seen on a motorway near Boston).

And now, think one step further and combine both ideas: a discrete skin-adhesive energy suit collecting thermoregulating the body while collecting heat and movement energy wherever possible. Take a walk and your laptop will keep running in the middle of nowhere.

Any implementation suggestions or profound reasons why all this is really just unreasonable gibberish and cheap science-fiction? Feel free to write so.

Lately, I noticed again a couple of car wrecks being torn apart to iron plates on the top of some wagon. A week after that, a mechanic changed the car battery of our old VW Golf. Seeing him making that, I thought:

“Hell, this old thing is still running. The only thing it was missing is a new battery. Sure, it consumes way too much gas, in comparison with more recent machines, but why would we buy a new one?”

Some car makers really try to sell you new models with pretense of environmental concern, but a new bodywork (the french say “carrosserie”), with seats, tires, plastic interior, gears, and who knows what else… has to be made: and the fabrication of those things actually costs gas energy, too.

The thing someone should really come up with is a plug-in motor:

The plugin motor is sold in separate parts, which can be connected to each other in such a way as to be able to plug the motor into any bodywork. When new technologies arise, you should not have to buy a new car, but simply replace your motor, or parts of it, as long as the bodywork is good.

All its parts should be worldwide ISO certified, so they can connect to each other in any combination. A car upgrade could then be comparable to what is done with software: you don’t throw your machine away, but only upgrade the OS, or little parts of it.

Just imagine your beautiful Chevy or vintage Trabant with the latest Japanese “Hybrid Inside”. Or an elctromotor, or whatever this civilization will have to come up with in the next thirty years.

Last but not least, the use of plug-in motors  provide local jobs to many people. Many mechanics would be needed to produce custom motors and motor upgrades on a regular basis. Garage work would become more creative. And people would be able to pay these new generation mechanics by all the money not spent on buying whole new cars. As opposed to car production, plugin motor upgrading has to be done locally and therefore cannot be delocalized: the jobs it provides are thus sustainable.

Is this feasible? Please post any drawings, links to similar projects or objections.

Image: from Flickr by: Paleontour, may 2008, Creative Commons BY