What if the Iraq War hadn’t happened? The global geostrategic balance would be the same, but the U.S. would be slightly richer, would have a better military, and Americans would be more open to waging war.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/trillions-dollars-saved-what-if-america-never-invaded-iraq-58007
The U.S. Army thinks that, with a few years of R&D, it can figure out how to put a 50 kW laser weapon into a Stryker armored vehicle.
https://www.janes.com/article/88936/us-army-poised-to-funnel-additional-dollars-towards-directed-energy-weapons
Most of the American ships sunk at Pearl Harbor were raised, fixed, and sent back into action.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-pearl-harbor-salvage-effort-keeping-navy-fighting/
The U.S. Navy’s “Littoral Combat Ship” program has failed in every way, and they’ve decided to go back to buying conventional frigates.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/its-official-us-navy%E2%80%99s-littoral-combat-ship-complete-failure-58837
China has started building its third aircraft carrier. It will be bigger than its two older carriers, but smaller than U.S. carriers.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-carrier-type-002/
China’s naval buildup has exceeded estimates made as recently as five years ago. It now looks like the country’s navy will be second only to America’s by 2030.
https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/predicting-the-chinese-navy-of-2030/
China is decommissioning older warships that were bought from Russia or copied from Soviet designs, and replacing them with larger, better, domestically designed and built ships. China doesn’t need any naval technology from Russia anymore and is pulling ahead.
https://www.janes.com/article/88602/plan-decommissions-four-type-051-destroyers
In 1967, a KGB agent stole a Sidewinder aircraft missile from a U.S. airbase in West Germany, literally draggedit away in a wheelbarrow, put it in the trunk of his car (it was so long that it hung out the back), and mailed it to Moscow. The Soviets copied it.
https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-to-moscow/
The Indian military stumbles again. They can’t even make ammunition right.
https://www.janes.com/article/88543/indian-army-expresses-concern-over-faulty-ofb-supplied-ammunition
India’s claim that it shot down a Pakistani F-16 during this year’s clashes is false.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-kashmir-pakistan-f16/report-says-u-s-count-shows-no-pakistan-f-16s-shot-down-in-indian-battle-idUSKCN1RH0IM
A veteran U.S. fighter pilot’s invaluable insights on different fighter planes:
-F-14: Unsuited for dogfights due to poor maneuverability
-F-5: With modern upgrades, can still pose some threat to first-rate fighters.
-F-16: The best dogfighting plane in American use
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27889/confessions-of-a-navy-f-14-fleet-pilot-turned-f-5-aggressor
A prototype plane that uses “fluidic thrust vectoring” instead of control surfaces to maneuver has been built.
https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/magma-the-future-of-flight
A little-known fact is that water is very effective at stopping bullets. Even a powerful rifle bullet fired down into a swimming pool will slow to a halt after going through only two feet of water. But now, a U.S. company has invented special “supercaviating” bullets that can cut through 16 feet of water.
http://dsgtec.com/capability-videos/
Another little-known fact is that trains can’t go uphill. Their steel wheels are very low friction, which lets them glide over steel tracks while expending little energy, but also robs them of being able to exert the traction necessary to climb up a hill.
https://youtu.be/KbUsKWbOqUU
In 2009, Dr. Christoph Westphal, the co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, predicted the “there will be drugs that prolong [human] longevity” by 2016. Today, there are several drugs that allegedly do this, but none have been proven to work. In fairness, their efficacy can’t be established until decades pass, and we can see how long their users lived.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29aging.html
Children who grew up in divorced families are likelier to get divorced themselves, or to never marry at all. These tendencies have obvious roots in how they were raised, but also could have a genetic component.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/divorced-parents-marriage/590425/
Update: The bereaved parents of a young man who died in a skiing accident have gotten court permission to use his sperm to make a grandchild. As I said before, I think they’d clone him if it were possible.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-05-20/judge-parents-of-dead-west-point-cadet-can-use-his-sperm
An algorithm was told to design a house that would have the highest strength-to-weight ratio possible (e.g. – strongest structure for smallest amount of material). The results were interesting and complex.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-48337824/if-a-house-was-designed-by-machine-how-would-it-look
Machines can now translate audio clips of a person speaking from one language to another, while preserving the idiosyncratic sound qualities of their speech (their “voiceprint”). I predict this technology will be perfected during the 2030s, and the translations will accurately convey the speaker’s emotions, figures of speech, and even their accent.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613559/google-ai-language-translation/
The technology used to make “deepfake” videos can also be used to turn still photos into manipulable motion pictures.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/05/23/deepfake-ai-can-turn-mona-lisa-convincing-real-person/
‘As labs like DeepMind and OpenAI tackle bigger problems, they may begin to require ridiculously large amounts of computing power. As OpenAI’s system learned to play Dota 2 over several months — more than 45,000 years of game play — it came to rely on tens of thousands of computer chips. Renting access to all those chips cost the lab millions of dollars…’
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html
A human brain only uses the equivalent of 10 watts of electricity, and can do things that tens of thousands of computer chips working together can’t do yet.
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JacquelineLing.shtml
A 1 TB MicroSD card is now available. Price? $450.
https://shop.sandisk.com/store/sdiskus/en_US/pd/ThemeID.4846328000/productID.5312044100
Autonomous boats can now dock themselves.
https://smartmaritimenetwork.com/2019/02/08/yanmar-trials-robotic-ship-technology/
California’s wildfire problem is exacerbated by bad forestry practices. Before white settlement, about 4.5 million acres of vegetation would naturally burn per year. Today, the authorities only do 87,000 acres of prescribed burns yearly, and they put out almost all natural wildfires to protect humans and property.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article230481684.html
To calculate the carbon cost of building a structure, you need to include the energy and emissions that went into fabricating the structure’s components and transporting it to the construction site. You need to trace the breadcrumbs all the way back to cement mills, steel foundries, and mines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48267035
A roundup of geoengineering proposals.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48069663
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant is shutting down because fracked natural gas, solar and wind are cheaper sources of energy. Of course, U.S. natural gas power plants pay very little or no money to offset the environmental damage caused by their GHG emissions, and solar and wind installations are artificially cheap thanks to government subsidies that nuclear power plants should also get.
https://www.exeloncorp.com/newsroom/three-mile-island-unit-1-to-shut-down-by-september-30-2019
A paleontologist who specifically studies flying dinosaurs says that the dragons in Game of Thrones would be way too big to actually fly “unless they’re secretly made out of carbon fiber and titanium.” So that means with advanced enough technology, we could make robots or cyborg animals that were like the dragons on the show.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/503967/could-game-throness-dragons-really-fly-we-asked-some-experts
With the same sort of technology, we could make insects as big as those from Starship Troopers.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/constraint_13
Recent reports of an insect mass extinction were based on fake science, and a scientifically illiterate news media that is eager to parrot any kind of disaster story to a global audience, wherever it comes from.
https://theconversation.com/is-an-insect-apocalypse-happening-how-would-we-know-113170
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/11/health/insect-decline-study-intl/index.html
‘I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research’
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/03/too-much-wasted-time
For several weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, U.S. fighter pilots saw UFOs off the East Coast, and also detected them on radar. The unknown craft did maneuvers that broke known laws of physics, such as instantly halting in midair even though they were just moving at over Mach 5. The sightings bear similarities to another military-UFO encounter near San Diego in 2004.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wow-what-is-that-navy-pilots-report-unexplained-flying-objects/ar-AABXltD
One of the world’s greatest UFO hunters, Stanton Friedman, is dead.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9097898/worlds-most-famous-ufo-hunter-dies-age-84-without-seeing-flying-saucer/
The high melanin levels in the skins of black people is extraordinarily effective at preventing UV light damage to DNA: ‘In the United States, melanoma is 20 to 30 times more common among whites than blacks.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/in-rare-occasions-dark-skinned-people-can-get-skin-cancer-but-sunscreens-wont-help/2019/05/24/539daf8c-7b0d-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
A computer program can look at chest CT scan images and diagnose lung cancer as well as human radiologists. Radiologists make about $350,000/yr in the U.S., whereas the computer program would work for free.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/20/googles-lung-cancer-detection-ai-outperforms-6-human-radiologists/
The world record time for solving a Rubik’s Cube has declined over the past few years partly because the construction of the Cubes has become more precise, so it takes less force to rotate their segments. The best solve time will probably plateau around 2.9 seconds, which is ten times longer than a machine’s speed.
https://youtu.be/SUopbexPk3A
An important problem with small flying drone delivery vehicles is the noise they emit. This might undermine the entire effort. For this and other reasons, I think it’s better to use autonomous cars and trucks for delivery.
https://theconversation.com/drones-to-deliver-incessant-buzzing-noise-and-packages-116257
Someday, packages will be delivered to your curbside by autonomous vehicles, and then carried to your doorstep by human-sized robots riding in those vehicles. The robots might not be humanoid in form. If you have your own robot butler, it will open the front door and accept the package directly from the delivery robot.
https://youtu.be/WHWciIxNK2c
If it proves harder than expected to build autonomous servant robots, would the next best option be to make remote-controlled servant robots? The human “pilots” could be low-wage workers living in poor countries.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/9/18538020/home-robot-butler-telepresence-ugo-mira-robotics
A “robot hummingbird” has been built. Note the electrical wires tethered to its bottom (current batteries lack the energy density to power such a machine for useful lengths of time).
https://youtu.be/jhl892dHqfA
Amazon.com has build a large machine that can box up and package goods for shipment. If it works well, it will destroy many human jobs.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive-idUSKCN1SJ0X1
Jeff Bezos unveiled a moon lander prototype.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/27929/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-venture-unveils-lunar-lander-rover-and-rocket
Modern astronomers have confirmed that their ancient Chinese counterparts accurately recorded a nova that happened in 48 BC.
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/3240.html?id=5421
Electric cars are faster and easier to manufacture than gas-powered cars, meaning many thousands of human autoworkers will lose their jobs in the 2020s as electric cars get more popular. Electric cars also require less frequent maintenance, so car mechanics will suffer.
https://apnews.com/e22ad2f734e448f4b3c5d415e8b8c73a
Autonomous cars will also know when they are due for maintenance or when something is malfunctioning, and, unless the problem is really bad, they will be able to drive themselves to repair shops. As I predicted, this will destroy car mechanic jobs and lead to the rise of a “big box” model for the car repair business in the 2030s.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/tesla-car-component-stress-monitoring-with-automically-triggered-repair-service.html
Through wireless networking, fleets of autonomous cars can improve traffic flow by at least 35%. As autonomous vehicles become more common, existing roads will be able to handle higher volumes of traffic without jams happening, reducing the need to expand roadways. Further improvements will happen due to autonomous vehicles distributing their trips over the course of the day (e.g. – delivery trucks will mostly drive overnight).
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/driverless-cars-working-together-can-speed-up-traffic-by-35-percent
Modern information theory shows that Samuel Morse’s eponymous code is surprisingly close to optimal for conveying English words. It’s all the more remarkable that Morse created such an efficient code without the benefit of computers.
https://eclecticlight.co/2015/10/22/reinventing-morse-code-using-modern-theory/
Compared to naturally occurring diamonds, lab-grown diamonds are cheaper, could be made to have fewer imperfections, and are more ethical to produce since they don’t require mines or the use of low-paid laborers in volatile countries.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351
Here’s an epic essay from roboticist Rodney Brooks about “The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI.” Definitely worth a read.
https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/
Experts are surprisingly bad at making predictions about things pertaining to their own domains of knowledge. Of course, people with no domain knowledge at all are also very bad at it. I think it’s best to gather predictions about the same thing from multiple experts in a given field, and to have them explain their thinking in detail. Off the bat, it would probably become clear that some of them were just making things up and had no thought process to back their predictions, so you should throw those out. The next step would be to have the remaining experts debate each other about differences in their predictions, and then to have smart generalists with knowledge of multiple domains to analyze everything.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future/588040/
Thanks to genetics, some people can’t smell specific scents, and some common scents smell different to different people.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/19/9475
Extensive genetic engineering could allow future humans to see light outside of the 380 – 740 nm range of the light spectrum, meaning they’d probably be able to see new colors we can’t conceive of.
https://gizmodo.com/will-there-ever-be-new-colors-that-we-can-see-1834500228
A precise, 3D laser scan of Notre Dame Cathedral done to make a simulacrum for the game “Assassin’s Creed Unity” could be used to reconstruct the burned-down building.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/notre-dame-fire-reconstruction
The EPA says that the pesticide glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-04-30/epa-glyphosate-the-herbicide-in-roundup-does-not-cause-cancer
These machines have overall lengths of 70 micrometers. They’re too big to be “nanomachines,” and instead are “micromachines.” A “nanomachine” would have an overall length no greater than 10 micrometers, and its subcomponents (e.g. – robot arm, propulsion system, computer brain) would be measured in nanometers, meaning none of them could be larger than 999 nanometers.
https://medium.com/penn-engineering/marc-miskins-micro-robots-are-small-enough-to-be-injected-by-syringe-c40ff65ba191