- We landed on the moon in 1969
and we haven't been back in 40 years.
Why don't we have a moon colony yet?
- Science fiction promised us things
and it has failed to deliver.
- It's really hard to predict
where technology is going to go.
We usually think that technology develops
sort of step by step, slowly making progress.
- You're like, oh it just keeps iterating,
like as if by magic it just keeps getting better
except it doesn't if there's no reason for it to get better.
- Progress is almost never just one guy with a smart idea.
It requires lots of different people working together
to make this stuff become a reality.
That's why we don't have a base on the moon
but we do have computers with all the world's information
that now fits in our pockets.
- Hi, I'm Zach Weinersmith.
- And I'm Kelly Weinersmith.
I have a Ph.D. in parasitology.
- And I draw weiner jokes.
And we wrote Soonish.
- Ten Emerging Technologies That'll
Improve and/or Ruin Everything.
Go team.
In our book, for each technology,
we covered three different topics.
We talked about what was still needed
for each of these technologies to make the technologies work
and become part of our lives,
how these technologies could make our lives much better,
and also how these technologies could potentially
make our lives much worse.
- Almost everything we researched,
we had a preexisting notion of what it was going to be like
that almost invariably was completely upended.
- We started looking into it and we discovered
that the people making these predictions don't look to see
if there's a longterm market for these technologies.
- So we've known how to go to the moon since the late '60's.
The problem is it's never gotten any cheaper
and there's nothing up there
to bring back to offset the cost.
- So right now it costs on average $10,000
for every pound of stuff that you want to send to space.
- That's $2500 per cheeseburger.
So if you see an astronaut eating an apple in space,
you should write your Senator.
(laughs)
- So if you want to reduce the cost of getting to space,
you can try to get the rocket back down
without throwing it away after each use.
Or you could try something totally different.
For example, there's an idea called the space elevator
and this idea is supposed to reduce costs
of getting stuff to space by 90%.
What we're waiting for is a cable
to go from Earth out to space
and right now we have no material
that's strong enough to make that cable.
- So you need this material that's like Superman's hair.
Weighs nothing, but it holds everything.
Carbon nanotubes are a good candidate
'cause they have this quality.
Problem is, we can only make them about this long right now
and we need them 100,000 kilometers long,
which is more than this long.
- Before you're going to get a cable that's long enough,
there's going to need to be an economic reason
to make them longer for Earth-based uses.
So the reason we don't have one continuous carbon nanotube
on which you can build a space elevator is economics.
- We wanted people to be really optimistic
about the future but also really skeptical.
- We thought it was important to consider
how technologies could ruin everything
so that people were thinking about that ahead of time.
So, for example, there's an idea called Programmable Matter.
A bunch of the stuff in your life
could be doing a lot more for you than it's currently doing.
A chair doesn't need to just be a chair.
It could also be a bike or maybe even a laptop.
In a really ideal world, you could have a bucket
filled with a goo where you could tell the goo
to become anything and it would just pop out
and there would be the wrench that you want.
- So it's like the T-1000 from Terminator 2,
only it's not trying to kill you,
it's trying to fix your house and make you tea.
- Some of the negative implications of having stuff
that can turn into just about anything else
is what if your programmable matter gets hacked?
- What do you do if it's hacked?
- And what if you do if programmable matter fails
at a particularly bad time?
- Yeah, like if you make airplane wings
and they behave appropriately in a way
that goes disastrously wrong.
Who's to blame for that?
- And what about security concerns?
- If anything can be anything else,
anything else includes things like knives and guns.
That's tricky.
- And what if we accidentally bring about
the dreaded grey goo scenario?
- In which we create machine life
that can reproduce and propagates throughout the planet
consuming everything as it goes.
- Uh, okay.
So we don't know if any of the bad things
that we talk about are actually going to happen,
but it's important that people have thought about it
so that you can try to reduce those negative implications
when the technology finally rolls out.
- There are lots of really awesome technologies
scientists are working on right now
that can make our lives way better, like precision medicine.
- So the idea behind precision medicine
is that when you go into a doctor,
they look at a lot of different biomarkers
to try to figure out if something is wrong with you.
- So the idea is you could get toward a future
where you have a doctor kind of acting
as concierge to a statistics machine.
- Hopefully you can hone in on the exact problems
and then treat specifically those problems.
Medical trials in general could be more efficient
and more effective, driving down the costs of
producing drugs in the first place.
We're not just excited about precision medicine.
We're also excited about origami robots.
- Bioprinting new organs. - And fusion energy.
- And brain computer interfaces.
- And augmented reality.
- Bringing asteroids back from space.
- This is all awesome stuff.
We wanted to get people excited about
the problems that remain to be solved
to maybe even motivate some of the generations of people
coming into college now to think,
"These are problems I could solve in my lifetime
"that could possibly change everything."
And hopefully for the better.
I got kind of rambly with the economics part, but--
Oh wait, am I supposed to say that again?
Oh no, that was a one time.
I nailed it once.