The Future

Yesterday was all about science, and today offers a little more science coupled with imagination.  The things I want to share with you today are ideas and concepts that are taking off right now--hopes and dreams that in another twenty to fifty years may be realities.  Or, they could just prove to be yet another of those many nifty ideas that never made it into our present future. 

Let's start off with a great song by Imagine Dragons--"Radioactive."



So what do you think of when you think of flying cars?  The Jetsons?  Those futurists from the 90's?  A Schwarzenegger movie?

Well, the dream of a flying car might not be that far off--as well as cars that can drive themselves.  As we become a more technologically advanced society, those same networks and systems that allow us to traverse the internet could be allowing us to travel in the real world, too.  Or at least, that's what the people at Terrafugia believe.

This next video was done in May of 2013, and I found it by checking out a Twitter comment by Nathon Fillion of Firefly and Castle fame and THE Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.  Apparently this is his dream car.


If you're interested in learning more about this, there is an informational webcast going on tomorrow that you can sign up to attend.  Check out this site here, and if you do attend, please let us know what you found out!

From the future to the "past of future", I want to take you now on a journey to Disney and their idea of what life would be like in Tomorrow Land.  I have always been excited about what life would be like in the future, and watching many old videos from the sixties reminded me of just how far we have, and haven't, come.  Where are all those amazing fold away storage units for our dishes?  Why can't my clothes come with a self-ironing tool?

In this video, Spotted Dog Productions takes us back a ways to the beginnings of Tomorrow Land and shows us what Disney has done to update it over the years.



Last, but not least, I leave you with two really exciting medical articles about advances that are coming in our future for diabetes sufferers and people with heart conditions.

The first article details a 3-D printed, electronic heart membrane that has a lot of uses, among them being able to prevent heart attacks.  It's still in the early stages of development, but could be viable and useable within 15 to 20 years.  By being able to create a membrane that is essentially a "fit" for peoples' hearts--using MRI scans and CT scans to get a good model of the heart and then using those to "print" the membrane--they can monitor pressure, pH levels, stimulate the heart for people who have arrhythmias, and likely a whole host of other things.

Our next article comes from Google's own blog about their intention to create contact lenses that can measure glucose levels through tears to help diabetes sufferers around the world.  By 2030 they estimate that one in three adults will have some form of diabetes, and while people right now have to prick their fingers to measure glucose in a blood sample, these contacts would eliminate that need, as well as providing a warning system to sufferers when their glucose levels are low.  How cool is that?

Google admits it's still in the planning phase, but I'm certainly looking forward to what the future holds.

Oh!  I nearly forgot one last video.  This is from a TED talk about being able to use our current technology in brain imagery scanning to make better thought-to-image translations.  That may sound a little far-fetched and scary, but they've all ready managed to create "thought images" from our brains using technology we all ready have.  Unfortunately, the images are not very focused yet, and they could use some refining.  And that's what Mary Lou Jepsen is aiming to fix.  Check it out!