What will be "The Biggest Breakthrough" in the next 50 years.. ??

[HappytheStripper]

What will be "The Biggest Scientific Breakthrough" in the next 50 years.. ??

It could be there are many breakthroughs occurring all at one time .. or seperately.. I'm especially interested in the unity of it all ..

Life: Ageing, alien life, consciousness, ecology, embryology, environment, evolution, genetics, health, humans, language, neuroscience, oceans, psychology, sex and social science.

Space and technology: Artificial intelligence, communications, computing, cosmology, space and technology.

Physical sciences: Chemistry, energy, materials, maths and physics

Ashley

[Jay-qu]

I think it will be in computing, not sure about quantum computing, but it sure looks intriguing!

[Abream]

Nanotechnology. It would affect most everything about our lives- but you did ask for the biggest breakthrough...

[freeztar]

Energy! (I hope) A much more efficient form of sun-harvesting...
Clean, cheap energy could affect just about everything.

[orbsycli]

We have no idea.

All the technology that's ever been developed EVER

DOUBLES

every five years. In 50 years.... I think AI will have surpassed human intelligence and we will be using it to further progress our own intelligence.

We're going to have such a greater understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in in 50 years that 2007 is going to look like "childs play"

Love,
ik

[firecracker]

I think government owned and operated postoffices and land-line telephones will disappear. I also think we will find out that we have been lied to about many things for many years. Using information that has been concealed from us, we will be able to make unimagineable discoveries. There is a base on the dark side of the moon! The earth itself is riddled with caves and tunnels used by aliens without our being aware! It is just a very short matter of 'time' that we will have wall-paper like TV/Computing screens that can be made interactive. Holographic and other types of virtual reality is just around the corner.

[Boerseun]

A sufficiently advanced technology 'being indistinguishable from magic', and as ever-advancing technology will demand an ever-growing investment in study and time in order to actually *understand* its workings, normal, everyday consumers will grow ever-distant from it, and their understanding of it will keep on shrinking. This will alienate the common man from those inventing and building the new technology, and might even cause an even bigger swing towards religion as an *understandable* counterargument to this *magic* that is all over the place.

And pardon my french, but religion is based on a belief in the supernatural, things that don't exist, but it does give one a fluffy feeling in the gut that somewhere, out there, a Big Dude is watching after your interests. And religion is very skeptical of science, the driving force behind technological inventiveness and progress. The advancement in technology over the next 50 years might be the very vehicle that alienates people from it, slowing its pace, even precipitating a big shift *away* from it.

But the inherent dangers aside, I guess the biggest advancement in the next 50 years should be in the energy field, not so much demand-driven, but more because if we don't spend a helluva lot of buck in researching it now, there might not be much of a future left.

One can only hope.

And one can also only hope that governments turn away from pleasing only the religious constituents and start spending more money on science teaching at high school level so that tomorrow's consumers aren't as alienated from technology as my father, for instance, is alienated from computers (as an example). Maybe a new required subject in high school can be introduced called "Understanding modern technology".

Just a thought...

[HappytheStripper]

Originally Posted by NS

Special Report on Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years - New Scientist

Instant Expert: Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years

What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations we asked over 70 of the world's most brilliant scientists for their ideas.
In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.

Ashley