For me it’s Open Source AGI not controlled by the enshittifying power of capital
Lab-grown meat that is both indistinguishable from animal-grown and is cheaper. Bonus points if they can make bacon have 100% of our daily vitamins and minerals.
I’d like to see fusion power (or some other good power source) become a thing. It’d be nice to live in a society where energy usage was basically safe and free.
If we’re being unrealistic, easy access to ftl spacecraft for everyone would be nice. Exploring the galaxy sounds fun.
Sure it’ll be safe, but free is a pipe dream under our current system
The last time I checked fusion was …check notes… just about fifty years away.
For the last 40 years it’s been down to 20 years away.
Well, that was mostly right— until we actually built one. Now we’ve built 3 fusion reactors. It’s no longer theoretical.
Now comes the phase of overcoming certain limitations wrt scaling up the tech to make commercially-viable reactors, and estimating that at about another 15-20 years (considering the rapid advances of the last few years) isn’t unrealistic.
Before it was a question of, “can we even do this?” We’re finally past that milestone. Now it just a matter of the very achievable goal of scaling up the reactors. The timeline for that is much more predictable.
Those scaling issues have always been the issues. We’ve had working reactors for over 65 years.
“The first experiment to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion was accomplished using Scylla at LANL in 1958.”
And don’t think that the NIF ignition results are the kind of breakthrough that headlines make it out to be - that project is weapons research, and is not designed to produce power, nor is it anywhere close to doing so when the power to the lasers is measured and not just what the pellet absorbs.
However, what’s new in the last few years is commercial investment in fusion, and I do think that it will make the difference that the last 65 years haven’t. Maybe even in the next 20 years™
we attained net-positive over a year ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html
as for scaling issues, we have just been able to tolerate 100 million degree reaction for a record amount of time, a breakthrough that sets a new milestone. a pretty big step beyond, ahem, 1958.
You’ve been taken in by intentionally deceptive headlines.
The energy absorbed by the pellet (what they are measuring as the “input”) is something like 1/20th or worse of the energy used to power the lasers. The output is greater than that “input” by a little, but again, nowhere near the actual energy used, and it won’t ever be at that experiment because it’s not designed for it, it’s designed so we can simulate H-bombs without setting off real ones.
The next major goal is still overall energy-positive output, right? We’ve only breached the threshold of output > input naively, without considering any external energy costs. I hope we get there though, it would be very neat!
Oh, no, we’ve managed net positive! That was the most critical achievement, and we finally did it last year! Not a whole lot, but we have. The problems we’re encountering now is dealing with the massive heat produced. But we just hit a new milestone in dealing with that, too!
Progress is being made, and that’s (the heat) is one of the biggest factors now in scaling up. But it’s an achievable goal. The more heat we can handle during the reaction, the bigger reactors we can build.
We did?? I thought it was just net energy gain from the impulse itself!
yeah, over a year ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html
it’s been replicated twice since then
What’s funny is that we DO have access to fairly clean energy already! Nuclear and renewables (not as much solar, until we solve the rare earth metals problem) are pretty darn clean. I mean… have you looked up Thoroum reactors? Those things are really neat, much safer and better for the environment, etc., but came just a bit too late combined with the nuclear scare.
Sustained fusion
Sustained net positiv fusion.
It’s plausible that we’ll see it in our lifetime.
Would be nice
That’s the first thing that comes into my mind when people say ‘you can’t spend that much money’, when thinking of being a billionaire.
I would finance the living shit out of fusion technology. You know. For mankind and such.
Cure for cancer
The problem is that there is not one cancer. But a myriad of cancers. That is the actual problem.
Same goes for the common cold…
Yeah, and better don’t tell people that coronaviridae are a big part of that - long before SARS_CoV_2/Covid_19.
Yeah. Cancer is more of a name for a condition than it is a specific disease. There will never be a single cure for this entire category of diseases.
“Cures for cancers” then
🤞
Evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. It would be so cool. I just hope its far enough we cant get there and fuck everything up for them (or that they cant do the same to us)
Perhaps we call them and it takes 400 years for them to get here and fuck things up.
Net zero carbon emissions worldwide
He said “technological” advancement, not “political”. I think the greed and slow politics is what is holding us back here, not technology.
Fusion reactors that produce all the (electrical) power we need.
This is the big one. With infinite energy you can basically do matter transmutation and end most forms of commodity scarcity.
I think the “promise” of fusion is a huge misunderstanding.
I mean we already have a nearly infinite source of clean energy, it’s called fission. The only difference between fission and fusion is that fusion will be much more expensive.
If you want a truly unlimited source of energy, we have those too, they’re wind and solar.
Seriously though, the expectations for fusion are completely rediculous, when we finally do get it working, it will be the most expensive form of energy ever concieved. If the reactors use the standard method of generating energy, heat capture to run a turbine, it will also require enormous amounts of beryllium as part of the “blanket” around the reactor. How much beryllium will be needed? In the whole world, we probably have enough beryllium for 4 grid scale reactors, the cost of which would be astronomical.
Here’s the worst part, over time those blankets would absorb neutrons, the materials would degrade and eventually the now radioactive blanket would have to be disposed of and replaced.
The tldr is this - tokamak and stellerator style fusion reactors work great in theory, they will probably successfully make sustainable fusion reactions quite soon. But they may never generate electricity in practice, they’re a logistical and economical nightmare.
I do think fusion could make a fantastic spacecraft engine however, I expect that will be a huge application.
That god is a chemically sustained illusion, and the dismantling of religion.
I want robot body parts.
I want to live forever, or at least until I get lazy and flash some shady firmware to my robotic heart…
Alzheimer/Dementia cure. That would be so nice.
Hyper compact batteries, that would change everything overnight
Room temperature superconductors. Not for any of the particular uses per se, but just because the world would go nuts and it would be interesting to see.
- Find proof of extraterrestrial life
- Find out what causes gravity and learn to use it (just imagine a world in which we could create gravity)
- Master matter and build Replicators
- Get a grasp of what time is and why we don’t have a real perception of it
Wait, which Replicator are you taking about? It makes a difference.
Oh, I meant the ‘make me a sandwich’ - device from Star Trek.
I want to see wide-spread adoption of organ transplants using decellularization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decellularization
A 3d printer in every home and a larger one in each neighbourhood. Design our own stuff instead of buying garbage that falls apart.
A self-hosted AI, which isn’t controlled by any bigtech company, would be pretty sweet.
The end of surveillance capitalism.
-Discovering extraterrestrial life
-Phasing out of disposable plastics and gasoline vehicles
-Transferring to clean energy and clean industrial processes whenever applicable
-More widespread ethical and sustainable farming practices
-Lab grown organs and/or more efficient artificial body parts
-Improved healthcare system/healthcare research
-Better treatments and potentially cures for chronic and/or rare diseases
-Much longer lifespans
I just think we don’t live long enough even with the current best case scenerios lolThough some of this would be viable now, if it weren’t for capitalism/politics holding it back so might not entirely count
