the future

[Cogman]

My brother just informed me about something I had not heard about before, aparently they are making HDs that hold about 15 gb and are about an inch wide. This sounded pretty cool to my, and it got me thinking, in the next ten years what can we expect? here are some of the technologies that I think should be ready by then (might be wrong).

Carbon Nanotubes - The small superconductive and super strong material, made from something we have no lack of CARBON unfotunatly now they are only able to produce a pound a day.

Fuel Cells - May be closer then ten years, but these babies are filled with some cheap butain or Methain and away they go. Power a laptop for 8 hours.

Holographic Storage - This is more about speed then storing capabilities, instant access to all information removing the bandwidth problem we have been plagued with in recent years.

Cloned Beef - MMMmmm Beeeeffff.

 

[Matthias99]

Carbon nanotubes, AFAIK, are not *super*conductive, although they apparently do conduct better than almost any metal.

Fuel cells are apparently working in labs now, and several companies want to put out fuel cell laptop batteries in about 2 years or so. A big hurdle is FAA approval (since laptops are used by travelers so much). Apparently they have some problem with bringing pressurized butane cartridges onto airplanes...

Holographic storage hasn't really gone anywhere in the last decade, and I don't see it going anywhere in the next decade unless people make some serious inroads into optical computing (using photons rather than electrons), where an optical storage medium becomes an ideal memory.

A concept I saw talked about for a while a few years back, but that seems to have gone by the wayside now, was IBM's attempts at building high-speed magnetic core RAM (think NVRAM that operated at CMOS speeds). Maybe they couldn't make it fast enough, or cheap enough. Ironically, before they invented hard drives, this is what very early computers used as nonvolatile storage (though it cost a fortune).

 

[rjain]

carbon nanotubes do have some semiconductive properties, IIRC

I think MRAM technology is still being actively researched. ISTR some news about IBM's latest advances in the tech.

 

[DrPizza]

carbon nanotubes very well may have some superconducting properties... I'm not going to take the time to verify that, but without looking, I'll say with 99.9999% certainty that the superconducting properties of carbon nanotubes do not occur at or near room temperatures. About 20 years ago, when I was in ceramic engineering, I was nearly superconducting this, super conducting that to death... All their predictions about what the technology would bring during the following 20 years... In reality, very very few of their predictions have come to fruition. There are some specialized applications where superconductors are used, but these are few and far between (AFAIK) There are some pretty cool experiments though. Nonetheless, I don't think we'll ever see the day when devices using superconductors will be commonplace (for personal use.) That is, unless someone develops a great distribution system for liquid nitrogen.

 

[f95toli]

As far as I remember the Tc (the temperature at which a material becomes superconducting) for (doped) carbon nanotubes is around 10 K or so (could be slightly less).

High-temperature superconductivity (HTS) is actually making some progress when it comes to applications. HTS filters are already used in mobile communications and there are a few (small) commercial installations of HTS high-current cables. The US navy is currently testing HTS engines for ship propulsion. There are also a few projects on using HTS for non-destructive testing of stel and welding joints.

The thing is that new cryocooles have been developed over past few years, you do not need nitrogen of helium to reach low temperatures. A 1-stage cryocooler which can reach about 20K costs about $2.500, using multi-stage types you can reach below 4K but they are still very expensive.

MCG (magneto-something-something, lite ECG but with magnetic instead of electric readout) is also beeing used in several hospitals, it uses conventional superconducting magnetic sensors (SQUID's) but might use HTS in the future.

Finally, you have NMR (MRI) which is a huge industri, superconducting NbTi-wíre is used in the magnets.
There are a few thousand MRI machines installed worldwide each years so it is big business.

 

[Cogman]

Wooops Sorry about that, I know the diffrence between supercondutive and highly conductive, guess I just had a brain fart . What I ment to say was they conduct better then the majority of metals (does gold beat it out though?) any yet running electricity through it is very cool so they dont produce much heat, Just wondering though, If they are going to make this into a processor, how are they going to make transistors? same as they do today just with carbon?

With the fuel cells, I can see it now, man sues the company because he dropped his laptop and it literally blew up lol.

 

[f95toli]

About carbon transistors: Basically it is a field-effect device, that is one electrode at each end and one gate electrode on top. Works very well, IBM has already demonstrated working transistors that are better than what is even theoretically possible using silicon.

The problem is to mass produce them, no one has figure out how to make the carbon tubes go where you want them to and it is still very difficult to grow them in place.

 

[djNickb]

Synthesized diamonds sound like they will be the semiconductor of the future - There have been several articles on this

 

[MontysNotebook]

Have you read the Time magazine series a couple years back? It was right after 2000 started and the series lasted for six months or so.

One of the things I remember reading from it were the future TVs. They will actually be cell-sized (literally cell-sized by the way) pixels on a wallpaper-like texture and electricity will flow through them at different currents (ex. 0.5v, 1.0v, 1.5v, etc.) to form different colors. It will be applied ON the walls as wallpaper is today. When the "TV" is idle, you can turn down the backlight and make it appear as regular wallpaper.

I heard that they're trying to make it two meters wide with the standard aspect ratio for HDTV screens today. I want one of those!!! lol

-Monty