Consider the possibilities.
by Daniel Pouzzner
All the electricity that powers your house is generated on your roof and in your basement. On your roof, you have some vacuum solar panels for heating your house and hot water. You also have some panels filled with water and genetically engineered photosynthesizing microbes that turn water and atmospheric carbon dioxide into methanol. This methanol is skimmed off to power silent-running thermionic generators in your basement, and a furnace to heat the house and hot water when there's not enough sunlight. At any given time, you store many months' worth of methanol, so that you can make it through cold dark winters. Some of the methanol is also apportioned for your car, your snowblower, snowmobile, lawn mower, wherever fuel is needed. If you're living in an urban area, you probably have to buy the methanol since you don't have a monopoly on the roof. This methanol is produced either in a microbe farm, or in a hemp farm where hemp is processed into a variety of fuels and chemicals for use in industry, agriculture, and food. Hemp seeds also directly supply the fuel to power jet engines in aircraft.
The air conditioning in your house and car uses thermionics, runs dead silent except the sound of the breeze from the vent, and is almost perfectly efficient. It also lasts for decades and never needs any sort of recharge. Your car uses thermionics to generate electricity from the methanol, and stores energy in vacuum magnetic bearing eddy-compensated flywheels. Each of the four wheels has its own motor-generator with traction control, and when you use your brakes, the motor-generators transfer the power to the flywheel so that the energy can be used later for acceleration or hill-climbing. Non-vehicular applications that require large bursts of electrical power (welding, power tools, high-power amplifiers, etc.) use the same flywheel battery technology.
Your pocket computer's CPU is a volumetric hardware-microthreaded fault-tolerant ULSI device, with thousands of processors in the space of a cubic inch. It uses a maximum of 3 watts of power; when it is not working hard, most of it is idled and it uses only a couple hundred milliwatts. Memory is distributed throughout the volume, to the tune of many gigabytes of RAM, and companion photocrystal volume memory cartridges (no moving parts) store a terabyte each. On many computation-intensive tasks (rendering, searching, etc.) it is faster than a Cray T3E supercomputer. Its display looks like a pair of eyeglasses, but is a variable translucency zoned high resolution panoramic stereoscopic imager that uses solid state rasterized lasers to create a perfectly sharp distortion-free image regardless of your uncorrected vision. Sensors embedded in the viewer detect your direction of gaze and brain activation patterns, so that you only have to direct your gaze and think your commands to control the computer. You can write memos moving nothing but your eyes, and do it faster than any typist can, and if you are very practiced, faster than anyone could speak it. In fact, you can make music, drawings and cartoons, a whole spectrum of such creative endeavors, with a similar degree of immediacy and fidelity. The ``eyeglasses'' directly stimulate your cochlea electromagnetically, creating perfect audition regardless of your level of natural hearing degradation. The vision and sound are completely undetectable by others.
Your electronic communications pass transparently through a fine mesh of point-to-point pay-per-packet frequency hopping spread spectrum microwave links positioned on private rooftops and short towers across the country, each with a bandwidth of between 100mbits/s and 2gbits/s. If you aren't running your own node in the microwave mesh, you can jack into this network by subscribing to wireless LAN's, each of which covers an area with a radius of about a quarter mile, and can handle between 10mbits/s and 100mbits/s at a time. LAN's can coexist, and the entire system is almost completely impervious to accidental or deliberate interference. In fact, it can survive the electromagnetic pulse from a high altitude nuclear explosion, as can your computer, your car, and the electrical systems in your house and workplace. The microwave mesh is owned by thousands of distinct individuals and companies, and there is an almost infinite number of usable routes to get information from one place to another. No one is in a position to control the network as a whole. Link providers compete with each other to provide the highest level of service and the lowest price. For applications that require it, binding bandwidth guarantees can be purchased.
Using the mesh, your town library gives you access to every publication in the Library of Congress, including every movie and record album, and you only pay for the packets to get it there. You can also buy any publication for download to your own computer. When you place a phone call, it passes over a LAN and the mesh, and you can choose various levels of quality, from minimum usable audio, to high-fidelity audiovisual. You can choose any level of security, up to iron-clad privacy and guaranteed authenticity with trace-foiling. You can make your own "telephone" filter out calls and email from anonymous callers, telemarketers, and lists of bothersome individuals and companies.
Satellites are routinely launched for about $20,000, using a combination of specialized electromagnetic artillery and rocket assistance. The entire nation, and neighboring portions of Canada and Mexico, are protected by a missile defense which is capable of knocking out an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile or reentry vehicle every second for up to 10 minutes, and a lesser pace while recharging. Populated areas are thoroughly protected against cruise missile and other atmospheric attacks. And the border regions of the country are surveilled with such resolution that large birds and beaching seals are detected and identified as such, as are small submarines. All ports of entry are equipped with machines that directly detect explosives, radioactive material, chemical and biochemical toxins, and biological weapons, regardless of their manner of camouflage. This is not today's reality, but it could have been - if it weren't for the anti-innovationalism of the establishment. And the astonishing truth? Many of the inventions I described already exist. Check out Borealis U.S. Flywheel Systems (also see their new corporate site, the Gerald Bull story, SAIC's TNA and PFNA technologies, Hugh Downs' commentary on hemp, Cray's MTA (erstwhile Tera Computer Company, before buying Cray from SGI, and as of 1Q2002, sidelining the MTA ostensibly for profit motives), and Thinking Machines Corporation in its previous incarnation as Danny Hillis' hardware project, for just a sampling.
Here is an inventory of historic American inventions.
The air conditioning in your house and car uses thermionics, runs dead silent except the sound of the breeze from the vent, and is almost perfectly efficient. It also lasts for decades and never needs any sort of recharge. Your car uses thermionics to generate electricity from the methanol, and stores energy in vacuum magnetic bearing eddy-compensated flywheels. Each of the four wheels has its own motor-generator with traction control, and when you use your brakes, the motor-generators transfer the power to the flywheel so that the energy can be used later for acceleration or hill-climbing. Non-vehicular applications that require large bursts of electrical power (welding, power tools, high-power amplifiers, etc.) use the same flywheel battery technology.
Your pocket computer's CPU is a volumetric hardware-microthreaded fault-tolerant ULSI device, with thousands of processors in the space of a cubic inch. It uses a maximum of 3 watts of power; when it is not working hard, most of it is idled and it uses only a couple hundred milliwatts. Memory is distributed throughout the volume, to the tune of many gigabytes of RAM, and companion photocrystal volume memory cartridges (no moving parts) store a terabyte each. On many computation-intensive tasks (rendering, searching, etc.) it is faster than a Cray T3E supercomputer. Its display looks like a pair of eyeglasses, but is a variable translucency zoned high resolution panoramic stereoscopic imager that uses solid state rasterized lasers to create a perfectly sharp distortion-free image regardless of your uncorrected vision. Sensors embedded in the viewer detect your direction of gaze and brain activation patterns, so that you only have to direct your gaze and think your commands to control the computer. You can write memos moving nothing but your eyes, and do it faster than any typist can, and if you are very practiced, faster than anyone could speak it. In fact, you can make music, drawings and cartoons, a whole spectrum of such creative endeavors, with a similar degree of immediacy and fidelity. The ``eyeglasses'' directly stimulate your cochlea electromagnetically, creating perfect audition regardless of your level of natural hearing degradation. The vision and sound are completely undetectable by others.
Your electronic communications pass transparently through a fine mesh of point-to-point pay-per-packet frequency hopping spread spectrum microwave links positioned on private rooftops and short towers across the country, each with a bandwidth of between 100mbits/s and 2gbits/s. If you aren't running your own node in the microwave mesh, you can jack into this network by subscribing to wireless LAN's, each of which covers an area with a radius of about a quarter mile, and can handle between 10mbits/s and 100mbits/s at a time. LAN's can coexist, and the entire system is almost completely impervious to accidental or deliberate interference. In fact, it can survive the electromagnetic pulse from a high altitude nuclear explosion, as can your computer, your car, and the electrical systems in your house and workplace. The microwave mesh is owned by thousands of distinct individuals and companies, and there is an almost infinite number of usable routes to get information from one place to another. No one is in a position to control the network as a whole. Link providers compete with each other to provide the highest level of service and the lowest price. For applications that require it, binding bandwidth guarantees can be purchased.
Using the mesh, your town library gives you access to every publication in the Library of Congress, including every movie and record album, and you only pay for the packets to get it there. You can also buy any publication for download to your own computer. When you place a phone call, it passes over a LAN and the mesh, and you can choose various levels of quality, from minimum usable audio, to high-fidelity audiovisual. You can choose any level of security, up to iron-clad privacy and guaranteed authenticity with trace-foiling. You can make your own "telephone" filter out calls and email from anonymous callers, telemarketers, and lists of bothersome individuals and companies.
Satellites are routinely launched for about $20,000, using a combination of specialized electromagnetic artillery and rocket assistance. The entire nation, and neighboring portions of Canada and Mexico, are protected by a missile defense which is capable of knocking out an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile or reentry vehicle every second for up to 10 minutes, and a lesser pace while recharging. Populated areas are thoroughly protected against cruise missile and other atmospheric attacks. And the border regions of the country are surveilled with such resolution that large birds and beaching seals are detected and identified as such, as are small submarines. All ports of entry are equipped with machines that directly detect explosives, radioactive material, chemical and biochemical toxins, and biological weapons, regardless of their manner of camouflage. This is not today's reality, but it could have been - if it weren't for the anti-innovationalism of the establishment. And the astonishing truth? Many of the inventions I described already exist. Check out Borealis U.S. Flywheel Systems (also see their new corporate site, the Gerald Bull story, SAIC's TNA and PFNA technologies, Hugh Downs' commentary on hemp, Cray's MTA (erstwhile Tera Computer Company, before buying Cray from SGI, and as of 1Q2002, sidelining the MTA ostensibly for profit motives), and Thinking Machines Corporation in its previous incarnation as Danny Hillis' hardware project, for just a sampling.
Here is an inventory of historic American inventions.
posted by |JZIM| @ 1/13/2006
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