The present technology is spectacular when compared to merely 10 years ago, and unthinkable when placed next to the devices from 100 years ago. The future clearly holds instruments and equipment that will surely outdo some of the contemporary gadgets and electronics that are so common. While there are too many directions to go when deciding what the “best” technology that the future holds, I have attempted to find four different categories that show what one can look forward to. Of course, there will be a second part to this article, one day, in the future…

So, now comes part 1 in a seemingly infinite series, the best technology that hasn’t arrived:

Tech: The hoverboard
First Prototype: Back to the Future 2
Street Date (estimated): 2015

Skateboarding has been around since some unknown date in the 1950s, and, even though it has had several breakthroughs in technology in terms of equipment, there hasn’t really been anything that completely revolutionized the sport. Football got astroturf, cheerleaders, and rules that prevent death, basketball got engineered footwear, cheerleaders, and convicts, and baseball got steroids.

But the best improvement that skateboarding has gotten is a apathetic tie between better bearings that increase speed or helmets to increase life expectancy. That is, until Doc took Marty to the future and Marty got a sweet hoverboard.

While this technology is less than ten years off, there is no doubt that this device will forever change the way that street hooligans will disrupt sidewalk ogres as well as increasing my chances of dying. Of course, my extreme deficiency of effectively being able to kill myself in the present has led me to solve the future in my own spare time.

To create a standard Manavian-Mcfly Super Hoverboard© v 1.1alpha, just follow these simple steps:

Collect these materials:
1. A few spindles of copper wire
2. A stop sign (you will have to “acquire” this from the city)
3. Two AA batteries, duct taped together
4. A baking sheet, wrapped in a double layer of aluminum foil
5. A 9 volt battery
6. A moisture free room, like a sauna
7. Construct the hoverboard as seen in diagram 4.1: The baking sheet is first wrapped in two layers of foil, then tightly coiled with copper wire, which will be connected to the two AA batteries later. Then, take your stop sign and coil two layers of copper wire, and connect the two ends of the wire to the 9 volt’s terminals.

(Click image for a larger version)

Your finished pieces should be similar to the diagram seen above. When your board and hover platform are both completed, connect the duct tape battery pack to the hoverboard via the two ends of the electromagnetic coil, and hop on the board. The resulting electromagnetism from the board and platform will cause you to hover! Congratulations, and have fun with your future tech.

Tech: SED (Surface-Conduction Electron-Emitter Display)
First Prototype: 2006 Consumer Electronics Show
Street Date (estimated): Toshiba’s plans to produce SED TVs in July 2007

While the gradual change from standard 480i television sets to 720p/1080i and higher resolution displays is slowly gaining momentum, a major factor that deters most consumers is the price range. While it is very easy to find an LCD (liquid crystal display) HDTV that is fairly inexpensive and offers benefits over standard TV monitors, the undeniable truth is that a similar sized, lower definition TV consumes less power, and can support higher refresh rates. But, these conventional CRT (cathode ray tube) TV’s are also much larger, sometimes up to five times deeper, which makes a CRT television over 36” a rather gargantuan piece of equipment.

Canon noticed this problem 20 years ago and began doing SED research in 1986, and Toshiba jumped aboard in 2004. The development is taking a long time, but the consumer gains seem to be worth it. Essentially, an SED aims to take the higher contrast ratios and higher refresh rates from CRT’s and couple them with the lean, space-saving spatiality of an LCD, with the added bonus of less power consumption.

Toshiba has announced that they will price their SED’s within the same range as current LCD’s, but due to the delayed release of this technology (from 2006 to late 2007), LCD’s may soon drop to lower than current prices, thus making SED’s competition much more intense.

Tech: Beriev Be-2500 Neptune: Amphibian Cargo Aircraft
First Prototype: Cold War era, also seen in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Flight Simulator X
Street Date (estimated): ?? (currently model stages), older models like the Be-200 are on market

Travel has been revolutionized several times, first with the wheel, then with the carriage, boat, train, automobile, and airplane, and total world exploration has increased along with these bounds in technology. While migration is faster today than ever before, one seemingly major problem with boats is that their speed is slow relative to the other types of travel.

Sure, there are high-performance dual engine speed boats made purely of carbon fiber that are employed by drug dealers, governments, and other types of organized crime, but these are typically small, sleek units that are only capable of holding small crews and a handful of passengers. For years, a Russian corporation called the Beriev Aircraft Company has made use of a fast moving boat that solves this problem.

They have been deeply involved with the advance of high speed shipping and transportation across large bodies of water. The Beriev Aircraft Company is a major part in the drastic improvement of ocean travel and long range emergency response, as well as a great leap forward for the shipping industry.

Most container ships, like the Emma Mærsk, can hold about 11,000 containers at 14 tons each, a total of 154,000 tons, but travel slow and steady at about 30 mph, and are solely meant for cargo. A Beriev amphibious aircraft, known as an Ekranoplan- which is Russian for “screen plane”, is theoretically capable of traveling at velocities of 280 mph across multiple terrain and environments at ground level.

It’s ability to travel over terrain such as ice, water, cement, and dirt with a load of 1100 tons is due to the fact that it flies at about 10 feet above the water. The Be-2500 also has another unique advantage over cargo ships: it can fly at altitudes of 33,000 ft. (a Boeing 747 operates at about 42,000 ft.) with a full cargo or passenger load.

While this will no means replace current cargo ships, or even future ones like the Malacca Max (18,000 containers or 252,000 tons of cargo!), this can help ease exploration expeditions by combining the capacity for large amounts of equipment and passengers and high altitude movement of airplanes with the “land anywhere” attitude of a sea plane. It is also capable of functioning within current boat docks and shipping yards as if it were any other vessel. Plus, piracy would be harder since the vehicle can reach high speeds and can lift off the water or travel over land. Ultimately, this technology is nothing new, but with the release of the Be-2500, a new era of this unique innovation will begin.

Tech: Quantum Computer
First Prototype: None
Street Date (estimated): 2030

The Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 , the Athlon 64 FX-74 4×4, the Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition QX6700, the ENIAC. Idiots. Morons. None of these current computer processors can even rival the theoretical power that is behind the quantum mechanical procedure. Today’s central processor units, as well as any CPU that is released within the next 10 years or so, will employ the standard computer design of bits that can hold either 1’s or 0’s and can be transferred to memory via logic gates (a series of gates composed of NOT, AND, OR, XOR; a boolean gate).

Quantum mechanics allow data to be placed into qubits, which can hold 1’s, 0’s, and, here’s the catch, both one and zero superposed. In other words, different data can be held simultaneously in the same qubit. While this breakthrough technology can change the way computers are used, from better video game performance to faster computational mathematics, there are some drawbacks.

Without going too far into a lecture for quantum computation analysis, a list of the main problems from Wikipedia will help explain the problems with a quantum processor core:

There are a number of practical difficulties in building a quantum computer, and thus far quantum computers have only solved trivial problems. David DiVincenzo, of IBM, listed the following requirements for a practical quantum computer:
-scalable physically to increase the number of qubits
-qubits can be initialized to arbitrary values
-quantum gates faster than decoherence time
-Turing-complete gate set
-qubits can be read easily
To summarize the problem from the perspective of an engineer, one needs to solve the challenge of building a system which is isolated from everything except the measurement and manipulation mechanism. Furthermore, one needs to be able to turn off the coupling of the qubits to the measurement so as to not decohere the qubits while performing operations on them.

While this list can very well be translated into a more comfortable understanding, the scope of this article does not allow it. Instead, the basic idea of quantum mechanics will be demonstrated using the model of Schroedinger’s Cat. Please refer to Diagram 6 below.

The basic premise of the model is fairly straightforward: A cat is placed into a box with a radioactive atom. If the atom begins to decay, a Geiger counter inside the box detects a change in alpha particles and activates a switch that causes a hammer to break a flask of acid onto a cat, killing it (or just torturing it). If the atom does not decay, the cat lives, and can sleep and purr once again.

(Click image for a larger version)

While Schroedinger clearly does not like cats, it appears that the cat has a good chance to survive and be taken out of this box of agony. But, of course, this anti-feline propagator has another wild card to play: The atom is in a state of superposition, a state in which it is both decayed and undecayed. Thus, along with the atom, the cat is in a superposition of dead and alive states, which will not be interrupted until the box is opened. Once the box is opened and seen by an observer, the superposed states collapses and the observer sees the cat as either live or dead, depending on the state that they observed.

Now apply this to a quantum computer: how can a computer engineer allow the correct data to be “observed” in order to allow the simultaneous nature of a qubit it be advantageous? Clearly, before the market releases quantum processors chips, innovations and discoveries must be made to improve the application of this type of architecture.

Until next time, have a happy future!

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