• Today’s cryonics scientists believe that this future may be a mere 100 years away. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., the world’s largest cryonics company, charges US $150,000 to freeze and maintain a body and $80,000 for a head, typically paid for with a life insurance policy.
• Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology expert and a director at Alcor, believes the best approach lies in developing nanorobots that can repair the body at the cellular level before thawing. They would fix or replace diseased and deteriorated tissue as well as the tissue fractures and denatured proteins that result from the freezing process itself. The revival process would, ideally, restore the physiology of dead persons to a pristine level, not only undoing the damage of whatever disease or accident killed them but also enabling them to return smarter and healthier than they ever were in life.
• ”We’re talking about a fundamentally more powerful medical technology than we have today that will continue the evolution of the concepts of life and death,” says Merkle, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.
• Before the body is cooled to –196 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which liquid nitrogen becomes a gas), the person’s blood is replaced by a cryoprotective solution that doesn’t freeze at those temperatures. Technically, the body and cryoprotective solution are not frozen but vitrified — that is, they solidify into a glassy substance that’s free of ice crystals and the damage they can cause.
• The first step in the future regeneration process would remove this vitrified liquid, letting physicians use the circulatory system as a series of tunnels through which they could run nanomedical robots, nanomaterials and a removable high-speed fiber-optic network connecting to an external supercomputer.
• ”It takes about 10 to the 25th bits to store the molecular structure of the brain,” says Merkle. ”The processing power to repair the brain alone might be 10 to the 37th; switching operations — the equivalent of 100 million copies of today’s fastest supercomputer running flat out for three years. With Moore’s Law doubling computer power every year, we’ll have that kind of computational power in a single supercomputer in about 26 years,” he adds.
• ”Give it another 10 years and the price will drop from $100 million to $100,000. Somewhere around 2050, that much computational power will be readily available to individuals.” And it doesn’t matter if Moore’s Law slows down, Merkle says: ”A person at the temperature of liquid nitrogen can literally wait centuries.”

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

2020:

UTA (Universal Tactical Attachment) is a user installed, tactical force multiplier: It enables a trooper armed with a long firearm (assault rifle, shotgun or SMG) and a Glock pistol to mount the pistol under the long firearm, thereby creating a unified, tactically enhanced, dual weapon system.

frontlineassembly:

(CBS)  In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that’s inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.

You’ll generate your own electricity with the box and it’ll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.

It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive - until now.

K.R. Sridhar invited “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade.

CBS Video

givemesomethingtoread:

Inside the rush to recruit, train, and deploy a new generation of cybersecurity experts to protect and defend our digital borders.

(via criminalwisdom)

Hacked Mattel Brain Toy Delivers Painful Electric Shocks for Thinking

• A toy that reads your brain waves to manipulate a foam ball sounds fun — until said toy begins manipulating other things, too. Like your body’s pain receptors. Doesn’t sound too thrilling to us, but a few geeks apparently thought it’d be a great idea.
• According to GeekoSystem, some folks at Harcos Laboratories took Mattel’s Mindflex and hacked it to deliver a painful electric shock to the user. Strap the device on your head, and challenge yourself not to think — not even a little bit. If your brain is a little active, you’ll get a little shock. The more activity inside your head, the more intense of a shock you’ll feel. If you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a step-by-step how-to on the Harcos blog. Attempt at your own risk.

• Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
• Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
• The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

(“Your papers, please.”)

• Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.
• The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.
• Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.
• In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.
• Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”
• He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies…
• Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

Related:

e9/11 Preparation: Bush Officials Plan Simulated Cyber-Attack

Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google Underground’

• The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.
• Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”
• But Geospatial Corporation is already doing it. The company, started in 2005 by longtime water-pipeline manufacturer Mark Smith, uses a proprietary gadget called  ‘Smart Probe’ to map deep earth via underground pipes. The company’s probe can be inserted into pipes as small as 1 1/2 inches, and then travel their length while taking super-speedy coordinates — 800 per second — and saving them onto a USB key. The probe is removed, the data extracted, and a 3D map of the underground region is created. The probe can travel through pipes that are empty, or contain fluid or gas.

(nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide!)

• The 11th annual “Mad Scientist” Future Technology seminar from 20 – 23 January 2010 addressed the challenge of blended S&T surprise. Specifically, it brought together a dynamic group of scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academicians and students from the private sector and government to look into the future and explore ideas about the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might challenge the United States. This executive summary provides an overview of the judgments, insights and implications from that seminar.

Robot wars, out of control nanotech, EMP bombs/guns, dark webs, Mad Scientist futures, all the good stuff.

Unabomber Raises Uneasy Questions for Stanford Scholar

The Unabomber warned that technology had mutated civilization – and French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès thinks he’s right.