Making Future Tech

Making Future Tech

Lots of the time the future tech talked about in these blogs never become anything because some of these things are too hard to make with the current technology we have isn’t advanced enough or they don’t get enough funding. There are also people that will doubt you and try to bring you down. That’s why there are websites like Kickstarter for people that don’t have the funding for there ideas. Kickstarter is a place where people can get funding for ideas they have there is a problem with this though because people could have an idea get the money for it but never do anything with it and take the money. There are other things like really good ideas not getting noticed like a guy trying to make a better spark plug but he needs $500 000 and at the moment only has $1000 with 9 days left. There have been some really good things that have come from Kickstarter like headphones the mold to your ear to make a perfect fit that has 2 Million dollars in funding so far.

Then there are the big companies that have the funding to make the idea happen but the technology that we have already needs to be better to do what they need. It’s like Jaguars augmented reality windshield they have the idea and the funding but the technology we have isn’t quite there yet. There is also tech that can be used in testing in a lab but is not ready to be used in homes or in real world tests. Lots of things are just ideas and will always be ideas they never get made or the idea just doesn’t work and they scrap it.

As an example of making future tech we can look at trains. It is a dream that all the cities in the world would one day be connected by trains that could make the journey in a short amount of time. The really big problem with making trains go faster is that it takes a lot of power to push the air out of the the way for example a train going 480 km/h uses about 27 times more power than a train going at 160 km/h. At ground level the air is very dense which means there is a lot more resistance than a plane flying at 35 000 ft. Another problem with faster trains is the bends and curves they go around for this they designed a train that would tilt going around corners almost like a motorcycle going threw a turn the idea was good but it's not used to much. Then they designed a maglev which requires a different train and track with the train is hovering using magnets the friction other wheels and track is lowered allowing for more comfort and speed. Now we have the idea of Elon Musk's Hyperloop which will be a train line that runs under ground in vacuum tubes which would reduce the air resistance on the train allowing it to go faster.

https://www.kickstarter.com/

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140813-the-challenge-to-make-trains-fast

Future Tech

Future Tech

            Jaguar has a concept for an augmented reality windshield for your car. It’s not out yet but they say I could reach production in 10 years. The windshield would be able to show race lines and depending on the colour you would accelerate or brake. The windshield could also display cones on the road to train novice drivers. It also has a ghost car visualization that could let people race against it on the real road. They also have plans using augmented reality to make your hood transparent so you could see the road and your wheels while off-roading. It would make driving the car almost like a video game.

DARPA has released video footage of a .50 caliber bullet that can alter its course during flight. The technology has been in development for a couple years and still needs more time before it will be used by troops. The bullet doesn’t just make a slight shift or curve it actually makes quite a significant detour in mid-flight. The sniper can make real time adjustments for weather, wind, and moving targets. This technology would be really god for keeping troops safe because the enemy wouldn’t be able to tell the position the bullet came from. Visions of these kinds of weapons were used in video games but now they are a real life thing.

Floating farms are a thing of the future because there are going to be a lot more people in the world and that means we need more food. The only problem is we can only have so much farming land so we have to start build farms up. The UN predicts there will be 2 billion more people in the world in 2050. That would create a demand for 70% more food. That’s where the floating farm idea comes in it will be a 24 m 3 tiered design with solar panels on the top to provide power. The middle tier would grow a variety a vegetables using nutrients in liquid the nutrients and plant matter would then drop to the bottom layer to feed fish. A singles farm could produce 8.1 tonnes of vegetables and 1.7 tonnes of fish a year.

In the military there is a bunch of future tech that is in the works. The UK aerospace and defense contractor BAE systems have several concepts that it envisions as possible military weapons in decades to come. There most interesting concept is the Transformer which is made up if a larger diamond shaped plane and two smaller triangle shaped planes attached behind it. The Transformer could conserve fuel by reducing drag. They also have a plane called the Survivor that could repair itself mid-flight. It would achieve this by having a lightweight adhesive fluid within a pattern of carbon nanotubes. When the plane was hit the adhesive fluid would repair the plane. They also have plans for an aircraft that could make and deploy UAVs with an onboard printer. BAE says these concepts are what might be possible in 20 to 30 years.

http://mashable.com/2014/07/08/transformer-aircraft/#iOHQ8pRuakq5

http://mashable.com/2014/07/14/darpa-guided-bullet/#A.lgNotKQOqn

http://mashable.com/2014/07/14/jaguar-augmented-reality/#efmh46ywl5qw

http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/land-rovers-see-through-hood-shows-the-road-under-your-wheels/#OibMuzI8XiqW

New Tech

New Tech

                The new technology Wi-Fi technology Li-Fi is really fast it is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. In lab tests the fastest speed they have ever gotten is 224 Gbps. The speed is amazing it is so fast because it transfers data threw LED bulbs in your house. It sounds really good but there are some downsides to this idea. The biggest problem is that you need to have a Li-Fi bulb in every room you want to have Li-Fi in. It also doesn’t work out in direct daylight. Li-Fi is also going to need reinvestments in lighting and wiring infrastructure.

            The technology that is coming out from Amazon and there drone delivery is pretty cool. They have done some practice deliveries and it seems promising at the moment. The drones can only fly 15 miles from the warehouse so it’s not the best option for delivering things just yet. It even has technology in it to avoid other things that are in the skies. Drones in general have advanced a lot. They are used for lots of movies because they are smaller than a helicopter and can fly really stable. Some drones can even take off and land on their own.

            Yesterday December 10 Germany launched the world’s largest fusion reactor. It is the world’s first large scale stellarator and it took 1.1 million working hours to assemble. The reactor will have to heat and hold gases that are 7 times the temperature of the suns core. The heat strips the electrons from atoms leaving plasma of electrons and ions. The reactor also makes the ions move fast enough to overcome the repulsion and fuse together. The older fusion reactor the tomahawk was in a plain donut shape. The gases are hard to contain in a normal container so they have to use a magnetic field around the donut to hold it in. The only problem with that is the magnetic field is that it’s stronger on the inside than it is on the outside so they have to put a twist in the donut so the ions go through strong and week points. The problem with tomahawk reactors is they can only drive a current in the plasm in short bursts and the current in the plasma can falter resulting in disruptions which could damage the reactor. Stellarators don’t have these problems so the might be good for commercial use. The magnets are being cooled with liquid helium. The new reactor in Germany is being tested with helium and then they will use hydrogen.

          Honda has reveled a new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. There is enough hydrogen to carry it 700 km and it only takes about 3 minutes to fill up which is about the same as a gasoline car. The new hydrogen cell is rated at 3.1 kW per liter. The car can also be used as an emergency generator and could supply AC power to a home for an entire week when fully charged.



http://www.gizmag.com/honda-clarity-fuel-cell/40133/
http://purelifi.com/
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/10/feature-bizarre-reactor-might-save-nuclear-fusion
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/29/media/amazon-drone-video-prime-air/

Leaders in the Field

Leaders in the Field

            Elon Musk is probably one of the biggest people working on future tech. He has so many plans for the future. It all started out with Musk being born in Africa to his mom who was a model from Regina and his dad who was an African born electromechanical Engineer. When he was 10 he learned to code and made a simple video game. He then went to Canada to go to university and then Pennsylvania to continue his schooling then to Stanford but left because he wanted to pursue his own ideas. Then Musk went on to make SpaceX, Solar City, PayPal and Tesla Motors. He is now building a Gigafactory that will produce all the battery's for Tesla's in the future He even wants to detonate nuclear weapons on both of the poles on Mars. The reason he wants to do it is because he wants to heat up the planet so humans can live there.

            Steve Jobs was probably one of the leaders in phone and early personal computer technology when Apple was first started. Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955. Him and his friend Steve Wozniak was one of the first to start developing personal computers. They started in Steve’s house were they built the first Apple computer. Apple really took off at first they were making a lot of money but then windows came in and they were starting to make better computers than Apple. September 17, 1985 Jobs left Apple to pursue other things. After Jobs left Apple he went to NeXT computer then NeXT was bought by Apple. Jobs also worked with Pixar and Disney. Jobs then went back to Apple when NeXT was bought. In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer and he refused to get treatment he was trying natural healing to beat it. Jobs died in October 5, 2011 from complications from his previously treated cancer. Now apple is producing really thin and fast computers and phones.

           Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and he got his success from Microsoft. Gates was enrolled into a private preparatory school. He then started to code some small games like tic-tac-toe. He then graduated with an SAT score of 1590 out of 1600. He then enrolled at Harvard and spent most of his time on the computers but then the Intel 8080 cpu was released and Gates decided it was an opportunity to start his own company. He then started Microsoft and then launched windows. People said he was the kind of person who was only reachable by phone and would never return calls. On June 15, 2006 Gates said he would slowly transition out of his day to day work at Microsoft and continue his work in philanthropy. Now gates focuses on other projects and he also donates lots of his money to charity. Now Microsoft has added to there production with phones, Microsoft word, Xbox one, and things like windows 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

Old Tech vs New Tech

Old Tech vs New Tech

            It is really crazy how much things have changed from even just 15 years ago. Cellphones have probably changed the most in 15 years. 15 years ago phones were all flip phones that could only really call people. There were also brick phones but those are even too old for me I don’t know what they did. Now we have phone’s that are as thin as paper and have touchscreens. They can also do more than just call people they can text, go online, give you directions, and even talk to you. The processors in the phones have gotten really good. It is crazy that computers used to take up a whole room almost and now we all have computers that are like a million times better than those old computers in our pocket. Now they have phones like the galaxy S6 that can charge wirelessly by just setting it down on a charging pad. Who knows what will come next with phones maybe you’ll be able to charge off Wi-Fi from your house.

Old Cellphone vs New Cellphone

            Cars and the way they are made have also changed a lot from years ago. It all started with people making horse shoes and wagon wheels and then evolved into a car factory with people and machines working together and now it is going to be the Tesla Gigafactory producing 50GWh in annual battery production and that is enough for 500,000 Tesla cars. The engines in the car have become more powerful and that makes the cars faster. The things like the material that the car is made out of and the oil that you put in the car makes the car last longer and oil changes are a lot less often. Inside of the car there have been a lot of changes the safety in the car has improved a lot. All the parts inside the car have changed almost all cars have heated seat some even have cooled seats there are also heated steering wheels. Most cars also have a touchscreen with the radio and a gps in it. Cars in the future will most likely be like Tesla they will be fully electric and they won’t need oil or any fluids really.

Old Car Shop vs New Car Shop

            The factories and people making these things have also changed. If you think about older car shops they are all dirty because there has been oil and other fluids spilled on the floor from the cars. Then you look at the new Tesla shops and since they are electric and don’t need oil the shop would be really clean. Even the people in the factories have been swapped out with robots to make things more precise and faster. And the robots will never quit working or get hurt and you don’t have to pay them. At the moment you still need people to operate the robots or at least program them. So maybe in the future robots will be able to do everything by themselves and we won’t have to do anything.

https://www.teslamotors.com/en_CA/gigafactory

http://www.samsung.com/ca/consumer/mobile-devices/smartphones/galaxy-s/SM-G925WZKABMC

Future Tech First Blog

First Blog

One of my passions is learning about and using future technology. I got hooked learning about new technology that was coming out when I was young and was playing video games. I would always want the new console that was faster and could run better games. Then I got a phone and I started looking at all the new phones that were thinner and lighter and faster. Now I have a computer and I look at the faster CPU’s and graphics cards that are coming out. I also look at things coming out from Tesla like there Model X or the Powerwall but I don’t think I’m going to get anything from Tesla anytime soon because they don’t have any Super chargers or stores in Saskatchewan.

 There are some really cool things that are coming out from tesla and other companies like Google, Apple, and Samsung. It is really awesome to learn about the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge that can charge for ten minutes and have 4 hours of battery life or even wirelessly charge. Apple is making their phones and computers extremely thin but still fast and they look really good. Tesla is making fully electric cars that are fast and stylish and they just updated their cars to have autopilot and they are also beginning to make a battery that can charge off solar panels and power your entire house.

It is also cool to learn about what the people behind these companies have in plan for the future and what stuff they are making. Elon Musk is the owner of Tesla and he has the Model X planned for Tesla but he also owns Space X and co-founded Solar City. Solar city is a company that is trying to get more homes to run off solar power in the U.S. its also a plus because you can charge your Tesla off solar power. Space X is a private aerospace manufacture and space transport service company. They are trying to make a rapidly reusable launch system and they are planning to make rockets that go to mars to colonize it. Google has started working on an autonomous vehicle but it’s not going to well considering it got pulled over by the cops for going to slow. 



https://www.teslamotors.com/en_CA/