Colleague Scott Smith reports that his spam is now coming from the future:
We are now moving into the realm of post-apocalyptic sci-fi—I just got a mail from Lawgiver H. Grail. If he isn’t an elder from a tribe of cave-welling psychic albinos I don’t know who is.
The New Scientist blog reports that ever-amusing DARPA is working on organically combining electronics with insects in order to create controllable insects, presumably for espionage or recon.
A cyborg roach appeared in The Fifth Element, carrying a spy camera until it met a sorry fate.
The intersections of infotech and biotech are growing, but the likelihood of useful cyborg insects still seems low. The FuturistMovies.com estimate:
New Scientist reports that researchers are developing the means to remotely control living sharks.
Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark’s brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal’s movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling.
The sharks would be used for sensing and tracking, and experiments with the animals may soon take place off the coast of Florida. The technology is different, but I am still reminded of the movie Deep Blue Sea, in which sharks are bioengineered for larger brains. They end up so hyperintelligent—or at least aesthetically sensitive—that they know to eat the cast of the film in reverse order of attractiveness.
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An aspiring writer asks: “What type of clothing do you think would be found in the distant future, around the 23rd century?”
Virtually anything is possible that far in the future. The clothing question is dependent on the conditions that an author sets for the story. Are people constrained by wealth or technology? In other words, how wealthy is the society, and what technologies does it have available? What are the society’s values and desires? If present trends continued, the planet would be immensely wealthy and technologically advanced, but that is for an author to decide.
One could imagine anything from people wearing natural materials because that is what they prefer, to nanotechnology-based “fields” that perform every function of clothing and more.
Rebels battle a totalitarian state in near-future Britain in V for Vendetta, to be released March 17th.