Seems the world has come face to face with one of its worst nightmares, the advent of cloning and regeneration. Well theoretically that is, stem cell research has progressed so much that people are beginning to worry about the ulterior implications of such scientific fervor. Stem cells are the human body’s super cells or blanks that have the ability to turn into a heart cell to a skin cell and the area scientists are working on is how they get them to do so on demand. The subject of cloning has been successful in animals and plants but has been met with strong opposition form most of us humans due to the implications of ethical infractions by which people get cloned from a single DNA sample.
That might have been possible in a lot of Hollywood blockbusters but the advances in genetics and stem cell research are indeed taking us a step closer to such medical breakthroughs. Imagine growing a new and perfectly healthy heart to replace a diseased one that would not be rejected for it is made up of the same genetic materials, your own. Or better yet, have an injection to get a couple of hundred or so Nano-machines to go into your body and scrape away all the plaque on your heart and blood vessels lessening the chances of a heart attack. They have even been designed to carry radioactive isotopes into the body releasing them onto or near cancerous cells, killing them more effectively than current treatments available.
The prospect of a world where nobody dies and everybody is perfectly healthy is not so far off. We have begun to play GOD by manipulating and probing into the innermost workings of the human body down to the molecular level. These advances in medical technology will take time to get out and manifest their true potentials, let us just hope that they don’t become the precursor to the extinction of the human race.
R.O.V. – Programmable Soldiers
Got a war to fight? Want to fight the enemy and not get complaints about the lousy food or inadequate air and ground support? Then, send in the ROV’s with drones that could spread out, each with its own propulsion and surveillance equipment that can cover a larger area, sending information to the mother ROV, and then back to the command center for interpretation. You can even arm them with active systems to take out all threats that are designated by their human controllers automatically(choose from the arsenal of pistols, sub-machineguns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers and all the stuff you could think of they’ve tested it).
The US military has a lot of autonomous vehicles that can be armed with handguns, rifles and even rocket launchers for doing jobs which could be too risky to send in people. These robots will be cheaper and they can operate indefinitely or as long as their batteries last which they can re-charge through solar panels as they switch to low activity modes, shifting to reconnaissance mode in long-period missions as they charge up. Once they get powered up to continue their mission, they get back up and go rolling away to complete the mission. Patrolling borders may be easier this way, with autonomous robots that do not get hungry or are designed not to bee too affected by the temperature extremes. Clearing mines in hostile waters is easier and faster without the risk to human life.The future of “Terminator” may not be too far fetched as it seems, for there is no boundaries to the technological wonders we are seeing now (not to count the ones that are for military use only, for the ones you might be seeing are already old-tech and they are sure to have better more improved versions way in the deep recesses of those converted missile silos deep underground which have been converted into top-secret development laboratories) and will be seeing in the near future.
Swarms, the next big thing in robotics technology
Nope, they’re not bees, locust or any living thing as a matter of fact, they’re robots. Yes robots that would be able to function as part of a bigger organism or machine. They are the next big thing that robotics experts are trying to perfect for they are cheap and they can be made into smaller, more compact machines. Remember the spiders deployed in the movie “The Minority Report”, the ones that looked like disks which transformed into miniature retinal scanners that think on their own, going through all obstacles so all the residents to see if the character of “Tom†was in there. That’s the type of development in the robotics world scientists are trying to perfect and use as a cheaper and more manageable system for all kinds of uses.
Take a look at an ant hill and you see individual ants that as individuals are quite easy to subdue. Get those same ants and combine them to make-up the colony, that’s another story, you’ll end up with tons of welts as you run for cover wherever you could. As it turns out, smaller more autonomous robots can be made cheaper with the advent of advances in micro-engineering where they are working to create mechanical and electro-mechanical parts out of atoms making a whole robot the size of micrometers, even nanometers. Imagine being able to inject a syringe-full of these engineered microscopic repair robots suspended in a solution into the human body to manually remove a blood clot in the heart. Or better yet, design them to take out the free radicals in the blood to halt the aging process which plagues all of us, delaying it by decades if not indefinitely. Or take the place of the body’s immune system for AIDS sufferers killing germs and bacteria that can pose a threat to health. The possibilities are endless