the most likely thing to cause a large impact to me is the continued advancement of crispr for gene therapy but it will not be a discovery at this point as much as just it becoming common and cheaper.
Fusion in my house. Matter/energy converter in my house.
Scalable, lab grown meat operations.
I came here for this one.
I don’t follow news on alt-meat super closely, but I thought the scalability thing was not much of a concern, and I thought we were mainly at the steps of raising demand and meating or beating price parity with the real thing.
Something like an alt-meat only fast food spot or something trendy that can only be done with lab created protein could be all it takes to cement its place in society, so I feel we’re just waiting for that tipping point due to product that mainly already exists.
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I thought it was a good gag, but I didn’t want it to sound like meat beating. 😜
meating
Nice one
I knew you guys would pick up on that one!
The spell checker really did not want me to make that little joke, but I knew it would be appreciated.
Came here to say this. The implications for food security would be massive, but it would also have an enormous impact on climate change, cutting GHG emissions by one-third.
APM (Atomically Precise Manufacturing)
Star Trek-style matter replicator/recycler. Just imagine being able to empty a garbage dumpster into a bin, shut the lid, press a button, and an hour later you get stacks of industrially useful metals & materials, bolts of cloth, and sacks of fertilizer.
… in the next 5 years?
The cool part about molecular assemblers is that you only have to build one the hard way.
In my defense, I’m half asleep, and due to lack of caffeine, didn’t notice the bit about “which could actually happen in the next 5 years.”
So with that in mind, I’ll say something about environmentally friendly raw materials for super efficient battery storage.
MRNA vaccines for cancer, HIV and others. Moderna clinical trials have been real good.
Imagine getting a cancer diagnosis, then 30 days later getting a tailored treatment that eliminated the cancer.
Also vote. Because one party system has decided to side with anti vaxxers. The other has not. Cancer numbers have been steadily rising, second only to heart disease as a cause of death. There is a solid chance you’re going to get cancer.
Do you know about preferential voting? It makes the 2 party system not so bad.
Voting is mandatory here. So no need to tell me to vote.
And I’m not sure which party is anti Vax.
Nobody’s talking about this one, but if NASA is able to confirm even the slightest degree of lab-scale spatial warping we’d be in for a huge sea change in potential futures.
A wealth tax. With that we could fully fund all the research people mention and have the means to roll out the advancement in a way that doesn’t cause massive externalities.
Solid state batteries are just starting to hit the market but are still fairly comparable to lithium. In theory the mature tech is more energy dense, more thermally stable, charges faster and may be less environmentally damaging.
Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.
A room-temperature superconductor.
Seconded, because that would likely make fusion practical which would lead to effectively unlimited clean energy.
Shit there’s like 3 other people saying that hours ago.
It’s gonna be something we slap our foreheads over. Like if you twist the hell out of bronze, or put a microprocessor in a vice.
High temperature superconductors.
Specifically anything above commercial / household freezer (-18C); but if we could get to ~105C (above water boiling) it would change literally everything.
Electric motors become more efficient over a much greater RPM range.
Superconducting magnets become much easier to construct and run, this gives us a much better chance at fusion.
Transmission lines themselves are pretty efficient as it is, but all of the associated switchgear at the conversion points all gets really warm, this could be virtually eliminated.
The conductors on circuit boards, and potentially inside microchips. This reduces heat loading and thus makes all computing devices more efficient.
The conductors in batteries; enabling these to be smaller and thus increasing battery energy density.
Finally making super-capacitors actually viable as longer term energy storage.There are so many aspects of life that would be impacted by this one breakthrough, that it is probably the most important thing that will happen this century (scientifically speaking). It would be almost as revolutionary as when electricity itself became widespread.
attempting to cure microvasculature damage caused by repeat COVID leads to a bigger-dick pill
Not huge in itself (hey hey) but immediately a source of trillions in funding.
this is the only outcome of the research
Room temperature superconductors. Those things are insane, but by now, as far as I know , the only way to create them is with extremely low temperatures.
Considering this one makes several of the other ones listed here more viable, I think it would have the most impact.
AGI
In the next 5 years?
I’m skeptical. In the next 20, sure.
I think there might be some existing algorithms like evolutionary algos that if scaled could led to beating the ARC-AGI challenge for example
Everybody is going to groan, but solid state batteries. That would be a huge sea change, not just for cars, but also air travel.
I have good news for you, then. We’re now past the “discovery” phase and we’re at the implementation phase with solid state batteries, as you can actually buy production models: https://yoshinopower.com/
Yeah but they’re not there yet in terms of mass deployment and that’s still going to take some more technical breakthroughs. They’ll get there eventually but there might be some new discovery any day that would greatly speed up the process.
Yes, it’s brand new, but the mass manufacturing difficulties have been resolved. We might not have whatever future iteration of the technology you’re looking for, but it is unquestionably here and future developments are likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary.
I don’t know about air travel. For comparison, Li batteries are about 200-300 Wh/kg, with solid state reading 3-4x that.
Jetfuel is 11000 Wh/kg. Hydrogen is 39000 Wh/kg.
By volume they might have an advantage but planes tend to care more about weight
