Future News- Bandwidth Breakthrough, Apple (will) Pay Controversy, China Goes to Moon,3D Printers Go Dino, Top Ten SciFi Realities

Listen Now to Dr. Future News 10.28.2014

Remember how, when we met each other, we would set up a plan to do so well in advance, and call the other from a pay phone if need be, if things had changed? I wonder the impact of changing that basic connection process as we update it to the use of today’s realitme mobile connections we all have with each other.

Traffic slow you down, restarant closed on Monday’s? No problem, your contactee(s) are notified with ease via text or mobile voice. Less anxiety and stress, easier connections, more fluidity.  That is the nature of of current species present, from what I’ve observed.  “How does this affect our organization structure, you might ask?”  

More ease of connection allows more connection, leading to greater complexity, typically.  And complexity can be quite good for us, if it’s say, the development of our fundamental ability to communicate, an evolution our species nervous system, if you will. 

One measure of how much we currently communicate with each other is how much bandwidth we are using.  Most of us consider it good bandwidth these days  if we have 10 Mbs symmetrical  (for both up and down).  The fastest commercial bandwidth today is 100 Gbps, way more than our  piddly 10 Mbs. But wait, that’s ok, we are used to that kind of disparity between high end stuff and low end usage.  But what’s to come is a real jaw dropper.  

According to Andrew Tarantola filed with Gizmodo, the latest data speeds coming from the R&D labs is 255 Tb/s, delivered over a single fiber optic hair! That’s roughly equivalent to the current internet traffic crossing the Atlantic ocean, as much as the entire transatlantic backbone, on a single fiber!!.  An expensive multicore fiber as opposed to a cheap single core fiber to be sure, but a single fiber nonetheless.  It is a 2,550x increase in bandwidth! That’s downright practically exponential; Kurzweil is probably very happy about now, and me too. Once it’s ecosystem evolves over the next few years, such bandwidth will be part of who we are.  “Why, what could happen?,” you might ask. 

The internet of things picks up speed, making everything around us smarter and interactive.  Not just your tablet, but the chair or bed you are residing on right now, the fridge, the toliet knows your gut. Virtual worlds are just a wall away. Video search is as common as word or phrase searches. Such things rapidly become ‘normal.’ Realtime interspecies translators are all the rage. Me and my neigborhood racoon have quite a story to share…

Notice how fast we’ve adapted to the Net over the last 20 years?  It should be interesting to reflect on today from the perspective of ten years from now, after it all came alive.. :-)

Meanwhile, we have a some more Future News this week for your consideration.  Plus we really enjoyed having John Monahue in the studio this week and Greg Panos on FB Messenger.  Thanks for your perspectives on all this crazy stuff!

(And yes, I did make a disparing remark about the boater who was shooed away from the Antares launch vehicle before it was postponed.  Fortunately that sightseeer wasn’t nearby when the robotic craft exploded on the launch pad the next day..)