Nuclear power reactors built after the 1970’s. New generation (5?, 6?) for baseload. Mox, msr, lead moderated… Renewables can bicker over the transient loads while reactors provide the ‘always on, always needed’ bulk of power load.
Fuel reprocessing to close the loop would be the grail at this point.
All well and good but at the higher end they’re writing applications in JavaScript and electron and using many times more system resources than C or rust, and it will always be cheaper for them to develop in higher level languages (especially when the performance problem can be offloaded on the user’s machine instead of their own servers)
It’s cheaper for companies to have their developers spend less time developing in higher level languages and just throw more hardware at the problem than spend more money developing in a more difficult language
They aren’t concerned with energy or material efficiency, only financial
Only their own specifically. Our economy wants people to only care about themselves. Even though this doesnt make sense as polluting the earth will directly impact you.
This could theoretically be done with stemcell stuff, but it’s not there yet. However, when we finally reach the point where we can infinitely regenerate our body cells, we’ll become effectively “ammortal”; unable to die due to natural causes (such as illness), but we will still die from other people (for example, a bullet to the head)
Besides that, I think nuclear fusion would be an incredible development if we can finally harness it to power our homes.
Fusion won’t be the silver bullet people tout it as for much of the same reasons as fission isn’t (mostly politics). No politician wants to spend billions of dollars on something that is going to take a decade to even be functional and another decade to break even. It would get cheaper with scale, but so would fission, we just never let it get there. It also still produces radioactive waste, despite what proponents claim, and it even produces more radioactive waste than a fission reactor by volume. But it isn’t as long-lived.
These are the same tired arguments we hear about fission. If your country isn’t actively building fission, it’s probably not going to build fusion, aside from demonstrations.
The steady improvement in computer speed and efficiency (unfortunately brought down by bloated software, but in some areas you feel it in absolute terms), storage and memory size, and EV technology. I hope in 2040 there will be cheap powerful e-scooters and e-motorcycles.
I really hope that storage increases faster than our recording tech, to the point that everyone can easily store the sum total of the internet (videos and all) on a single portable drive.
You underestimate the amount of crap (which is mostly porn, whether you like it or not) on the Internet. And resolutions will increase as cameras get better.
But in some metrics, we have already gotten there. You can download the entirety of Wikipedia and it fits in a few gigs. You could download everything (including the 800+ videos which would span multiple weeks long end to end) I made and have it be less than 1TB.
The democratization of embedded programming and the capacities it offers. Coupled with 3D printing you can build your own robots or machines with minimal knowledge and money.
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