Wouldn't it be terrific to design a car with a sophisticated computer graphics program, and to have it (your dream car) appear in fully-functional three-dimensional glory [replete with new car fragrance] either appear on a transporter stand, or come out of the end of a tunnel? Can you imagine the amazing power of translating ideas from the mind, to the computer, and then to the real world in real time?
Years ago, this kind of apporting of objects from one unseen dimension (or parallel universe) to this one was thought to be a parlor trick practiced by phony mediums on their desperate clients. That was then. But now, we are perhaps five years away (by THE GLOBAL FUTURIST BLOG's estimates) from computer-conceived and computer-generated three-dimensional objects. This technology has already been used to create industrially extruded items like sheets of material and relatively simple packing and containerized items, the more complicated of which require further assembly either by Humans of robots. But a leap is approaching. Perhaps it will start with the production of molecules of chemicals and progress to small fully three-dimensional components of larger devices -- but ultimately what the mind can conceive (with the computer acting as catalyst) it may well be able to create.
It might be the technological breakthrough to rival the genie trapped in the fabled magic lamp. I read a wonderful article on this posted by Futurist Thomas Frey of The DaVinci Institute, and I wanted to share it with you. It is just a hint of things to come. Use your imagination to extrapolate and project the potentialities...
Inventing the 3D Pill Printer (via Futurist Speaker)
The next big innovation in healthcare may very well be a printer. But this is no ordinary printer. Professor Lee Croninheads up a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University in England. His team has figured out how to turn a 3D printer into a sort of universal chemistry set capable of…[read the rest of this article]
In my opinion, what we are in the process of doing is one million-fold greater than creating a calculator which can create a drawing of a two-dimensional Cartesian graph from an equation plugged into it.
What we are doing, if you take a macroscopic and time-lapsed view, is [dramatic pause] breathing form, substance and function into our ideas... we are redefining our notion of Creation by our progress in this area. The ultimate questions here concern the very nature of life, the notion of Creation, the nature of matter and energy, the definition of reality and the veil between daydreaming and manifestation.
And these questions raise further questions about ethics, theology, and how the disparity and increasing divergence between the acceleration rate of our technological capabilities versus the sociological, psychological and philosophical development of our species will play out in our future history. It frightens me, but a Futurist faces fear, and walks through it (like a haunted mansion) to arrive at the state of fascination.
It is a brave new world, indeed.
Douglas E. Castle for The Global Futurist Blog and The Internationalist Page Blog
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