Nice list! I’m skeptical of 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 21, 22, 25, 28. I’d be interested to hear more about them and also about 29 and the hydra markets stuff. Also, clearly protein folding will be solved to a significant extent, but how solved? Enough for molecular nanotech? Can you say more about what you have in mind?
2/3/4: Look at the UK hydrogen strategy under Boris Johnson (a good chance that it was partly written by Cummings people). Currently, we have more then a week in Germany with negative energy prices where people are paid to use energy (if the get the energy directly from the energy market). The more solar you have the more days you will have where a lot of energy gets produced that has no clear use. On the other hand you need to be able to produce energy on days where the sun does’t shine. Batteries can be used to shift energy usage over a 24 hour time period but they are not cost effective for moving energy production from summer to winter.
If you want to run fully on solar/wind with current technology there doesn’t seem to be a way around hydrogen/methan production on the days where you have too much energy and use those partly when you need them in the winter.
Hydrogen for heating is part of the UK hydrogen strategy as proposed at the moment. Hydrogen is very light which makes it a good fuel for planes.
7: 10$/kg is a number that Elon set as a goal for the Starship (https://wccftech.com/elon-musk-starship-launch-cost-reiterate/) I expect that by 2040 there will be successor technology to Starship that’s more efficient so even if Starship doesn’t reach that goal the successor technology will.
9: Given what we know about how transportation works it’s likely that driverless cars will result in people spending more time in cars. Making good use of the time will be important.
Rented cars inturn mean that you can rent different cars that are specialized for different usecases.
Hairdressers that provide that service will be a premium product that’s brought by business people who are very busy and spent a lot of time in their cars.
10: Reduced electricity costs and driverless cars mean that the ride is cheaper and you don’t need to pay a delivery person.
21: I think I need to qualify, I mean all uniformed police. There might be undercover police where having camera’s wouldn’t work because it allows detection of the police. Camera’s get cheaper by the year and there’s a lot of pressure to take action regarding policy brutality. The power of technology lobbyists who want to convince politicians to use tech solution rises over time.
22: Cancer vaccines that are created based on the mutations that a particular cancer has increase the immune response against the cancer cells. While it might not be enough on it’s own to kill every cancer it’s combinable with a lot of other cancer treatments. If you for example operate out a cancer you want the immune system to go after any remaining small metastating cells and cancer vaccines are a tool to encourage that.
If you don’t give a patient drugs that shut down the immune system, giving them cancer vaccine in addition to other treatments will have better effects.
This is different from cancer vaccines that go after proteins that are normally only expressed in fetal development which largely flopped in clinical trials.
25: It’s basically saying that within 20 years the needed technology for EarthNow will be deployed. Being able to track all the cars on the street do things like being able to tell how much millionaires who park their cars in their garage engage in speeding has huge privacy implications and EU lawmarkers will want to regulate it.
29: This might be the one I’m least certain about, but I expect advances in mining that might include asteroid mining to bring down prices.
hydra markets stuff
Hydra is a Russian darknet marketplace that superior in technology to any other darknet market. Hydra accounts for 75% of total darknet marketplace revenue despite currently only targeting Russian speakers.
Hydra is also noteworthy for a hitman being hired to kill a police official.
They have a system where there are delievery people who hide a drop at a specific location and then the customer gets told about where the drop he ordered is hidden which means it’s possible to buy on Hydra without revealing your home address.
Hydra charges the merchants fees that among others are used to do quality testing where the drugs are taking by paid human volunteers and their effects analysed.
Hydra had an ICO with the goal of expanding West which they might or might not follow through on. In any case it’s a clearly superior darknet model and if Hydra itself doesn’t expand West I would expect another entity to create a similar market in the West.
Also, clearly protein folding will be solved to a significant extent, but how solved? Enough for molecular nanotech? Can you say more about what you have in mind?
If you have a chemical reaction that’s inefficient there’s a good chance that you can create a protein that catalyses the reaction much more effectively.
If you can design proteins for specific reactions, problems like mining uranium from seawater suddenly become a lot easier. You can design a membrane protein that’s able to trap uranium atoms and then bring them into a cell.
You might even have different bacteria for mining different minerals from the water. You leave the bacteria for some time in the water and they take in a bunch of minerals. Then you let the water out through nanopores that don’t let the bacteria through. Then you use a centrifuge to sort the bacteria by the materials they contain, and put each one in their own tanks. Then you heat the bacteria up with destroys the cell walls and makes the materials you are after fluid. You centrifuge again and have your materials.
I expect bacteria to be used that switch from the 3-letter genetic code to a 5-letter genetic code where a single letter mutation doesn’t lead to another amino-acid being used to have a bacteria for tasks like the above that doesn’t just mutate away.
There will be a bunch of things that can be done that are hard to think about now because it’s very different technology then we are used to.
If you have concrete usecases for molecular nanotech I could tell you whether I think that they are doable with it.
Nice list! I’m skeptical of 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 21, 22, 25, 28. I’d be interested to hear more about them and also about 29 and the hydra markets stuff. Also, clearly protein folding will be solved to a significant extent, but how solved? Enough for molecular nanotech? Can you say more about what you have in mind?
2/3/4: Look at the UK hydrogen strategy under Boris Johnson (a good chance that it was partly written by Cummings people). Currently, we have more then a week in Germany with negative energy prices where people are paid to use energy (if the get the energy directly from the energy market). The more solar you have the more days you will have where a lot of energy gets produced that has no clear use. On the other hand you need to be able to produce energy on days where the sun does’t shine. Batteries can be used to shift energy usage over a 24 hour time period but they are not cost effective for moving energy production from summer to winter.
If you want to run fully on solar/wind with current technology there doesn’t seem to be a way around hydrogen/methan production on the days where you have too much energy and use those partly when you need them in the winter.
Hydrogen for heating is part of the UK hydrogen strategy as proposed at the moment. Hydrogen is very light which makes it a good fuel for planes.
7: 10$/kg is a number that Elon set as a goal for the Starship (https://wccftech.com/elon-musk-starship-launch-cost-reiterate/) I expect that by 2040 there will be successor technology to Starship that’s more efficient so even if Starship doesn’t reach that goal the successor technology will.
9: Given what we know about how transportation works it’s likely that driverless cars will result in people spending more time in cars. Making good use of the time will be important.
Rented cars inturn mean that you can rent different cars that are specialized for different usecases.
Hairdressers that provide that service will be a premium product that’s brought by business people who are very busy and spent a lot of time in their cars.
10: Reduced electricity costs and driverless cars mean that the ride is cheaper and you don’t need to pay a delivery person.
21: I think I need to qualify, I mean all uniformed police. There might be undercover police where having camera’s wouldn’t work because it allows detection of the police. Camera’s get cheaper by the year and there’s a lot of pressure to take action regarding policy brutality. The power of technology lobbyists who want to convince politicians to use tech solution rises over time.
22: Cancer vaccines that are created based on the mutations that a particular cancer has increase the immune response against the cancer cells. While it might not be enough on it’s own to kill every cancer it’s combinable with a lot of other cancer treatments. If you for example operate out a cancer you want the immune system to go after any remaining small metastating cells and cancer vaccines are a tool to encourage that.
If you don’t give a patient drugs that shut down the immune system, giving them cancer vaccine in addition to other treatments will have better effects.
This is different from cancer vaccines that go after proteins that are normally only expressed in fetal development which largely flopped in clinical trials.
25: It’s basically saying that within 20 years the needed technology for EarthNow will be deployed. Being able to track all the cars on the street do things like being able to tell how much millionaires who park their cars in their garage engage in speeding has huge privacy implications and EU lawmarkers will want to regulate it.
29: This might be the one I’m least certain about, but I expect advances in mining that might include asteroid mining to bring down prices.
Hydra is a Russian darknet marketplace that superior in technology to any other darknet market. Hydra accounts for 75% of total darknet marketplace revenue despite currently only targeting Russian speakers.
Hydra is also noteworthy for a hitman being hired to kill a police official.
They have a system where there are delievery people who hide a drop at a specific location and then the customer gets told about where the drop he ordered is hidden which means it’s possible to buy on Hydra without revealing your home address.
Hydra charges the merchants fees that among others are used to do quality testing where the drugs are taking by paid human volunteers and their effects analysed.
Hydra had an ICO with the goal of expanding West which they might or might not follow through on. In any case it’s a clearly superior darknet model and if Hydra itself doesn’t expand West I would expect another entity to create a similar market in the West.
If you have a chemical reaction that’s inefficient there’s a good chance that you can create a protein that catalyses the reaction much more effectively.
If you can design proteins for specific reactions, problems like mining uranium from seawater suddenly become a lot easier. You can design a membrane protein that’s able to trap uranium atoms and then bring them into a cell.
You might even have different bacteria for mining different minerals from the water. You leave the bacteria for some time in the water and they take in a bunch of minerals. Then you let the water out through nanopores that don’t let the bacteria through. Then you use a centrifuge to sort the bacteria by the materials they contain, and put each one in their own tanks. Then you heat the bacteria up with destroys the cell walls and makes the materials you are after fluid. You centrifuge again and have your materials.
I expect bacteria to be used that switch from the 3-letter genetic code to a 5-letter genetic code where a single letter mutation doesn’t lead to another amino-acid being used to have a bacteria for tasks like the above that doesn’t just mutate away.
There will be a bunch of things that can be done that are hard to think about now because it’s very different technology then we are used to.
If you have concrete usecases for molecular nanotech I could tell you whether I think that they are doable with it.