Invisible to the human eye, nano diameter needles will be shot like clusters of bullets
from great distances to “pin” people to a wall or freeze their physical movement.
Nano needles, because of their incredibly tiny diameter, will be the ultimate
non-lethal weapon, leaving no visible wounds and causing no permanent damage.

I would like to begin by saying that I am not a fan of using nanotechnology for weapons or in any way, shape or form as tools of war. However, since the military is one of the key drivers of nanotechnology, and its use in warfare will be an inevitable outcome, our awareness of the possibilities will be a first line of defense against their proliferation.

On the optimistic side, I have high hopes for nano-weapons to offer precise solutions for the bigger conflicts, eliminating some of the causes for war, and generally contributing to a safer and more stable global environment. With precision comes less loss of life, not more.

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When the United States was founded, only 40 percent of the people living within its boundaries spoke English as their first language. Today that number is 87%.

For most of us, English is like the air we breathe: natural, given, right.  However, language is rarely a given, a fact of which many groups are painfully aware. Language is a key battleground for national and cultural conflict.
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Terrafugia - Redefining the flying car

What exactly is a flying car?

My life is a bit unusual in that I often have conversations with people about the topic of flying cars. Since I was a child I dreamed about the day that we would have flying cars. But, other than the vague notion of the flying car that George Jetson drove each day to Spacely Sprockets, we have no real definition of the flying car, until now.

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The Whole Earth Genealogy Project - Where will it lead?

Starting with a concept for creating the genealogy for the entire earth, here is a fascinating journey into the topic of radical transparency.

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Complexity is a Very-Real, Very-Destructive Disease
that Destroys Human-Based Systems

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

Often time we hear about some new disease that sounds kind of phony and quickly discard it because it sounds like some made-up name for a common personality quirk. So, when I talk about the “complexity disease”, your first inclination will probably be to say “yeah right!”

But here’s the difference. Complexity is not a disease that affects humans. Complexity is a disease that affects systems. And even though it has never been labeled as such before now, it becomes a very useful frame of reference for people involved in building, operating, or managing a system. Complexity is a very-real, very-destructive disease.

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Roman Numerals were a Numbering System that
Prevented an Entire Civilization from Doing Any Higher Math

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

During the time of the ancient Greek civilization several mathematicians became famous for their work. People like Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus, Posidonius and Ptolemy all brought new elements of thinking to society, furthering the field of math, building on the earlier work of Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians

A few generations later the Romans became the dominant society on earth, and the one aspect of Roman society that was remarkably absent was the lack of Roman mathematicians. Rest assured, the scholarly members of Roman society came from a good gene pool and they were every bit as gifted and talented as the Greeks. But Roman society was being held hostage by its own systems. One of the primary culprit for the lack of Roman mathematicians was their numbering system – Roman Numerals and its lack of numeric positioning Read the rest of this entry »

Artwork by Patrick Turner

From Futurama to Prey, our view of the world ahead has become tainted with dismal prospects for a positive future

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

Few of the science fiction buffs watching reruns of Matt Groening’s now-defunct cartoon classic Futurama have any idea the name of the show was coined half a century earlier for a wildly-popular ride at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
That Futurama - the original Futurama which is viewable on YouTube - was an unforgettable trip into the brave new world of 1960. Yes, the fabulous 1960s. Who can forget the thrill of exiting off a highway at 50 miles per hour Read the rest of this entry »

Will people in the future sell real estate “information rights” as a separate property right?

“Science never solves a problem without
creating ten more.” - George Bernard Shaw