Science Channel - Is This a Good Idea?

Is This a Good Idea? Antigravity Devices?

In the tsunami of media hype triggered by Michael Jackson’s demise, one significant achievement in the Gloved One’s career has been largely overlooked (except, thankfully, by blogger Stephanie at Mediabistro.com where I saw it). In addition to winning 13 Grammy awards and selling 750 million records worldwide during his career, the late Jacko apparently also was an inventor. As Stephanie reports, he’s listed as one of three inventors on a 1993 U.S. Patent for a "Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion," which the document explains is

A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer's foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member.

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Is This a Good Idea? Killer Robots?

    Should autonomous robots —that is,  robots who can perform tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance--be armed with lethal weapons and allowed to decide for themselves whether to kill humans?

Downloading Data Directly Into Your Brain?

A shout-out to reader Raywalt de  Cuba for suggesting this idea.

What if it were possible to connect your brain to the Internet, either wirelessly or through a cable, download digital information at high speed, and then translate it automatically into a chemical form that could be stored by your brain cells as memory?

Is This a Good Idea? Transgenic Human Babies?

In case you haven’t seen them, here are photos those almost unbearably cute marmosets and their glowing green feet, created by Japanese scientists who implanted a jellyfish fluorescence gene into monkey embryos. The experiment, detailed in a paper just published in the scientific journal Nature, is momentous because it marks the first time that a gene-encoding protein has been fully integrated into the DNA of a primate, enabling the fluorescent-footed monkeys to pass the artificial trait on to their offspring. It’s a development that has a lot of medical researchers excited, because of the potential for breeding primates with genetic tendencies for human diseases, who then could be studied in research to find cures. Conversely, animal rights activists, who are already against the use of apes for medical experimentation (see my previous blog on that subject), are likely to become even more outraged by the breeding of transgenic primates for laboratories.

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Is This a Good Idea? Full-Body Scans at Airports?

A lot of the time, I blog in this space about speculative inventions and applications of technology, such as bacteria-sized medical robots or transoceanic underwater maglev trains. This week, however, we’re going to look at a controversial technology that is already here: active millimeter-wave full-body imaging, which penetrates clothing to reveal anything concealed beneath the fabric, from hidden objects to the human body itself. The federal Transportation Security Administration already is using such scanners at 19 airports across the nation to thwart terrorists trying to sneak bombs or weapons through security checkpoints.

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Is This a Good Idea? A Flying Saucer?

Cue up the spooky theremin music. 

What if we actually had a disc-shaped vehicle that could take off and land vertically,
hover, and fly without burning a drop of jet fuel, just like the alien spacecraft in The Day The Earth Stood Still?   (I’m talking about the 1951 version, not the recent Keanu Reeves remake.)

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Is This a Good Idea? A replacement for Google?

In ancient times, the Greeks sought guidance from the trancelike ravings of the ethylene-snorting priestess Pythia at Delphi. Today, we’ve become similarly enamored of the wisdom spewed forth by Google, the dominant search engine on the Web.

The human race now does about 235 million Google searches per day, in search of information on vital subjects ranging from Oprah Winfrey’s fried-chicken giveaway to the truth about bird-eating spiders. But just as the Greeks were dependent upon priest intercessors to translate Pythia’s streams of gibberish, so are we reliant upon our own ability to come up with search terms that suitably cajole Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm into summoning forth pages of links to Web sites where, hopefully, we’ll be able to find the information we are seeking.

But what if there were an easier, more direct way? What if we simply could ask the Web a question, and receive an answer?

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Is This a Good Idea? Teleportation

Beam me up, Scotty! What if life was actually like Star Trek, and we actually had a device like the Starship Enterprise’s Transporter  that could de-materialize our bodies, beam information about our exact atomic configuration to a distant location, and then instantly reassemble us there?

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Bacteria-sized medical robots inside our bodies?

What if doctors could inject robots the size of microorganisms into our bloodstreams and send them to attack individual cancer cells, remove plaque deposits from the walls of our arteries, fix damaged kidneys, deliver drug treatments and perform various bodily repairs from the inside on a scale too tiny for regular-sized human surgeons to attempt?

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Anti-piracy technology?

You’re probably as thrilled as I am by the U.S. Navy’s dramatic rescue of an American ship captain, Richard Phillips, who was being held captive by pirates off the coast of Somalia. (That is, unless you’re a Somali pirate, in which case you’re probably vowing revenge.)

Wait! There's more! Could science and technology be used to prevent these attacks from happening in the first place? Keep reading...