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5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon)

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5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon)

It’s so often that we sit back and look at the world we live in and suddenly realize just how far it has actually gone. Alright, we don’t have flying cars yet, nor super power unlocking implants, but take a moment to look at science fiction from the 70s and 80s and be amazed. Some of it even sounds like a vivid description of our own world. Give or take the evil empire that’s slowly taking over the world.

Here are a few of this past few year’s developments in science that really make us strongly aware of how much we have advanced in technology and possibilities.


 5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon) Self-driving cars

1. Self-driving cars

It’s already out there, folks. Well, truthfully, although it is out there, it’s still in testing phase. The best two examples are actually some cars you might have heard of before. One of them is the Google Driverless Car – development started nearly 3 years ago and its first prototype was exhibited in May 2014. If you live in San Francisco Bay area, you might actually witness the testing undergoing for the Google Car sometime this year.

The second example is a little more ambitious, but still believed to be a dream come true in the next few years. It was presented at this year’s CES and pretty much involved a car that is commanded through voice and motion that – if anything – is more of a lounge or pleasant but relatively smaller living room. The car in question is the Mercedes-Benz F 015 “Luxury in Motion” and looks nearly hard to believe.

5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon) Hydrogen-fueled cars and airplanes

2. Hydrogen-fueled cars and airplanes

Also featured at CES 2015 was the wonderful Toyota Mirai – the first car to be hydrogen-fueled and also available for purchase for anyone who wishes it. Not only that it basically promises to run on a very cheap and abundant fuel, but it doesn’t exhaust any form of fumes either – instead of carbon dioxide it produces water. The Mirai is currently being sold for $57.000 but Toyota has made all of the 5,680 patents that it owns for this model available and royalty free to allow developers and producers all over the world innovate further on the idea.

Airplanes haven’t been forgotten either as airlines have been attempting to find alternate fuelling methods for years. Boeing and South African Airways are theorizing on using a tobacco plant named Solaris that supposedly has a lower carbon emission.

Even the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been looking into the matter and has discovered an alternate method to power jets – by producing fuel from the water that surrounds them and turning it into a liquid hydrocarbon type of fuel.

5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon) Suspended Animation

3. Suspended animation

Experimenting with this concept has been going on for a long time. Theorizing it by sci-fi writers and medical researchers alike even longer. What suspended animation entails is exsanguination – draining all of your blood from your body, and replaced with a very cold saline solution that stops all cellular activity temporarily for a few hours. In essence you would be dead from 99% of the perspectives but your cells would be kept alive without oxygen for a while – in this time doctors could operate freely in case of cardiac arrest brought on by traumatic injury, then pump the blood back in and resuscitate the patient.

5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon) The Blue Pill

4. The blue pill

Following recent studies, it has been discovered that the way our memory works could be cheated by certain proteins. Whenever we try to recall a fact, our brain uses said proteins to form the memory circuits needed for the process. So, logically, if we were to block this protein – known as PKMzeta – the circuits would no longer form in our brains and thus the memory would stop existing in our brains. Amazing, yet a very spooky thing to think of.

5 Science Fiction Ideas That Came True (Or Will Soon) No more postal services

5. No more postal services?

Amazon and Google seem to be the companies that are most bent on making the drone delivery idea a reality. Amazon is already set and ready to go, except it’s still awaiting for approval from the FAA to begin the Amazon Prime Air program – a system that promises to make deliveries of orders in 30 minutes. By air. Using remotely controlled drones.

Google is at it as well and recently revealed that it’s been working on Project Wing – originally a program that was meant to deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims using air vehicles – now shifted towards the same 30 minute delivery-by-air concept.

 

 

4 Medical Discoveries that Bring us Closer to Immortality

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Despite the fact that we have eradicated many diseases with the help of treatments, life expectancy is not very optimistic for many people. We eat more processed foods, have more addictions and live more sedentary life-styles. Studies actually show that most of the illnesses that appeared in the past 100 years are a result of our poor decisions. Nevertheless, science is doing all it can to keep us humans alive as long as possible. The concept of immortality, which sounded like something fit for the gods a few centuries ago, might actually be more real than we thought. Let’s take a look at 4 Sci-Fi technologies that are moving us closer to immortality. They are the stepping-stones to, what we hope, will change our destinies in the future.

1. Reversing Paralysis

reversing paralysis

There are many afflictions in this world, but one of the most devastating one is injury to the spinal cord because it is the part of the body which carries information everywhere. In other words, if it stops working, everything else stops working. In the past, medicine could do nothing to remedy the damage inflicted on it, and for many victims it resulted to a complete loss of mobility and incredible pain. Modern medicine has discovered ground-breaking technology that works with the help of electrical impulses on the nervous tissue, to return voluntary movement to paralyzed patients. If it is combined with daily movement and therapy it can make running & walking a reality.

2. Reversing the Process of Aging

The list of incredible medical discoveries doesn’t stop here. Remember all those skin care commercials which promise that they will reverse the process of aging? While most of them do not work, there are a select few made from natural substances that actually render decent results. Following the footsteps of skin creams and super-food industries, a group of young scientists has discovered a chemical in the blood of young people that supposedly prevents the effects of old age.

The interesting thing about this discovery is that it is not only the result of one study, but of three separate ones. Nevertheless, the studies were conducted on mice so there is a lot of work to be done until the theory proves relevant for people. The good news is that in a few years we might be paving the way to genuine anti-aging injections.

3. Suspended Animation

suspended animation

Although it is popularly known as suspended animation, this technological break-through it actually called emergency preservation and resuscitation. What it basically does is to suspend life. It is one of the most important medical discoveries of the decade. The blood in the patient’s body is replaced with a cold, saline solution that induces a sort of hypothermia that severely slows cellular activity (it almost halts it). In other words, if you have a serious disease, or need more time for an operation, Suspended animation will give surgeons the time to fix your problem.

Peter Rhee, the medic who invented this technique, says that patients aren’t necessarily alive during the procedure. They’re not dead either. They are in a state of inertia which could be prolonged for years. This experiment was first demonstrated on three pigs. In their case, the hearts simply started again on their own, without any loss of cognitive or physical function.

4. Growing Body Parts

image_thumb[3]Have you ever considered the possibility of growing body-parts? We are talking about reality, not science-fiction. Although some things like interstellar travel, flying or food reduced to pills sound strange, the idea of actually growing and harvesting organs seems totally crazy. Reality is usually crazy, and it seems that medics are doing just this: they are growing organs in laboratories.

Besides the fact that their “crops” are anatomically correct, they also work. At the moment vaginas and nostrils have been successfully transplanted into humans. Women who were lost without, or with incomplete vaginas received artificially grown ones and were tracked for a period of 8 years. During that time, their new body parts worked seamlessly.

These discoveries are indeed amazing. They may be still far from immortality, but they represent stepping stones for future developments.

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