Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Asteroid mining. We've had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
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Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we'll even be able to eliminate measles...again.
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you've detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose...
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
Underwater cities
With climate change and coastal flooding, it's coming, just not in the form you're thinking of.
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Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
There's been something else new?
I saw a talk on the subject about a year back. It was discussing tokamak reactors, from an engineer working on them. The small ones can't sustain a break even state, but they are affected by the inverse square law to a larger degree. I believe China is about to start/has started construction on a power station sized test reactor.
The pellet sort are a different type. They have different pros and cons.
Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.
fusion maybe, but in scifi, it often requires an alien race making first contact, we wont even get to things like anti-matter tech without that intervention. SG1 is more in our time frame, but with aliens already possessing advanced tech
Orbital habitats with rotational gravity.
Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.