What is going to be the next important invention that wiil change life as we now know it?
148200
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. \nTodays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like. \nIn the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise. \nIt's worth pointing out that the word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology." Sub-micron lithography is clearly very valuable (ask anyone who uses a computer!) but it is equally clear that conventional lithography will not let us build semiconductor devices in which individual dopant atoms are located at specific lattice sites. Many of the exponentially improving trends in computer hardware capability have remained steady for the last 50 years. There is fairly widespread belief that these trends are likely to continue for at least another several years, but then conventional lithography starts to reach its limits. \nThere is also Cold Fusion which holds the promise of easily available low cost energy.  For example buying a car or house which comes with its forever energy.  More can be found at the Cold Fusion Journal http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/
1070173
Here's a link to a list of inventions.  I'll leave you to figure out which ones are most important how they changed the world.\n\nhttp://www.crystalinks.com/chinainventions.html
169918
look into nano-tech. we already have injectable little machines that proform surgery. the power to weight ratio is amazing
176711
Virtual Reality - almost there so this is most likely.\nBrain Transplants are currently too tricky.\n\nAlien Encounters would be cool - this is what I would like most. It would make veryone on Earth get along a bit better.
815915
new technology you know like video cell phones, ps3, new cars, etc.
63431
tomorrow will be alot like today.  A week from now will be more of the same.  A year will show a couple cool inventions and some new research.  A decade will have safer cars with lower emmissions.  A century and we will be surprised to find that we still rely alot on ground transport.  Medical improvements will have improved quality of life, but genetic detiriation from a lack of natural selection in humans will be having increasing tolls.  We will start to allow gene therepy but it will be heavily regulated.  A millenia will find man and machine merging.  People will choose to replace faulty body parts with bionic parts instead of cloned parts because the bionic ones allow superior performance.  Sports will be hard to regulate.  Fusion will be controlled and will provide us the energy to travel far in space.  Due to relativistic effects, the amount of people who are willing to travel far are surprisingly few.  Tech takes care of most everything for peolpe nd the most common occupations are science and engineering related.  Art and music widespread, but since there are so many people engaged in it there are relatively few who make much profit from it.  The economy is a combination of socialism and capitalism, more socialistic then America today due to increased availability of resources.  And I could go on and on.
1097872
Not quite yet. It's on the list though to be developed in the future. Stay tuned!
1017823
Read "The Singular is Near" by Kurzwiel. Non Fiction You will be amazed at the speed of technological advancement. Good reading if your interested in this stuff.
1120397
The most important was the use of fire.  Right after that, although maybe more important in some respects, was the invention of the wheel.\n\nThe next really modern practical and convenient thing was indoor plumbing including the invention of the flush toilet.\n\nThings have come to the point where it is not so much a matter of being "better" as it is being "different".  My parents never had computers and got along just fine.  An iPod was totally unnecessary, as were peripheral things like Blueberries, and even something like cable TV was petty much unknown, and forget about cellphones, didn't exist.\n\nThe trend today is away from inventions based on steel and heavy machinery to products based on a few million lines of computer code.  The interesting thing about all of this is that as everything shifts to digital bits of magnestic dits, you will still need someone to fix your toilet.   So while the price of computer related hardware and software plummets through the floor, expect the cost to repair a toilet to skyrocket, until eventually you will be able to buy a massive supercomputer the size of a slice of bread for $20 but the cost to fix your toilet or unclog a drain will shoot up to well over a hundred times that.\n\nThe reason is simple: for every 1000 computer engineers, programmers and technicians, there will be only 1 plumber.  So in the future the programmers and computer technicians will be working 80 hour weeks for a barely minimum wage and living in public assisted housing projects whereas the plumber will be working a 20 hours week and living in a mansion, driving a Mercedes and a Bentley, and taking vacations to the Islands every month.
313960
Fire\n\nInvention? Or discovery? *shrugs* But I'm thinking most of all we need and use just wouldn't be around without this heating component. Just a thought.
260721
Technology will solve all problems. In time we'll be capable of living anywhere. Better question is will we be alive to see it.
747880
I bet it will be nanomachines.  Microscopic machines that work at the molecular level will be crucial in the biomedical fields and in new tech innovations that we use everyday, like today cell phones.  Did you ever see that add for microsoft where it was in the near future and this girl was jogging and she got a video conference call from her dad over her sunglasses? He brought up schematics of art works he was thinking of buying and talking to her while she was jogging... well thats all going to be possible with molecular computers.  Unfortunately though, so will other really bad things, we'll just have to see how it goes.
499620
i think it would be someone who changed the world (for good).possibly einstein??
239919
Like most things, the internet gives us miraculas benefits and dangerous possibilities. With the growing energy crisis, we will see more people having the ability to work from home, but this could create a rise in depression and a decline in social skills.\n\nIt will be interesting to watch the development of computers and where the next generation of technology will take us. We will obviously see more voice activated computers, they will be used in more areas of the home, they will be faster, perhaps smaller. They will run most of the aspects of our home (security,entertainment, maintenance, communication). I'm sure there will be aspects we can't even imagine now. We are alreay using them in ways that were inconceivable as little as 12 or 15 years ago. \n\nWe live in interesting times.
391566
Technology of the future.\n\nGuranteed by the richest man in the world.
894620
ahhh nanotechnology can save lives by inserting small thingys inside the patients to detect cancer and kill it, umm it increase information processing, it will make computer so cheap that almost everybody in the world will be able to afford one! isn't that kooL! umm yeah and will make education suberb! There will of course be many, many inventions due to nanotechnology so jsut sit back and let the future unfold before ur eyes. = /
870254
we already have...\n\nits called nanotechnology...they ahvei nfused carbon nanotubes onto silicon substrates and used DNA and its complex functionality to solve problems..this has been done to a limited scope...but it is very well established that larger scale systems will be availabe in 20 years...to the functionality you describe...the first intelligent machine is expected to appear around 2025-2030.\n\nThis will take time and engineering...(these are projections based on current average rate of economic growth and research)...research is based on curretn glboal computing power, research education and lab power...which is at its most powerful form ever---but that is ONLY---if the economy doesn't, colapse for example...\n\nhowever, another alternative, taht is faster--there is a faster way to do it than yours...\n\nwe an simply get rat brain cells...and organize them on substrates so that they resemble the human brain...we make a brain out of rat cells and then we just teach it like a new born..this can be done...\n\nor we could get brains of people and just turn them into subconcious zombies and take them out of the bodie...by which we then plug them into an itnerface and we can make them do computations...\n\nhowever, that would be amoral...so we cannot do this...you will ahve to wait 25 years from now for nanotechnology and computer chips to be integrated with carbon nanotubes/DNA to see that type of functionality.\n\nI beleive at such times...we would have perfected the machine-human interfaces and will become "part" of these intelligent machines..through neural implants--.... we will be the same identity...say your computer jsut becoems you but with greater intelligence and functionality--\n\nwe can also develope identities that are INDEPENDENT of humans that can think for themselves...but for them to have a "termintator" mentality they would have to differentiate between "human" and machine...and since intelligence is just intelligence...I don't think there will be such mentality...\n\nits as if you one day woke up one day and learned your a robot...you would not want to nuke the entire human race right?\nin fact, you would identify with humans...you wouldn't care if you were a robot...just don't tell anybody.\n\nbut even if you did want to nuke all humans, that would imply you had more resources than humans, able to get their civilization from undertheir feet right?\n\nbutas I said, insuch a society, humans would plug into "machines" which were their slave.s..and gave them mroe intelligence...but the machines themselves were not "concious" themselves...\n\nso the humans...knowing how to be "cyberntically" avid...just as regular concious machines...\n\nthe machines would "loose" their edge..\nin other words...the intelligent machines would not be "smarter" than the 2025 human because that human would have also become smarter with machiens that are tied to their brain...and whih they controla nd know how to operate just as well as an intellgienct computer...\n\nthus, placing computer intelligence and human intelligence on the same level...and thus making US similar...making it less likely for any "confrontation'...\nbesdies...if ar obot was "jealous" of the extra senses of thehuman body....after acheiving such tehcnology...we could easily develope synthetic bodies made of biological /nanotech grown tissue...and thatwould make them more equal...and thus---not view us, nor we them as "different"\n\nto a point...that a "synthetic human" and a "machine enhanced human" would be almost viewed the same...\n\nthe synthetic human...just has a robotic mind....whith a human like body....the enhacned humans (probably most humans by 2045) are just human brain...with enhanced features that make it the same as a robotic mind...\n\nso in essence, they are same...\n\nyou see? its only our primit