Tomorrow's reality

"Never" does not exist for the human mind... only "Not yet".

Source: NASA

This is the opening intertitle of Fritz Lang's 1929 science fiction movie Woman in the Moon. Just because we do not know how to do something today does not mean we cannot do it ever. Jules Verne in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon gave a pretty detailed account of space travel. His story served as an inspiration to many scientists later on, and they made it a reality about 100 years later. History has repeatedly proved that ambitious imaginations and grand visions of a few people inspired what mankind has achieved today. It is for this very reason Intel has started The Tomorrow Project. 

This project tries to imagine tomorrow's reality by bringing together science fiction authors, experts and everyday users. The project starts by asking two simple questions:

• What kind of future does man want to live in? Remember the Holodeck from Star Trek. Something like that will be cool, isn't it? With the increase in computing devices (how many devices do you own?), the data we are generating everyday is increasing multifold. To be able to process it and make use of it would be a huge thing.
• What kind of future do we want to avoid? Definitely not something where mankind is ruled by Martians, or sentient machines!

As they say, science fiction is the prototype of future's technological advancements. The more feedback we get on prototypes, the better the design of the end product becomes. Join the conversation and be part of the future.

the dark dreams

A few motivations for this post:

1. Christopher Nolan's take on dreams in Inception.
2. A girl with vision impairment I came across while I was crossing the road the other day (She is very beautiful). Restless's post about dreams of a visually challenged girl also got me thinking about this. This got me thinking about the dreams in point 1.
3. And, an article on research about controlling things on your PC with mind

  Photo Source: Jim Prigoff

I'm a person of dreams and memories. Memories of the past, and dreams for the future. More than 3 years ago I wrote a post My Dream Project on how and what all we need to capture and store dreams. Recently after seeing Inception I was glad to know that I'm not the only one who thinks a lot about dreams. And the movie is in agreement with my understanding about dreams and it also answered some of my questions.

Starting with in perfect agreement with Nolan's Inception on how dreams get influenced by our memories and experiences. Our mind fills up our dreams with the colors, contexts and emotions we come across in real life. But for people who are visually impaired, who don't have a visual perception of color, I wonder if they dream. If yes, how! A little research made me understand that for those whose vision is completely impaired since birth their dream is full of emotions and sounds. After all the advances man has achieved ever, can we not have technology taking care of completely eliminating this problem of vision impairment?

The article on mind controlling is an active research at University of Minnesota about controlling 3D virtual world with signals from your mind. All you would do is wear a cap with 64 electrodes on your head. This article got me thinking! Why not scientists make something to input the visual signals directly to the brain's nerve cells enabling them see in their mind, in dreams? I guess that would require a lot of reverse engineering on how human brain interprets visual signals. But I think its definitely worth putting in efforts for researching on enabling vision for the impaired using artificial methods. Nothing can replace the visual perception of nature for those people.

I hope technology emerges soon to help them dream not in dark. Just a wish, a dream!

~Vee...