The stuff of science fiction has become fact. It's no longer a question of whether the technologies behind male birth control pills or nanotechnology will become viable, but when. Wired asked experts in medicine, manufacturing and engineering to give us the real timetables. They may not agree on exact dates, but one thing's certain: whether we're talking about clothing or cars, sex or surgery, the future is coming soon to a present near you.
With e-cash, you'll be able to do everything you can do with hard currency except flip a coin. But even with online credit-card transactions more secure, e-cash won't be ubiquitous until 1998.
In an effort to make bespoke tailoring as easy and convenient as bargain hunting, engineers are developing digital body scanners that are more accurate than tape measures. They'll enable haberdashers to deliver custom clothing overnight and/or expedite custom apparel orders from remote manufacturers.Haysun Hahn reports that Adidas has begun testing a digital foot scanner for measuring shoe sizes, and that men's stores already tailor dress shirts from prefabricated garment sections. Jud Early and his full body scanner have been the focus of national media profiles. Sung Park's company, Custom Clothing Technology Corporation, already delivers "Levi's" Personal Pair women's jeans in less than three weeks. All that remains, Hahn says, is to organise the process on a larger scale and hit the home shopping networks.
Such an arrangement doesn't give consumers the opportunity to try things on. That's no problem, according to Martha Harkey and Gary Henderson, founders of Yang Snowboard Clothing. They say that a combined body scanner and video display will give consumers much the same effect as looking in a mirror. However, Ingrid Johnson of the US Fashion Institute of Technology dissents, claiming that "mass-produced clothing will always be cheaper than clothing produced on an individual basis."
Bottom line: Custom attire, facilitated by digital scanners and driven by the ever-present demand for comfortable clothes, will go mainstream in 1999.
Haysun Hahn, director, Bureau De Style, a trend forecasting company.
Sung Park, president, Custom Clothing Technology Corp.
Jud Early, director of research and development, Textile/Clothing Technology Corp.
Martha Harkey and Gary Henderson, founders, Yang Snowboard Clothing Inc.
Ingrid Johnson, professor and chair of the Textile Development and Marketing Department, Fashion Institute of Technology.URLs/Further Reading
CAD Cut: Technology for hire that computerises manual processes and produces goods more efficiently.
[TC]2 Body Measurement System: Homepage of the system under development by Reality Checker Jud Early.
The Industrial and Social Impact of New Technology in the Clothing Industry into the 2000s. A dissertation on technology and haberdashery.
Fair is fair: if a woman can swallow a pill and alter her body's chemistry so that she can't get pregnant, why shouldn't there be a chemical or hormone men can take to neutralise their seed?Even though it has been cited as self-serving sexism, probably with reason, it is true that engineering a method to deactivate sperm is biologically more difficult than disrupting a woman's monthly egg output. It isn't as though attempts at a pill for men haven't been made: several male birth-control regimens have entered trials, only to prove toxic, or to have unacceptable side effects. While some such effects are intolerable - impotence, for example - Isadora Alman, a sex counsellor, says that some of the trials have merely confirmed persistent suspicions that men are content to leave birth control to their partners. For instance, the only side effect of one pill that did well in trials, Alman says, is that it turned the eyes of its taker pink. For Alman, this hardly rates when compared to the bloating, risk of cancer and other myriad side effects associated with the female birth control pill. In fact, she says, this neo-pink eye would actually be an advantage: a woman could tell on sight if her partner or liaison was actually on the pill.
A couple of promising new developments have, however, been made public: Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina has announced a new male contraceptive compound, now in trials, and an Australian group at the Royal Women's Hospital and Melbourne's Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research has announced male contraceptive injections. The injections, reminiscent of those developed for women, have proven as effective in weekly doses as a woman's daily pill. To make the injections more market-friendly, researchers are trying to make them monthly or quarterly.
In general, our experts are optimistic. They acknowledge gender bias in contraceptive R&D. For example, they pointed to a double standard: to merit financial support, new contraceptive techniques for men must also protect against HIV infection, whereas new contraceptive techniques for women that don't block HIV, such as Norplant, routinely receive funding. But, they insist, men do care about birth control - vasectomies, for example, have never been performed more frequently - and they have confidence that a chemical or hormone supplement will soon make it that much easier for men to wear the pants in family planning.
Bottom line: Dozens of under-publicised male contraceptive techniques currently exist, but if it's the simplicity of a pill or injection you want, look to 1999.
Nancie S. Martin, president of Jouisance Productions and former editor of Playgirl.
Isadora Alman, "Ask Isadora" syndicated columnist and sex and relationship counsellor.
Richard Kadrey, editor of Covert Culture sourcebook and author of Kamikaze L'Amour.
Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Community, Virtual Reality and editor of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalogue.URLs/Further Reading
Research Triangle Institute: Male Contraceptive Compound Developed. Press reports from the makers of a new compound that has so far proved non-toxic in humans and effective in rendering rats and mice sterile.
Contraceptive Options for Men: An engaging, helpful list for those who hate condoms and aren't ready for a vasectomy.
Ask Isadora: Homepage of the columnist and sexpert with a daily question culled from her columns.
Despite the media attention and millions spent on R&D, few - if any - purely solar-powered cars will ever cruise our streets. But by 2001, cars fuelled by both petrol combustion and electricity will use photovoltaic cells for auxiliary power and battery recharging.
Early in the next century, gym memberships may decline as weight loss or control becomes as simple as popping a pill. Such pills will be here as soon as 2002, but while they may get rid of the spare tires, they'll never replace the benefits of regular exercise.
Terabytes of memory and dazzling processing speed from a computer smaller than a pinhead; swarms of microscopic robots that neutralise cancer cells, eat rust for lunch, or reconfigure hard plastic to produce a repeatedly customisable toilet seat; self-replicating molecular machines that "grow" into a product - these are some of the visions, useful and whimsical, that nanotechnology may someday enable. But the current reality is far more prosaic.Getting at the truth of nanotechnology first requires agreeing on a definition of it. If, for example, one refers to nanotechnology as any activity at the nano scale (one billionth of a metre), then nanotechnology could include ultra-high-resolution lithography. Lines this narrow are feasible today. Ralph C. Merkle of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (Xerox PARC), however, contends that the appropriate definition of nanotechnology is "a manufacturing technology able to inexpensively fabricate most structures [in a manner] consistent with natural law, and to do so with molecular precision." In short, nanotechnology is a "bottom-up" approach to engineering.
It is nearly three decades since Richard Feynman, the physicist, first speculated on nanotechnology: "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom." But only the most tentative steps toward creating useful nanotech engineering tools have been made, and most current progress is largely limited to computer simulations. Richard E. Smalley suggests that the first practical product could be a chemically synthesised biosensor, placed on the tip of a needle, that could first recognise biological agents in the bloodstream or measure blood-sugar levels and then send the information out of the body for analysis. K. Eric Drexler, however, predicts that a first application will occur not in medicine, but in electronics. "A good candidate for the first product to make a big splash," says Drexler, "is a molecular-based computer memory."
Bottom line: As even its proponents admit, nanotechnology remains a theoretical field. Still, there are strong indications that nanotechnology will become feasible, and a first nanotech-engineered product will be available in 2004.
Robert R. Birge, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and director of the W. M. Keck Centre for Molecular Electronics, Syracuse University.
J. Storrs Hall, Ph.D., computer scientist, Rutgers University, and moderator sci.nanotechnology Usenet group.
Donald W. Brenner, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University.
Richard E. Smalley, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and physics, Rice University, and chief investigator of Rice's Centre for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
K. Eric Drexler, Ph.D., chairman, Foresight Institute, and author of Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of NanotechnologyURLs/Further Reading
Nanotechnology: Introduction to nanotechnology by researchers at Xerox PARC.
A response to Scientific American's news story Trends In Nanotechnology by Ralph C. Merkle.
Computational Molecular Nanotechnology at NASA Ames Research Centre. NASA's foray into nanotech research with short- and long-term objectives.
Foresight Institute: With access to Engines of Creation. This is the single best site to keep track of what's happening in nanotechnology.
Human organs for transplant are in short supply worldwide, which makes the idea of animal donors appealing for some. By 2005, cross-species transplants may not have been perfected, but they will be an alternative to premature death for a select few.
Remember Rosie, the Jetsons' trusty mechanical domestic? Our experts predict that house-cleaning robots capable of doing the tasks you hate most may be commercially available within a decade. They disagree, however, on whether or not they will resemble Rosie.If John Canny is correct, we won't have anthropomorphic vacuum cleaners, but instead "a fleet of mouse- or cockroach-sized robots scurrying around the floor," efficiently sucking up dirt or emitting static electricity to become dust magnets. On the other hand, Joe Engelberger reports that his company has already conducted a large-scale study of a mobile, articulated two-armed robot that could soon (given three more years of substantial R&D funding) be ready to clean house. Beyond tidying up, he says, the machine could be utilised as an "elder-care robot to extend independent living for cognisant but mobility-impaired senior citizens."
House-cleaning robots will have to feature substantially advanced navigation capabilities and significantly improved interfaces before people feel comfortable around them and entrust them with their homes and, for that matter, before health and safety executives give them the go-ahead. As Isaac Asimov insisted in his Three Laws of Robotics, robots will have to "serve humans without harming them."
Bottom line: Regardless of whether they look like electronic vermin or more closely resemble a human vacuum cleaner, house-cleaning robots will be on showroom floors in 2005.
John Canny, associate professor of computer science, University of California, Berkeley.
Richard S. Wallace, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Lehigh University.
Toshio Fukuda, professor of microsystem engineering and mechano-informatics, Nagoya University, Japan.
Joe Engelberger, chair, HelpMate Robotics, Inc.
Rodney A. Brooks, associate director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and chair, IS Robotics, Inc.URLs/Further Reading Automated Robot Cleaning of Windows. ARCOW work-in-progress: a cleaning system for hard to reach windows.
Mobile Robot Research at the MIT AI Laboratory. Veteran and new robots currently being put through the paces at MIT.
Fred & Ginger - Co-Operant Mobile Robotics: University of Salford researchers introduce "Fred" and "Ginger," but not Rosie.
Eventually, the clothes that we wear will assume some of the functions that our laptop computers and mobile phones perform today; embedded electronics may enable fabrics to serve as computer screens or communications devices. That's a long way off; but in the much shorter term, smart fabrics that change their constitution to fit the weather will be here as soon as 2007.
Satisfying virtual reality experiences currently requires complex, cumbersome interfaces such as special gloves, goggles and helmets. Despite the predictions of William Gibson's novel Virtual Light, we may never see VR shades that give a realistic impression of moving about in a computer-generated environment, but eyeglasses that double as computer monitors may grace your face by 2009.
The logical end-point for keyhole surgery is a device that can just be left in the body to do its thing - patching stomach ulcers, zapping bowel polyps, or whatever. Expect some such micro devices by 2010.
The book isn't dead yet: paperbacks are much more portable and versatile than laptop computers, and they will probably never disappear altogether. But by 2013, an electronic form of the book will have begun to displace its paper equivalent for millions of readers.
Some say that by 2015 it will be possible to get all your dietary requirements from a pill the size of an aspirin. But even if science can solve big problems with obtaining the right energy balance and keeping our bowels occupied and cancer-free, our culture almost certainly won't stand for substituting a pill for a full meal.
Public libraries won't be closing their doors any time soon. Databases have replaced card catalogues, new media have broadened the scope of our browsing material and networked computers have given rise to the concept of a library without walls, full of virtual books; but such libraries - which we may see as soon as 2016 - lack the social elements of the bricks-and-mortar antecedents, and will only complement conventional libraries for the foreseeable future.
Imagine a phone that displays a 3D image so realistic that the person you called seems to be sitting right across from you. According to holography experts, this is not so much a matter of developing the technology to project the hologram (that's already here) as a matter of connecting people with the bandwidth required to transmit real-time 3D images. In fact, the prospects for holography make the hoopla surrounding virtual reality seem misplaced.It will take time, of course, before the required bandwidth will be available and/or installed in a majority of homes, but Mark Diamond, creative director of 3-D Worldwide Holograms Inc, thinks that once that hurdle has been overcome, "intelligent" optical materials will operate on both ends of the fibre-optic line. Such materials will e[less equal]ciently and naturally compress holographic images, he says, eliminating the need for powerful computers to reproduce the holograms on either end.
Stephen A. Benton points out that two years ago the MIT Media Lab sent a hologram through 70 metres of coaxial cable, but he believes the first holographic phones are likely to employ improved "lenticular imaging", the quasi-holographic technology used on 3D postcards.
More philosophically, Diamond reflects that once holograms have become a reg-ular part of our lives (and their visual qual-ity is convincing), they will change the way we look at the world. "We will see a return to the ancient belief that information is dispersed everywhere, within us and without. We'll adjust to the perception that things are weightless," Diamond says. "[Holography] will give us new metaphors to live by."
Bottom line: A "phone" that uses holographic technology to produce a lifelike 3D image of a caller will be available by 2016.
Stephen A. Benton, ph.d., Allen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Spatial Imaging Group, Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tung Hon Jeong, professor of physics, and director of the Centre of Photonics Studies, Lake Forest College.
Emmett Leith, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of Michigan.
Mark Diamond, founder, Diamond images inc and creative director and vice president, 3-D Worldwide Holograms, Inc.
James Fischbach, president and CEO, American Propylaea, a commercial holography developer.URLs/Further Reading
Coherent Laser Vision System. Profile of a technology that could enable holophones.
Holophile Inc - Spectral Imagery. Homepage for a device that lets you convey a message as Princess Leia did in Star Wars.
Whether it's to ensure a safe drive home from a party, or to prevent a hangover the day after, consumer interest in a tablet that quickly brings on sobriety seems assured. As Timothy Leary said wistfully: "Sunday morning wouldn't be too early for the invention of this drug."According to Michael Aldrich, learning how to reverse the effects of alcohol could be either as simple as discovering the neurochemical basis of alcohol's intoxicating effects, or as complicated as parsing the combined effects of amount, setting and frequency of alcohol use, and the genetics of the drinker. John Morgan agrees that the problem is finding the correct cell receptors or membranes that mediate intoxication.
Understanding the chemistry would be only the first hurdle, however, as the approval of any drug that promised to reverse inebriation would require a series of rigorous clinical trials. Only then could its widespread availability further encourage all manner of bad behaviour before it's time to "sober up" for the drive home.
Bottom line: Because achieving sobriety quickly can require more than merely reversing alcohol's effects on the brain, it will be 2020 before a reliable "sober up" drug hits the market.
John Morgan, MD, professor of pharmacology, City University of New York and member of the Advisory Board of the Drug Policy Foundation.
Michael Aldrich, ph.d., curator, Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library.
Andrew Weil, MD, author of Spontaneous Healing and Natural Health, Natural Medicine.
Alexander Shulgin, MD, chemist/pharmacologist, University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story. Timothy Leary, ph.d., philosopher.URLs/Further Reading
The Alcohol Neutraliser. A product of herbs and glandulars that helps "safeguard" against alcohol's toxic effects.
Intoximeters Inc - Alcohol and the Human Bod. Fairly "dry" background on alcohol and its effects.
Alcohol. A chemical analysis of what we drink.
Functional Requirements for Chemical Detoxification. Medical information on avoiding harm from alcohol.
Liver - Herbal Formula No. 58. Homepage for a commercial product that helps the body's own detoxifier.
"The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale of corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables." 'And this,' said the Director opening the door, 'is the Fertilising Room.' "
These lines, written by Aldous Huxley in 1931 in Brave New World, introduce readers to a terrifying world in which the same system of controls that corporations use to mass-produce commodities has been applied to mass-producing human life. Over 60 years later, much of the technology required to create a society like Huxley's has arrived. Fortunately, however, these advances have thus far been utilised to begin or preserve life and not to control it.
In 1977, scientists at Cambridge University performed the first in vitro fertilisation, a procedure whereby eggs that have been removed from a woman's ovary are fertilised by sperm outside the body. Since 1977, tens of thousands of in vitro fertilisations have been performed to overcome various types of infertility and have given rise to several other techniques, including GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer), and ICSI (intracyto-plasmic sperm injection). Developed and first demonstrated at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1994 (the first child produced by this method was born in February 1995), ICSI involves injecting a single sperm into the centre of a human egg.
As for technology sustaining foetal development outside the body, incubators can now support extremely young infants (little more than 20 weeks of age) born prematurely or rescued from the womb of an injured mother. Medical science, in other words, is narrowing the gap between test-tube conception and machine-assisted development, and may well have closed it completely by 2022.
Looking out for future children, Nancie S. Martin jokes, "it would be so nice to avoid all that muss and fuss, but who are you going to blame in therapy if you don't have parents?"
Bottom line: by 2022, for better or quite possibly worse, creating a new human life might not require a mother's womb.
Richard Kadrey, editor of Covert Culture sourcebook, and author of Kamikaze L'Amour.
Nancie S Martin, president of Jouisance Productions and former editor of Playgirl.
Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Community, Virtual Reality and editor of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalogue.
Isadora Alman, "Ask Isadora" syndicated columnist, and sex and relationship counsellor.URLs/Further Reading
IVF - GIFT, ZIFT and ICSI: The fertilisation services available at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Embryo and Semen Freezing. More from UCSF, specifically on their ability to preserve embryos and sperm.
Ethics of Embryo Research. An article by Ronald M Green of The Washington Post which raises a few difficult questions.
ZyGen Laboratory: Lab services in Los Angeles County and who they serve best.
Here's the vision: one day you die (or de-animate, as the advocates say), and over the next few days, technicians slowly but surely freeze either your head or entire body, eventually submerging what's left of you in liquid nitrogen. Years later you are brought back to life, your body mended, re-invigorated, perhaps even cloned anew. Welcome to a brave new world where the Big Chill no longer means death and where true death occurs only when there's nothing left to reconstruct.Cryonics, the latest and arguably most promising technology yet for achieving extreme longevity, is the science of deep-freezing tissue before it has begun to decay with an eye toward reanimating it later. The term dates to 1965 and Robert C. W, Ettinger's book, The Prospect of Immortality. At least four companies make good on Ettinger's idea, insofar as they offer the front-end (deep-freezing) technology today and will store the results until someone comes up with the back-end (reviving) technology. These four organisations are maintaining 67 heads and/or bodies in cryosuspension. Alcor Foundation, perhaps the best known of the four, sustains 13 whole body and 19 neuro (head) suspensions. (Walt Disney's body and head, by the way, are not among them. His cryosuspension is an urban myth.)
Far-fetched as cryonics strikes some, it is - according to Ralph C. Merkle - "feasible in principle, if not yet in practice". Kidneys and other internal organs have been frozen and later restored to their functions. But that is as nothing to reviving a brain - with the memory intact. "Within ten years," says Steve Bridge optimistically, "we will know how memory functions well enough to see if particular structures that are vital to it have survived."
To reach that point, says the president of Transtime Art Quaife, will require investment in R&D. He points to Wall Street's recent interest in "spin-off" cryonic technologies like BioTime's blood substitute (which, in the context of cryonics, could serve as a biological antifreeze); to advances in cloning (lizards are already cloned in labs); and to the ability to repair tissue damaged by ice crystals.
Significantly, our experts suggest that the reanimation of people currently in cryonic suspension may not be the best measure of this technology. Instead, they point to cryogenic medicine as a better indicator of progress in cryonics. Imagine, says Merkle, "being able to operate on a person as a mechanic does a car - to turn off the motor completely, fix what is wrong, and then turn it back on again."
Bottom line: In 2043, it will be possible to reanimate tissue that was cryosuspended at "death" and restore it to life.
Ralph C Merkle, Ph.D, director of nanotechnology research, Xerox PARC.
Charles Platt, vice president and co-founder, Cryo-Care Foundation.
Richard S Wallace, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Lehigh University.
Steve Bridge, president, Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Art Quaife, Ph.D, president of TransTime.URLs/Further Reading
Cryonics - Our Frozen Future. An introduction from the American Cryonics Society that assures readers that "being stiff doesn't have to mean being boring."
CryoNet. Introduction with "Is it for you?" questionnaire.
Cryo-Cell Ireland Ltd/Uni-Matic Storage Unit. Homepage of a manufacturer of the dewars where cryosuspended persons are kept.
BioPreservation, Inc. Homepage of one cryoservice provider.
Alcor Foundation. Homepage of the leading cryoservice provider.
Cryo-Care. Another cryoservice provider.
3D goggles, a condom-tight body suit with thousands of "sensor-affectors" and, doubtless, something nifty for the sense of smell. Sex acts transmitted at the speed of light, recorded and replayed - all this and more will be possible by 2036.
Futurists and technologists have been heralding the advent of the paperless office for at least a decade. Email would replace faxes, Newtons and other PDAs take the place of Post-It notes and programmable wristwatches replace Filofaxes. Yeah, right. Paper will diminish in importance - its use could halve by 2005 - but paper is so highly entrenched in our culture that it will never face total extinction.