I am living in the future and its a strange place. Some difficult mundane tasks are still just as difficult, while others have become trivially easy and fantastical. For instance, my old 1987 motorbike has a problem with its speedometer. The needle is kicking around wildly rather than show my correct speed. To fix this would probably involve opening a small plastic box, and replacing a corroded piece of plastic or metal with a new piece of plastic or metal. Perhaps I would get lucky and find that a screw or something just needs to be tightened, but it would be hard to find exactly where the problem lay. This process is no easier now than it was in 1987. It turns out there is a much simpler way, at least in the interim. I simply attach the pocket supercomputer (with a billion transistors in it) I carry everywhere with me to the motorbikes frame mount. I then command it to link with dozens of orbital space stations, each one carrying a supercooled atomic clock. This network of space stations is overseen by the most powerful military the world has ever seen and involves multiple ground stations taking millimeter accuracy measurements of the exact position of each space station, providing each one with a constantly updating orbital almanac. My pocket supercomputer then uses the positions of at least 4 of the space stations, plus the known speed of light, to calculate its own position to withing a meter of accuracy. Somewhere in the calculation, the refractory composition of the atmosphere must be taken into account, as well as the fact that the space stations are traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and are far from the astronomical mass of the earth, and that therefore time itself is running slower on the space stations. As a consequence of knowing the exact position of the pocket supercomputer at every time, its speed can be established and displayed to me in place of the original speedometer. In this entire process, the hardest thing for me to do by far is to find and attach the bit of plastic that exactly fits my particular pocket supercomputer (since there are so many of them). Everything else Ive described is trivial from my point of view. Acquiring this bit of plastic is no easier than it was 1987, or 1957.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 08:22:06 +0000
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