Futurism

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A place to discuss the ideas, developments, and technology that can and will shape the future of civilization.

Tenets:

(1) Concepts are often better treated in isolation -- eg: "what if energy became near zero cost?"
(2) Consider the law of unintended consequences -- eg: "if this happens, then these other systems fail"
(3) Pseudoscience and speculative physics are not welcome. Keep it grounded in reality.
(4) We are here to explore the parameter spaces of the future -- these includes political system changes that advances may trigger. Keep political discussions abstract and not about current affairs.
(5) No pumping of vapourware -- eg: battery tech announcements.

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From Cellphones to Isolinear Chips? Star Trek isn't all techno babble! (self.futurism)

submitted 2 years ago by Mehillus to c/futurism

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The other day over lunch I was talking to a coworker about Trek, when Isolinear Chips came up in the conversation. I happened upon some articles regarding light based computer chip research while looking up the wiki info and I was intrigued.

What other interesting things do you see in our fictions becoming reality? A dream of a Station in the clouds of Venus is one I often fall back on.

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[–] troyunrau 2 points 2 years ago

I'm not sure Star Trek ever really defined what an "isolinear chip" was formally -- although there are numerous Star Trek Encyclopedias and similar that contain this jargon. And it's probably a good thing too, as isolinear has a real, technical meaning in mathematics, at a minimum:

iso+linear => on the same line

It sure sounds fancy though -- and makes for great technobabble. Likewise, Voyager used some sort of neural mumbo-jumbo completely unrelated to modern neural networks.

Optical data transmission has been a thing for a long time (late 50s?). Optical data processing is relatively new, but since at least 2005ish there's been significant research there. Good wikipedia rabbit holes can be found if you start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing