If you could travel through time, but only to see something for Research or for Fun, not to change anything, what would you pick? (Yes you may have a babel fish in your ear to translate for you. You are immune to disease and damage as long as you don't interfere).
Answer to a family history question.
Pictures of a building that exists when it was new
Pictures of buildings that have been destroyed
The Last Restaurant ever
The very last human
The Death of our Sun.
Who wrote My Immortal and why?
First contact with extra terrestrial life if any.
Assorted fresh fruit and vegetables out of season
Far enough in the future to use Food Replicators and the Holodeck
Voting ended onApr 15, 2025
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A team of physicists working with Google claim, in pre-print research, they've created actual time crystals inside a quantum computer. This
Google’s ‘time crystals’ could be the greatest scientific achievement of our lifetimes
Who cares? What’s this going to mean for me?
Imagine technology from Star Trek and Marvel Superhero Movies.
Literally everyone should care. As I wrote back in 2018, time crystals could be the miracle quantum computing needs.
Nearly every far-future tech humans can imagine, from teleportation to warp drives and from artificial food synthesizers to perpetual motion reactors capable of powering the world without burning fuels or harnessing energy, will require quantum computing systems.
Quantum computers can solve really hard problems. Unfortunately, they’re brittle. It’s hard to build them, hard to maintain them, hard to get them to do anything, and even harder to interpret the results they give. This is because of something called “decoherence,” which works a lot like entropy.
Computer bits in the quantum world, qubits, share a funky feature of quantum mechanics that makes them act differently when observed than when they’re left alone. That sort of makes any direct measurements of qubit states (reading the computer’s output) difficult.
But time crystals want to be coherent. So putting them inside a quantum computer, and using them to conduct computer processes could potentially serve an incredibly important function: ensuring quantum coherence.
So Google solved quantum computing?
No. No, no, no, no no. Don’t get me wrong. This is baby steps. This is infancy research. This is Antony van Leeuwenhoek becoming the first person to use a microscope to look at a drop of water under magnification.
What Google‘s done, potentially, is prove that humans can manufacture time crystals. In the words of the researchers themselves:
These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.
Basically they believe they’ve proven the concept, so now it’s time to see what can be done with it.
Then why is this so exciting?
Time crystals have always been theoretical. And by “always,” I mean: since 2012 when they were first hypothesized.
If Google‘s actually created time-crystals, it could accelerate the timeline for quantum computing breakthroughs from “maybe never” to “maybe within a few decades.”
At the far-fetched, super-optimistic end of things – we could see the creation of a working warp drive in our lifetimes. Imagine taking a trip to Mars or the edge of our solar system, and being back home on Earth in time to catch the evening news.
And, even on the conservative end with more realistic expectations, it’s not hard to imagine quantum computing-based chemical and drug discovery leading to universally-effective cancer treatments.
This could be the big eureka we’ve all been waiting for. I can’t wait to see what happens in peer-review.
The crew's of Star Trek's ships are spoiled when it comes to a choice of food, ever since the days of the NX-01 Enterprise with its on-board Chef, things only got more extravagant with the advent of the food synthesizer in Disocvery/TOS era then full on energy-matter conversion technology by the time of the Next Generation in the 24th century.
This video tracks the progress of the replicator in regards to food from NASA's space age rehydratable sealed packets to the protein resequencer in 2151 then on to the "food slot" and finally the 2360-onward replicator tech.
Of all the tech in Star Trek, I think I'd like to have the sonic showers the most. Showers are exhausting. With sonic showers, you might have to do a little twirl or shake your hair a little bit, but that's about it. The food replicators are a very close second.
