WILD CONJECTURE: COMPUTING
It's been a while, class. Time to sink back in. Today we're talking about different types of COMPUTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERS or rather "computing"- specifically wet computing, quantum computing, and carbon nanocomputing.
"Wet computing" is a weird sounding concept, but it's actually kind of intriguing to consider. This is using DNA to perform complex computations via changing how the nucleotides combine with one another and analyzing the results. DNA performs it's operations in parallel, meaning it can sort through many different problems at once, whereas most electronic computers sort through problems in a linear, one-at-a-time fashion. Pretty potent stuff. The book predicts that DNA computers wouldn't come into general use until about 2016... we'll see if that actually happens or not.
Any number of people could probably tell you more about quantum computing than I could, but basically it works by manipulating "quantum bits"- or more specifically they attribute a 1 or a 0 to the quantum state of a bit at any particular moment. Because of the laws of quantum uncertainty, it's actually possible for the bit to be a 1 and a 0 simultaneously, or somewhere in between, allowing for the computation of multiple equations or problems at once, extremely rapidly. Quantum computers already exist, though up to this point they remain something that primarily scientists tinker and toy with a they attempt to make a truly versatile and reliable one. Also my understanding is that quantum computers tend to be fairly expensive, which is why they haven't come into more general use as of yet.
Finally there's carbon nanocomputing, which involves nano-sized components made of carbon. These can either be electric computers or mechanical computers based on the method of their fabrication, but the basic idea behind them is that they're microscopic, think faster than computers many times larger, hold more memory, and can require less energy to keep running for long periods of time. We haven't gotten there yet, but we're getting closer and closer to the time where this technology becomes not only possible, but useable... though I have my doubts that we'll really hear about it for a while. Technology this convenient would be taken under the government's wing for further development, so the first active generation of nanomachines could be used for discreetly collecting and transmitting information. If no one knows about it, they'll be less likely to suspect it, and because the bugs are so small they're massively difficult to find. That's my assumption anyway.
"What would you do with a pocket supercomputer?"
I... honestly do not know. At the point that I could even get one, my assumption is that people smarter than I am would have already used some to solve a lot of the world's problems. You'd hope so, anyway. Honestly by that point there'd probably be an app to randomly generate an entire videogame to play, just by inputting a few starting parameters and letting the comp run for a while. Probably do that a lot. But yeah, at the point that we're writing programs to write programs for us, things are going to start getting... a little screwy. More than usual. We'll start noticing more of the bugs in the underlying code, though.
