You didn’t wake up this morning. No, you’re not dead—thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, you simply haven’t needed to sleep for a week. Which is pretty handy, since you’ve been able to perform nearly uninterrupted work on your undergraduate thesis for the past 100 hours.
Now it’s 10 a.m. and time for you to head to “class.” But you’re not going to some stuffy lecture hall to hear Professor Boring drone on while you doodle in the margins of your notebook (ugh, how 20th century). No, you’re strapping on your jet pack, ready to blast over the glittering spires of this brave new world to the educational centre, where you’ll have information downloaded directly into your brain. At 100 megabytes per second, reading the book is even faster than renting the movie.
Yeah, the life of an undergrad in 2030 sounds pretty sweet. Or at least productive. But what aspects of this depiction are science fiction, and which might actually become science fact?
Not a Wink of Sleep
Slumber is nice. It helps us recuperate our weary bodies, sort and store knowledge and memories, and it just feels good. But it’s also rather inconvenient. Sleep takes up about a third of our already too-short time, and we have to do it with annoying regularity—for most of us, every single day. Unlike flossing, we can’t keep putting it off until we get a spare moment. Indeed, rats deprived of sleep for a week develop hyperphagia (abnormally incrased hunger), hypothermia, and other complaints, eventually developing septicemia (blood poisoning) and dying. And who wants that?
Why not do away with this biological necessity?
In 2006, circadian biologist Russel Foster told New Scientist that “In 10 to 20 years we’ll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening.”
Science is making progress on that front, as it develops drugs allowing humans to go for increased periods without the need for rest. A decade ago, scientists kept helicopter pilots awake for 40-hour stretches on the pharmaceutical Modafinil. They found that performance was “maintained at or near baseline levels by modafinil, whereas performance suffered under placebo.” All this from a drug shown to have few side effects and little addictive potential.
Modafinil was acquired by Cephalon in 2001. In a later press release, the company described the drug as “first in a new class of wakepromoting agents.” Wired reported in 2003 that pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly was quietly working on a drug to surpass Modafinil, with a lead scientist on the project chuckling that “the first drug in its class is rarely the best.”
The Guardian noted last week that Cephalon is set to release Nuvigil, the successor to Modafinil, later this year. Read: 40-hour sleepless stretches are just the beginning.
Jetpacks: A Flight of Fancy?
What would a vision of the future be without the ability to fly? From hover cars to jet packs, many science fiction dreamers would have us freed from the tyranny of gravity. Glenn Martin is leading the way in making personal flight a reality. For 28 years, Martin, of Christchurch, New Zealand, has been building flying machines in his garage. He’s still testing and fine-tuning the culmination of his work, the Martin Jetpack, but it has broken virtually every record in the field. Traditional rocket belts, usually propelled by compressed gas, have been around for decades. However, they’ve barely cracked 30-seconds of air-time, and have found few, if any, practical uses.
With a 200-horsepower engine driving two rotors, Martin’s device can fly for half an hour— theoretically, at least. He’s already clocked around 5,000 test runs of up to five minutes in length, posting some impressive footage of his feats on YouTube. The machine should be able to soar high into the air, though Martin has yet to take it more than a few feet off the ground.
“You don’t teach your sevenyear- old kid to swim and then have them swim Lake Superior,” Martin told The Varsity.
“I won’t let anyone fly any higher on this until we’ve done 100 hours [of cumulative flight time] on one frame,” and after all the safety mechanisms are finished, he said. But Martin allows his wife and kids to fly the jetpack. “I wouldn’t let them if it weren’t safe.”
Once it’s ready for the public, he sees many uses for the machine, including building inspections, search and rescue missions, and transporting medical personnel to accidents.
“In the next 10 years, thousands will have flown jetpacks,” Martin claims. “That doesn’t mean people will abandon the automobile.” He notes, though, that one of his customers “already owns a Lamborghini, but he still gets stuck in traffic.”
Mind Over Chatter
The idea of having that three-hour Econ lecture beamed directly into your head—instead of having to actually sit there through it— sounds far-fetched. But consider that Sony was granted a patent in 2005 for a “device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain,” as New Scientist reported. While entirely speculative, the corporation imagines a day when we can use ultrasound to produce electrical currents in small, targeted areas of the brain, bypassing the usual perceptual organ. Thus a stonedeaf Beethoven could “hear” his own symphonies, were he alive today. Or rather, tomorrow.
It gets better. In 2008, the Telegraph quoted Chris Parry, chief executive of the U.K. Independent Schools Council, as saying “It’s a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge.” Parry went on to predict that “Within 30 years, sitting down and learning something will be a thing of the past.”
A bold claim, to be sure. But we’re perhaps inching in that direction. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is already a reality: we can induce electrical currents across broad areas of the brain simply by toggling rapidly between magnetic fields. We can also make information flow the other way. In 2006, for example, the *Pittsburgh Tribune-Review *reported that a University of Pittsburgh neurobiologist successfully trained a monkey to “feed itself chunks of zucchini using a robotic arm powered by the animal’s own brain signals.”
Yes, it’s a far cry from not having to read that 500-page philosophy textbook. And perhaps the day will never come when people can entirely forgo such “analogue” means of education. Leslie Chan, a lecturer at U of T Scarborough who focuses on learning with new technologies, explained to The Varsity, “Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not education.” While he believes we’ll eventually be able to “download” bits of information directly into our brains, it won’t be enough.
“Education has to be in context— it’s about the appropriate application of knowledge,” said Chan. He added that while “some would argue that memories are just brainwaves, and that we could digitize them […] a lot of what goes on inside the classroom can’t be duplicated.”
Chan says that in 20 years we’ll still be using analogue and digital educational methods “handin- hand.”
Claire Brett, an associate professor at OISE who focuses on computer-mediated learning, is even more skeptical of Parry’s prediction.
“When we process information, we don’t want everything in our brain. We selectively encode things, and we do that at the perceptual level,” said Brett.
“The last 50 years of cognitive science show that to store things in long-term memory we have to heavily process it. Look at cramming for an exam by rote—there’s so much you lose.”
So the kids of the future will probably still have to go to school, but at least they’ll be able to console themselves by flying there on a jetpack.
