My most expected technology breakthroughs

Health care: Live longer, live better and live forever

Everyone wants a healthy, quality life, most of us want a long lifespan and a lot of us (believe me, a lot) want to become immortal. The following new developments in medicine and biology open the doors for human to join the club of gods. An immortal species is unprecedented and will fundamentally change every aspect of our society.

1. Gene Therapy
Imagine you can fix your Microsoft Windows bugs by modifying its source code. As the name indicates, gene therapy enables us editing our own source code, aka DNA, to fix problems or even improve ourselves. Over two thousands clinic trials had been conducted and more than half were performed in United States. ¹ They promised cure from rare genetic disease to HIV and cancers. Being able to modify human's source code is powerful and scary at the same time. This is definitely a field you want to keep your eyes on it.

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2. Artificial Organs
Similar to your vehicle's timing belt or tires, at some point your organs will fail to function. Unfolding new technology shows us the possibility to grow new organs from your own cells. ²

3. Understand our brains
Are we more than our own genes ? How the memory is stored ? What's the cause of Autism ? Who we really are ? Scientists believe studies in connectome, which is a complete map of neural connections of the brain, will give us answers.

Infomation Technology:

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4. Quantum Computing
The current leader, Google thinks they will demonstrate so called "Quantum Supremacy" as soon as this year with their 72 qbits chips. This would be marked as a milestone in human history since from this point, the quantum computer will be beyond reach of today's fastest supercomputers. ³

5. Artificial Intelligence
Computers are approaching human's intelligence only in specialized applications, such as object recagonization, natural language processing and autonomous vehicles. The self learning general purpose AI is still far away from us. Here is an extensive report on AI's potential applications from Mckinsey.

6. 5G network
The peak download speed for 5G wireless network is 20 Gb/s. By comparison, 4G network and Google fiber are 1 Gb/s. It will be available in the next two years. ⁴

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7. Blockchain
Bitcoin may not succeed as digital gold, but blockchain will stay as a powerful tool to transform our society. ⁵

Aerospace

8. Hypersonic Aircraft
Flying from Beijing to New York in two hours ? ⁶ All major players, United States, China and Russia are racing for speed. The future hypersonic aircraft may fly at Mach 36 and arrive California from China under 14 minutes.

Energy

9. Nuclear Fusion
As always, we’re again 10-15 years away from practical fusion power plant. ⁷
But who knows, it may finally become true this time. Fusion is too important to humanity, that we should never give up.

10. Better Batteries
What's in common among your cell phone, laptop, iPad, electronic vehicle ? They all need batteries and the batteries are also the bottlenecks of these products. New batteries could be charged in seconds and lasting for months. ⁸