We have fully reusable rocket ships that let us put people in orbit at less than $200k per person (SpaceX reusable Falcon 9 / Dragon, likely to see fruition within the next 5 to 15 years or so).
We have hand held computers and smartphones with the cpu power of an entire server rack today and with petabytes of non-volatile storage that's nearly as fast as ram (memristors, possibly RSFQ logic, possible on a circa 20 year timeline).
We have fully automated factories (the grand-children of today's CNC machines and 3D printers), you upload some data and press a few buttons and not too long after a fully assembled complex product (a tablet computer, an automobile, an excavator, a spaceship) comes out the other end, as many as you want. And then you start self-replicating such factories this way. That's probably going to happen within the next 50 years, if not sooner.
And this is hardly everything. The future is a crazy place.
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Ain't seen nothing yet.
Just wait until:
We have fully reusable rocket ships that let us put people in orbit at less than $200k per person (SpaceX reusable Falcon 9 / Dragon, likely to see fruition within the next 5 to 15 years or so).
We have hand held computers and smartphones with the cpu power of an entire server rack today and with petabytes of non-volatile storage that's nearly as fast as ram (memristors, possibly RSFQ logic, possible on a circa 20 year timeline).
We have fully automated factories (the grand-children of today's CNC machines and 3D printers), you upload some data and press a few buttons and not too long after a fully assembled complex product (a tablet computer, an automobile, an excavator, a spaceship) comes out the other end, as many as you want. And then you start self-replicating such factories this way. That's probably going to happen within the next 50 years, if not sooner.
And this is hardly everything. The future is a crazy place.
The present is a crazy place that we pretend is normal. The future will be another crazy place, and we'll still pretend it's normal.