Ray Kurzweil

This video of Ray Kurzweil was very interesting and educational. There were many points that he made that I thought were shocking. He talked about how if we converted only .03% of the sunlight to energy then we would be set on our energy usage till 2030. It would also help decenerlized things because the need for nuclear plants will decrease and it would be enviornmently friendly. Also he made the point many times that the acceleration of technology is exponetially and that it may take a long time to get to one point but once it's their the development of technology explodes. An example is it took 15 years to sequence the DNA structure of HIV but only 31 days to figure out Sars. Another point that had me thinking of what the future could hold is that computers back in the day when he was in school took up a whole room. Now more powerful computers can be found in your cell phones. They are now working on 3-D chips so they can contain more information and be more effective. In the 80's one transistor would cost $1 but in 2002 you could get 10 million for $1. This is because they have been getting smaller and faster. So it takes less money to produce each and because of the smallness of them the electrons have way less of space that they have to travel. The most intreging part of the video was the part about the fat insular recepter gene. It is a gene that holds on to calories because in the future it may be harder to get food but now days we don't need this. They did a test on mice and turned this gene off. It allowed the mice to eat all day and they would stay slim. But more importantly, it made their life span 20% longer and they didnt get any forms of diabites or heart diesase. I think this would be a great thing to implement for humans. The other part that had me thinking was the robotic red blood cells that they are creating. It can help to cure diabites but the effect that I was most impressed with was the improvement to human capibilites. If they replaced 10% of your red blood cells with these robotic ones you would be able to do an Olympis sprint for 15 minutes without having to breath. Also it would allow you to stay under water for up to 4 hours. These advancments could make the ultimate human. I think this video was very educational and eye opening on what the future could hold.