The purpose of technology is not for technology’s sake, there is no “la technique pour la technique”. It should be in the function of the progress of the human community through better health care, communication and education. The goal is a healthy population that has more spare time that they use well and without non-personal monitoring of their activities. Such freedom is possible only through the use of new technologies that address all the existential needs of humanity.
In this context, 5G will undoubtedly improve the human community, but it is also just a transition period for some future 6G – nice and useful, but it is essentially just an evolutionary step and not a revolution as telecom giants present it. Well, let’s look at what an approach that focuses on fundamental scientific work more than one related to advancing technology has to offer us.
Examples of two technologies that will change the world to a much greater extent than 5G are nuclear fusion to solve energy problems and quantum computers with the ability to solve problems that were previously unimaginable to overcome.
Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun and the stars, is a potential source of safe, non-carbon emitting and virtually limitless energy. International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER, The Way” in Latin) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today. ITER will be the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time and producing a ten-fold return on energy (Q=10), or 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power. ITER will not capture the energy it produces as electricity, but—as the first fusion experiment in history to produce net energy gain—it will prepare the way for the machine that can. The world’s first commercial-scale fusion reactor project is on track to officially launch operations at the end of 2025.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex real-world problems such as simulating chemistry, modelling financial risk and optimizing supply chains. Simulating quantum physics is a fundamental problem for chemistry, nanotechnology and other fields. If you want to do calculations for new molecular designs, then classical computing is of very little help. Therefore molecular design testing is still mostly done physically in a laboratory in which wide variety of designs are simply tested out using different hardware. Quantum computers make it easier to do calculations because you have quantum system simulating another quantum system and tasks such as modelling atomic bonding or estimating electron orbital overlaps can be done much more precisely. Quantum computers could aid development of catalysts for clean energy and renewable chemical manufacturing, enable deeper understanding of the enzymes that underlie photosynthesis and the nitrogen cycle, power the discovery of high-temperature superconductors and new materials for solar cells, and much more. There are many quantum algorithms that produce a significant speed-up over the best possible classical computations, and researchers are working hard to try to find more.
Continuous improvements in researching indicate that a practical application for both of these technologies will be found in this decade. Unfortunately, it is possible that we will have the same problem that affects 5G technology – the fact that people don’t know what a vaccine is, what a chip is, and what fake news is. The problem lies in the fact that it is the simplest way for such people to become important to themselves and like-minded people, and at the same time feel liberated (this is how one of my now ex Facebook friend described the enlightenment about the evil mind and intent of Bill Gates). It is therefore essential to put pressure on politicians to raise enough funds for these two things. Preferably, before conspiracy theories about them emerge.
Tmilinovic's Blog 