The Age of Photonic Metasurfaces
If you say in a poem, “grass is green,” They all ask, “what did you mean?” — Louis Dudek
Photonic metasurfaces promise to shrink lights, cameras, and action* onto flat or curved pieces of paper, and even weave them into fabric. *(LIDAR, chemical testing labs, reactive neural computers)
Just look it up, seriously it is ridiculous, and clearly advances in software (intelligent agents, self-improving systems, domain specific languages, and, perhaps paradoxically, compression algorithms) are going to make the need for hard drives and computer chips skyrocket.
Regulation, culture, and education will have to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and I think it could go on like this for a million or a billion years so can we at least decide on a standardized shape and size for our computers and hardware interfaces, and give them open source platforms or at least functional APIs that are only allowed to change one or two things every ten or twenty years?
Within a decade or so, it should be relatively easy to program in whatever language you already speak, or in an esoteric language that you made up on the spot. (For further information, see Spherepop and Pipsqueak.) Whatever languages are used as substrates, I’d be willing to learn them, in order to “program or be programmed”.
Ok, so I wanted to say that the age of photonic metasurfaces is upon us and it’s already here. You can get your assistant to write an essay on it right now if you like.
Anyways, I didn’t really want to write an article, but I am starting to worry about a future in which we all become podcasters and video bloggers or else remotely control forklifts for some monolithic corporation that goes behind everyone’s back and buys up all the world’s companies.
I already came up with dozens of solutions for global warming and sea-level rise, but not one of them can easily be implemented for less than a trillion dollars — although you could make a model with a few dollars worth of popsicle sticks and Styrofoam.
A few examples of these ideas, in no particular order: the Tetraorthodrome, Septentrion and Meridion, the volsorial pediments, the Hoberman space elevator, and the Dyson swarm ring.
These function to desalinate and distribute water, as floating gravitational batteries, nuclear polar refrigerators, giant kelp farms, rainforest generators, geothermal mass accelerators, and factories.
I think that if trends continue, it looks like the earth’s population is going to stabilize at around ten billion, so maybe we should consider adding one billion whales to the mix.
My plan is to build forty billion new rooms and a carbon sequestration cycle to sustain them, although it might take a hundred and fifty years or more. It might accidentally make space travel really cheap (through rocketless orbital mag-rail launch) and eventually, once Mercury is dissected, energy can also be made almost free.
So then maybe (if education, medicine, and government are also fixed), I think this might lead to a population boom and we can finally get around to solving the ingenuity gap and ending the replication crisis.
References
Dissassembling Mercury:
(Note: It is actually a good idea.)
Interstellar Mitosis:
