The torment nexus
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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Alarm clock that reads my brain activity and only wakes me up at the point in my REM cycle, where i'll feel refreshed waking up.
Sounds like a fun Hack a Day-esque project for someone out there. If you can secure it well enough to stay in place while you sleep, can probably make something with a repurposed Star Wars Force Trainer headset, an Arduino, and some means of triggering an alarm (the fact that we're just out there selling EEG tech as a kids toy is nuts to me).
I just wake up a few minutes before my alarm due to my internal clock. Doesn't matter what time I go to bed.
These exist in smartwatches. Not reading your brain activity but tracking your micro movements (or macro) and vibrating on your wrist when you are in a lighter stage of sleep around your alarm time.
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Mech suits.
We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
It's why in the Robotics;Notes visual novel, they have to invent some meteorite that gives a lot of power and is small, just so their story about realistic mechas being everywhere work.
I'm an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don't have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn't demand them much, at least with our current technology.
There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side--the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less "mech suit" and more "assistive arm" type of things.
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I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.
I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.
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Fusion energy. Man, we are so close!
Yeah, you know what they say: only thirty more years.
With adequate funding. That's the part that always gets omitted. We haven't been funding the research to make it happen.
Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
I've got good news for you! We've been terraforming the planet to be more like Arrakis for a couple decades already!
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Nuclear rocket engines. A bit less ambitious than most of the responses, but most things here seem to either refer to technologies we don't have yet but seem within a century or so of developing, which doesn't fit the question, or vague consequences that one wants that tech to have without it being clear how our current technology gets there. But nuclear rockets definitely fit the question, because we have built and ground tested them before, decades ago even, we just haven't bothered to actually use the things. And they should theoretically make developing things like space industry or manned space exploration beyond the moon more viable, by being more efficient than chemical rockets while giving better thrust than ion engines do. They don't work well for launching from the ground, but since our launch abilities have increased a fair bit in the past decade or so, actually getting the things to space in order to use them should be easier than ever.
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