Evaluating future technology

[ciphergoth]

How do you tell a reasonable guess about what future technology might bring (eg a manned mission to Mars) from unreasonable guesses (eg teleportation)?

I'm inclined to think that you have to get down to the technical nitty-gritty. If you don't know the field, it might be reasonable to think that in the future we'll prove that our ciphers are unbreakable. Actually, for everyday useful ciphers, a proof that they are secure with no unproven assumptions is much harder than you might think if you've not studied CS. There's no reason I'd expect you to know that if you're not a computer scientist, but if your vision of the near future included provably unbreakable ciphers, I'd want to explain why that doesn't look very likely at the moment.

What do you think?

Comments

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

A manned mission to Mars wouldn't be that hard.

It's only if you want the astronauts to return to Earth, alive, that it gets prohibitively difficult.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I chose that as an example at least in part because it's incredibly hard in a way that often seems underappreciated.

However, if for some reason we discovered tomorrow that the first nation to get a manned mission to Mars and back would immediately gain some massive military advantage over all the others, I don't suppose anyone thinks it would take all that long.

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Neah. What you do is get them to Mars and start a colony. Then you cryogenically freeze them. Once their descendants have advenced to the stage of being able to build a ship to get back to Earth, you wake them up and send them back.