Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?

external gestation...a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation... designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
- Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
  
  Artificial wombs are something that's often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I'd bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
- They just released a story about removing the gene that causes down syndrome. Pretty huge

Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I'd like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it's much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
- The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
  
  I feel like the bottleneck will be with smooth continuous motions. It's very easy to move a cursor in that way with a mouse but you can't do that motion with your eyes unless you are looking at something else that's moving.

Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we'll even be able to eliminate measles...again.

I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don't think it will be "downloading minds" or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.
I'm pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.
- This is so terrifying to me. I feel like it'll end up like the Black Mirror episode with the subscription model, getting more and more expensive with fewer features.
  
  Common People
  That episode made my wife and I really hope this tech never becomes a thing.
- Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on.. I can only assume the tech is much better these days.
  Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).
- bsg, sga all had the brain interface thing going on. especially the cylon part was all about that.

Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
- Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
- I can detect gravity without a device:
  Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you've detected gravity.
  
  You could just raise your arm and let it loose...

Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
- Look up Daylight DC-1 might be what you are looking for
  
  Oooohhh, thank you
- I remember we could use the game boy advance SP outside. Is this screen technology used for PC?
- They exist as monitors. In videos they kind of look like really early crappy LCD screens.
  I'd just sit in the shade.

Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.

We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.

living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met
- I saw something about a city in India being super eco-friendly. I'm not sure what was the name of the city, but it looks like they have a few.
  https://www.magicbricks.com/blog/world-environment-day-2025-indias-10-greenest-cities-driving-real-estate-demand/140400.html

A lot of black mirror stuff.
Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.

Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
- They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
  The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
  
  The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
  There's been something else new?

Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
- I thought we already had rail guns on ships?
  
  No. Well kinda.
  The Ford class uses what is basically a rail gun to launch planes but big navy decided against continuing development on railguns as a weapon.

Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.
- Can we get a dream recorder, please?!
  
  I feel like wed learn everyone has cool dreams and pivot back to skill being a thing over just imaginstion and prompts lol

Cancer curing nanotechnology
- borg nanoprobes, or replicator nanites of sg1 and sga.
  
  Pre-progammed viruses to set in motion whatever changes you want in the body.

Is it cheating to say AI and humanoid robots?
Anti-aging tech, if so.

Direct brain interfaces for, like, VR. So instead of a screen strapped to your face, your visual cortex is just stimulated so you see the game using your own "hardware." A literal Matrix type environment for your mind.
This is either gonna be cool and fun, or scary and evil. But it will exist.
- I don't think we'll be able to upload knowledge any time soon, as we're a long way from properly mapping how the brain handles this.
  But visual inputs for VR/AR is much closer, as there is already some functional implants for something similar: having cameras produce neural stimuli has been a thing for a few decades now, and it's now at the stage where some blind people have been able to regain a limited form of vision despite not having functioning eyes. The tech is only going to get better, so at some point it can be used to augment normal vision.
  
  they had an ai generate images based off thoughts or dreams or something, I imagine its further ahead now too lazy to look for more articles https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna76096

I think we can make an oven with a tiny fire breathing dinosaur in it.
- So the Flintstones was actually about the future?!
  
  The Flintstones and Jetsons happened at the same time on the same planet.

Portable communicators. It would be slick to have a USB c tricorder though.
- ...you mean phones?
- Hold up. I'm pretty sure things that already exist don't count.
- Download the Phyphox app to access your phones raw sensor data. Very much like a tricorder.
  
  You've just destroyed my afternoon, thanks and congratulations
  Edit: installed it. very cool. It would be crazy on my watch though.
- https://www.thewandcompany.com/tricorder/

Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
- They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.
  
  Yeah but they make such a mess.
- They exist in Switzerland.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarco_pod
  https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/assisted-suicide/after-the-first-sarco-pod-death-will-switzerland-introduce-stricter-rules-for-assisted-suicide/88824081
- That'd be pretty expensive to run if you think anout it. And who'd do the cleanup?
  
  Blend them up and flush them into the sewage system.
  
  The cleanup is part of it.
- I read that as Sucide Marines and was confused for a bit
  
  The military mental health epidemic. That's the future I want.

- This will be useful for all the people over at !leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world

Exoskeletons like Ripley's in Alien. We've got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.
Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.
- I've seen prototypes of these that were very impressive since like a decade ago, so I'm fully expecting those to be here soon. Power supply usually is the biggest issue

Asteroid mining. We've had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
- Okay I've had this astroid mining concept dining around my empty skull for a while now. The way I see it is that going up to space and mining an astroid for minerals and then bringing them back down to earth will never be a worthwhile endeavour. If you're mining them in space and using the material manufacturing in space then that seems more plausible. The only way I can think of planetary based astroid mining being worthwhile is if instead of mining the rock and sending it down in crafts, you just bump the astroid so it's on a collision course with earth and then mine whatever is left from impact. In anycase, I'd say we are far off being able to mine asteroids since imo, the only worthwhile way to do it is by having the entire process in space. And we're not even close to that level of infrastructure existing in space.
  
  https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=asteroid+mining
  Here's a link to some books on the subject. You're right, most people figure it would be putting our heavy industries in space and bring down what ever products are needed.
  
  We can get a major shot in the arm if we can find a solid industrial use for iridium that sufficiently eclipses any other element. Or some alloy to the same effect.
  Unfortunately, it's so rare that it's next to impossible to do any real amount of testing.

FTL communication using quantum entangled particles.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Discovery_and_Preparation/ESA_takes_steps_toward_quantum_communications
- Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.
  
  Huh?
- Not possible; entanglement collapse can't be used to send information
  
  The idea is this:
  2 particles are quantum entangled. Whatever happens to one instantly happens to the other regardless of distance.
  So you establish a state that means "0" and a state that means "1" and you can send binary.
  At a minimum, you have quantum Morse code.

Fully autonomous humanoid robots. Unfortunately with out-of-control AGI they will probably kill me.
It would have been cool to have a benign C3-PO or R2D2.

Sex robots!

Most of the stuff in Jules Verne's books, even Paris in the Twentieth Century.
(Well, the moon gun would need to be a very long railgun, not a gunpowder cannon, if you want crewed capsules, but still.)

I would guess that we'll most-likely have AGI in 100 years. That's pretty futuristic and impactful.

I'd really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I'm losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn't be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it's shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we're in is just part of a larger cycle.
- Flying taxis won't happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
  
  We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3...

Orbital habitats with rotational gravity.

fusion maybe, but in scifi, it often requires an alien race making first contact, we wont even get to things like anti-matter tech without that intervention. SG1 is more in our time frame, but with aliens already possessing advanced tech

Underwater cities
- With climate change and coastal flooding, it's coming, just not in the form you're thinking of.
  
  You're implying venice ?

Robocop Bell Riots suppression?

I think genetic engineering is the most high-potential tech right now. They're already using it to cure sickle cell, and my (total non-expert, probably way too hopeful) pipe dream is that we could basically treat it like we can open a terminal on the body some day and change whatever we want.
Edit: I just want to point out that I'm imagining curing cancer, reversing aging, etc. Not like, additional orifices or anything.

I'm hoping we'll get a couple of big medical breakthroughs on nuerodegenerative diseases and cancer in the same way HIV is now much more manageable than it once was.
If anyone said space harpoons/orbital bombardment, they'd be wrong - we already have that technology deployed in orbit right now.

The Oscilation Overthruster.