cybrbeast

Why no love for Enceladus? The geysers seem to be a sure sign of an ocean underneath and even have some interesting chemistry.

That show actually saved the cheese IRL.

Ah that's good :)

The extent of the liquid reservoirs is indeed very uncertain, but even large pockets of connected liquids could be a good habitat. I think studies of the plume have shown that the hot ice hypothesis is very unlikely.

With the right equipment it would be much easier for a mission to detect life on Enceladus than on Europa. Cassini doesn't have the right detectors to see if there are complex molecules in the geysers but a better equipped craft could, and do so without having to land and melt through miles of ice. Isotopic studies of the compounds could give a nearly certain confirmation of life without even having to detect the life itself.

Enceladus named sweetest spot for alien life

While geo-engineering is made all rosy in Super Freakonomics the truth is anything but. If you look at climate models they are quite bad at predicting what will happen on a regional level in terms of temperatures and precipitation. The best predictions we can make are mostly that it will become warmer, not where, how much, and how wet. No if you start spraying SO2 in the atmosphere you might cool the planet back to normal temperatures on average, but you have no idea what the regional effects might be.

There is still a lot of amazing tech on near to intermediate horizon. Here are some I can think of now off the top of my head:

• 3D printing is here, but it's not in our homes yet and still not nearly at its potential of printing complete functional devices including mechanical parts and electronics

• Actual working VR goggles like Carmack is developing

• Augmented reality with Google Glass

• Driverless cars being developed by Google which can have many huge implications on society

• Surface computing

• Actually smart computers that understand what you ask them. See Watson

• Flexible OLED screens, imagine being able to simply unfold your smartphone into 2x or 4x the screen size

• Eventually screens will be able to be printed very cheaply and become ubiquitous everywhere, think of your whole walls being able to display anything, downloading actually wallpapers for you wall and not your monitor

• Volumetric displays

• Evacuated tube transport, frictionless maglev trains travelling 6,500 km/h. High investment, but technically possible now

• Factory produced skyscrapers constructed in a matter of days (being done now)

Probably missing a lot of other innovations. And then there are also those that take even futurologists by surprise, but of course we don't know what they will be.

This is also mostly consumer tech, there is a ton of medical, production, and energy tech which will have huge impacts but aren't as immediately noticeable as smart phones