Greetings dear ones, I am Kryon of magnetic service. Again we
are here in a way that may seem strange to many. I want you to get used
to hearing this voice and understanding the reality that is here.
Perhaps you might ask yourself, "Is this real?" You might say, "Kryon,
I'm having a hard time believing that you're really channeling, that
the voice comes from the other side of the veil. It's just so
difficult!" If that's what you're saying today, Human Being, I will
say that you are blessed to be so honest with words coming from the
struggle to work out of the three-dimensional box you are in.
Dear one, if you ask the right questions of your
own Higher-Self, of
your own belief, of your own psyche, you then start have things revealed
that you didn't expect. For it indeed is a quantum experience on the
other side of the veil. My partner [Lee] and I are linearizing this
conversation for you. This is a quantum experience and that means that
language is only a small part of it. The audio that you hear and the
words seen on the page are only a portion of it.
In the past,
we have spoken of something called the third language. This third
language, identified some time ago, is not a language in linearity. It
is instead a language of the
catalyst of the three. We use the
three in numerology to represent a catalytic
action number.
That is to say that all of you have the ability to receive what is being
given at a level which is quantum, and not a language such as words on a
page. Even the reader of this particular message can ask for a quantum
experience and then be in the session with those who are in the room in
real time.
We're going to give you some science. We've chosen,
perhaps, an odd place for that [Albuquerque, New Mexico]. But we really
haven't, for we think in a quantum way. We wanted to come to this place
and honor those who built this building [The Indian Center]. We want to
honor the ancestors who are here, listening. We've come to a very quiet
place in the stillness of the southwest in order to give a message of
clarity, and purity, so that others will also receive it in this
fashion.
Science for today
When we give a
scientific message, I ask my partner to go very slow. Some of the
things we speak of now have been revealed to him, and some have not. So I
asked him to proceed slowly, for it will be heard and read clearly and
much will be seen around it. For what follows in this message is not
just esoterics. There will be practicality presented and there will be
physicists looking at it... and that makes my partner nervous.
This is not going to be complex, for even the one sitting in the chair
who doesn't understand science will still receive what they need to
receive through the third language. They will understand why these
things are being given and appreciate them. All through this process,
the entourage who has poured into this place, who represents the
ancestors of all of you, resound with it all. Even the ancients who are
here, and who are wrapped into this building, into this place, where my
partner gives a message of science, are pleased.
Reassurance
about Global Warming: what is happening?
This
message is not necessarily a long one, but one which you have to hear.
It's about the environment and science. So let us start with some
assurance and positive news. Let us review one more time that what you
are seeing in weather changes on this planet have not been created by
Humans. What you have called global warming is not global warming at
all, and I say it again: It is part of the cycle that always was. This
information is not new, and we told you these things some years ago when
the idea of warming first was presented, and fear was the result. We
also called out the weather changes you are seeing now, back in 1989
when my partner began this journey with me. Long before the idea of
warming was popular, I was telling you to expect this cycle.
The North Pole has melted several times and come back several times. It
is waxing and waning. The water evaporation cycle [what Kryon called the
water cycle] is the way Gaia works. However, this time it appears to be
here sooner than expected, and that is alarming to many. If you were to
ask Gaia right now to come in to this place, Gaia would give this
message: "Humans have not caused this." Could it be any
clearer? I give you this information so there would be no alarm sounded
regarding it or actions taken that might be in response to a false idea.
However, at the same time I tell you that there is a mandate to
change how you create your energy. What you put into the air is
significant, for it is a hazard to your health. What you put into the
air hurts Humanity, not necessarily Gaia. Gaia is far more resilient
than you think. Gaia adjusts in ways you don't expect, and faster than
you expect. Your contribution to pollution is insignificant compared to
just a few natural volcanic eruptions of the past. Gaia takes care of
Gaia, and the process is not new, or a surprise. However, for humanity
we say, "Clean up the air and you will live longer." It's not about
stopping a weather cycle that you have created. Hardly! It's about
common sense for life.
It's going to get colder. That's one of
the subjects of today. You're going to need more energy to combat the
cold, and we have given you advice in the past regarding this, and one
of them we wish to revisit today. For it is time for you to think out of
the box of three dimensions when it comes to some of the things that we
have discussed with you.
You think in a straight line. You
don't necessarily think past certain concepts, but rather you assume
things that then create straight line thinking. At the same time I give
you this information, I will also tell you that this particular concept
is already known on the planet. It is the way of it. We do not give you
something that has not already occurred to a Human Being. Free choice is
what we have told you is the operative word. So in order to honor this
free choice attribute, the things presented today must have already
occurred to a Human Being before we will deliver a message like this.
This creates a situation where the Humans are manifesting it, not just
using hints from Spirit.
When these insights are received by
humanity, they normally land as inspiration on the planet in
more than one place at a time. That is to say, epiphanies of discovery
happen all at once, usually three to four places in order to assure that
they will not be lost. It's like this: The vibration of the planet is
like a big door that opens and closes with the vibration of an
enlightened or non-enlightened humanity. If you chose to close this door
by creating a low vibration of the planet, then information, invention,
and discovery are lost. They actually go away, since humanity doesn't
even care to look! However, when the vibration becomes higher, the door
opens and discovery and invention just "lay there" ready to be seen. So
Spirit does not dole out inventions, but rather the system you have
created allows for it. For high science is always there no matter what,
but the Human Beings on the planet temper how much of it becomes
available by how high the planet vibrates with human consciousness. This
explains how you have lost so much science in the past 50,000 years.
There were societies who actually were far more quantum thinking than
anything you currently have today.
There is an actual irony
here in that you have higher tech inventions today, but far
lower conscious of understanding. You have marvelous computing power
that only is programmed for 3D! Later this will be funny to you.
There is tremendous energy available to you directly from the earth,
and it's free. It is not what you call free energy, for you have to
build an extractor to get it. But it's everywhere; its forever (you
don't use it up) and it's called geothermal energy.
New
ways to obtain geothermal heat
It's all below
your feet, not really that far away and its natural heat. It's
hot enough for you to drill down and create steam. If you can create
steam through natural process of thermal energy, then you can drive
steam turbines and create electricity. That will create the power you
need to survive some harsher winters and to heat your homes. Electricity
may not be the most efficient method to use to heat a home, but it may
be the cleanest in comparison to the methods that pollute the air. If
you can create the electricity itself in a very efficient way, it
becomes far more viable for everyday use.
Using steam, there
are other ways to create electricity as well. Humanity is fond of very
elaborate steam engines, and you've been using them a very, very long
time. Today's nuclear reactors are simply very expensive steam engines.
You heat water using nuclear reactors and create steam with that heat,
which then drives your turbines. So we're giving you something to think
about. For nuclear power, as clean and good as it is, has bi-products
which are dangerous and you know this. Geothermal, although very clean,
can also be dangerous. So now we open the discussion of something new.
If you can drill approximately five kilometers into the earth, you
will find enough heat to make a steam engine work. Now, five kilometers
to you is not all that far as measured in a straight line along the
surface of the earth. Many of you actually walk that distance to school
and work and realize that it's not that far. But if you're going to
drill that distance, technically it becomes difficult and dangerous.
It's not just dangerous for the driller, but can be dangerous for the
planet. On the way down through the crust of the earth to the five
kilometer mark, you go through pockets of attributes... releasing gas
perhaps; releasing fire, perhaps; releasing water, perhaps. If nothing
else, sometimes you interrupt what we will call the integrity of the
lubricant of the shale itself. What I'm saying here is you might even
advance the potential of an earthquake, all by drilling down only five
kilometers.
So now I'm going to give you the answer of how to
make steam without drilling so far down, and it requires thinking "out
of the box" of what you have always assumed. All along you're thinking
that you're going to drill down and put a pipe in the earth with water
in it. You put water in, and get steam out. However, what if I told you
that you only have to drill down a fraction of that distance, and you
will find enough heat to boil fluid! You'd say, "Impossible." This
feature exists over the hot spots of the earth, which have heat very
close to the surface, but those attributes don't exist in most of the
places we're asking you to drill. The answer is not to use water. It's
time to marry the highest technology that you have on the planet, with
things you didn't expect to marry them with, and this is thinking out of
the box.
This is the kind of thinking that is becoming a
little more quantum, seeing the entire picture instead of just seeing
what you think it should be, or what you are used to. There are
solutions here, and some already know what they are. There is elegant
chemistry that will boil at a fracture of the temperature that water
will, and this is the answer: Learning to use those substances and those
fluids with this chemistry within a geothermal closed system machine,
which doesn't have to drill down five kilometers. How about two
kilometers? Using this known chemistry it will be possible to drill only
a fraction of the distance, and get the heat you need for steam.
So we tell you this because you're going to need to do this. If you
heed this advice, you'll find that the timing and the synchronicity of
discovery is at hand. That is to say, you will understand it all and
realize that the elements will fall together and you will get your steam
engine. And it won't take five years to build and it won't be dangerous
and you don't have to cover it with a shell. Much easier. It won't
belch smoke. It won't pollute, and you don't have to worry about being
next to it. Think about it... natural heat from Gaia that is forever! It
will create electricity you're going to need to heat homes and
businesses... because eventually it's going to get colder. That's number
one.
What Humanity needs the most right now
We're
going to give you one other insight: This is not new, in that the
following information was known, then inappropriately sold and pocketed
by industry. Since the idea is already known, I'm going to give it to
you here so that the public can see it and anyone with synchronicity who
listens to, or reads this message, will understand it. Even you sitting
in the chairs will understand the concept, but the scientists and the
physicists will then have to implement it. We would not mention it here
unless it were very timely.
The resource that humanity is going
to need the most as the population grows, as the weather changes, is
what you probably already had guessed: Fresh water! Already it's
becoming scarce. You will notice the snow is falling more and more in
the wrong places, and often in areas that have no infrastructure to
capture the runoff. The reservoirs and aqueducts are built for the old
energy with the old weather patterns. As the population grows, water
will be the issue.
The New Desalinization Answer
Here
is one immediate answer. It is a profound thing when the earth is
mostly water, yet you cannot drink it! The answer is to use the sea and
the ocean, and convert it. The ocean, of course, is not fresh water, so
you have to ask how to extract the salt.
Desalinization exists
today in a very inefficient way. Large amounts of water have to go into
vats of containment and sit there while heat is used in various ways.
There are various systems, some of them steam, some of them not, all
requiring heat to take out the salt. It takes a long time. It's
expensive and not efficient. Therefore it is not tenable to desalinate
for an entire city. Instead, only places that simply have no fresh water
at all have a system like this. It becomes a necessity of inconvenience
and expense instead of a good solution.
Now, I'm asking you to
think out of the box and I'm going to give you the answer of how to
desalinate water in a new way. My partner, I want you to go slow here.
Most of the largest cities on earth are on the coastlines of the
ocean... very near water. This is because over time those coastal areas
were the places where trade could happen with ships and ports. So you
end up with the largest cities being on the ocean. It's a good place to
start, is it not, to get water for them, from the source which they can
simply look at and use? The answer is not that difficult, but it
requires something that has not been considered.
The highest
technology you have today has to do with the smallest of the small. You
call it nano-technology. It is chemistry and even chemical
machines, extremely small, taking form as what you would call robots.
These ultra small, molecular sized robots exist today, and are at the
pinnacle of your new inventive efforts. Even now, your science is
considering how to insert them into the Human bloodstream to seek out
and kill disease... as an enhancement to the white blood cells that you
currently have. That's how small the nanoparticles are.
Naturally there are objections to this, since it seems to alter the
Human body. It doesn't, any more than any supplement that is not
naturally created, which you have learned can help you with pain,
disease, chemical balance, or even to sleep at night. So it joins forces
with the kinds of science that has been given to Humanity to help keep
you alive. Remember, that although we teach that a Human Being can use
their own consciousness to do that, there are millions who will not
believe it, or not be interested in that. So science takes up the slack,
so to speak, and there is much today that is known to assist the
quality of Human life that is not metaphysical. This is a balance, and
is proper and appropriate. Still there are those who will let their own
child die, rather than use science to help balance a disease. They
believe that anything that is not given from God is not appropriate.
It's time to fully understand that good science is simply the discovery
and implementation of the way God created the Universe. Used with
integrity, it is appropriate, God-given, blessed, and was allowed to be
discovered due to a higher-vibrational Earth. In other words, you earned
it! Therefore to throw it away or call it evil is to not understand it.
A man is very thirsty. He is very religious and prays for water to
be given to him. Along comes another man with water, and offers it to
him. The thirsty man rejects it, saying that he expects it only from God
and will wait. He dies thirsty, never understanding the synchronicity
of God is through other Humans! Learn to appreciate the science
that is given to you to extend your life, for this is appropriate and
is given to Humanity for this reason.
Nanotechnology is
becoming smarter. Science is learning to make the robots intelligent
through chemistry, through logic, through electronics. It's like the
logic of a computer, which can cleverly help you to do many things. It
doesn't think for you, but rather it assists you in tasks you can't do
yourself. These tiny smart robots can help desalinate water.
I'm going to give you a task: You're going to build a desalinization
plant where the water never stops flowing, and where salt can be removed
in real time, and a by-product created that you had no idea
about. The water never has to rest and never has to be cooked.
There is no heat involved at all. Using nano-technology, the water goes
in one end of the machine, and it comes out the other in a steady flow.
In—salty, out—fresh, and ready then for standard purification.
The first stages of the system require that you release enough
nano-technology robots assigned to find the dissolved salts and attach
themselves to them. Here is the secret, however: every single robot
is magnetized! I am the magnetic master, after all.
[Kryon
smile]
All of the salt then becomes magnetic, with tiny little
nano robots hanging on to all of it. On to the next stage: Flowing into
the next area, the water is exposed to tremendous, huge electromagnets,
pulling the salt out of the water completely and totally, because the
salt is now magnetic! Out it goes. Over simplified, perhaps, but this is
the way of it. No heat is involved.
Now, the by-product... you
won't believe it! Oh, and this will be controversial when you discover
it. Magnetic fields applied to water often create water that is quite
healing. Do you see where this is going? What a device that might be! It
would be quantum, you know, because it uses magnetics. There would be
those who will say that magnetically treated water is bad for you, since
you are altering it in a way that is not understood. They don't realize
the amount of energy that other Humans have gone through to find the
healing waters of the earth! Now you get a bit of that while
desalinating water! There will be no proof either way of what is
happening, so that will make it controversial. All people will know is
that fewer people are getting sick!
So this is what we wanted
to give you today. This is what we wanted to have recorded today in this
way, so that you might hear it and it would be published. I wish to
tell you what we see in the future, based on the potentials you have
developed. We're not going to give you a time frame, for there is none.
The
Future of Science
The information I'm about to
give you can be two generations away, maybe even three. But it all has
to do with quantum invention. Physicists, listen. I'm going to give you
something you already know, and it's possible. It involves another field
of science but it opposes everything three dimensional you've ever
learned. Humans are funny. Even in the highest math and geometry,
everything is defined in a straight line. Therefore Humans just love to
define a circle as a polygon with an infinite number of straight
lines. That's funny! It's almost as though a circle didn't exist in
nature, and the Human has to create a formula using a straight line
object for it to exist. Interesting, isn't it? I'm just giving you the
Human straight line bias, and its fun to look at. Bubbles have always
been around. They're beautiful, you know? They're natural, you
know? The circle is a natural occurring event in space, as well... think
planets. But Humans want this shape to be an infinite number of
straight lines.
Like cartoon characters on a page, the
stick figures find a few three dimensional properties in their two
dimensional lives, and they "prove" them by creating an infinite number
of stick figures to explain the shape.
What you already suspect
is that gravity and magnetism all naturally bend. They don't go
straight, and they never have. What about light? It doesn't either. When
affected by the other two, it bends also. That should tell you
something. Nothing is really a straight line at all! The only straight
lines around are the brains of the Humans. [Kryon joke] You're not using
the right kinds of math either, and we told you that long ago. There's
an elegance of math that is quantum and if I begin to tell you about it,
even in the simplest terms, it's going to seem overly complex.
The
New Math is coming
Quantum math uses something
that is going to be discovered and we're going to give it a name: influential
numbers. These are numbers that do not have empirical values, but
instead have values that are influenced by the numbers around
them. Four is not a four. Four is modified because of the numbers that
sit next to it, as in a formula, or in linearity as in counting. Each
time a formula is manufactured in a quantum state, the numbers within it
are all influenced by the others around it. This is because all of the
numbers in that formula are modified by the numbers that are next to
them. They're influential numbers. If the four is used in a
linear way, it is affected by the five, or by the three. They all
influence the numbers next to each other, as seen in the conceptual
sense. The reason is that a quantum reality is one that is never linear
or has the attributes that you think are "normal."
However
complex, it is not random, and there is indeed an elegant system... a
beautiful thing when you find out the attributes and see the consistency
of the change. Chaos does not look like chaos when you understand the
"chaos rules." Eventually, when you see this, you will then have the
formula for a circle being a whole number, not an irrational number as
it exists today. It won't be pi. Instead, it will be "pi solved." We ask
the physicists to work it backwards if you have to, in order to get a
whole number of pi. That will give you a hint and what has to be done
with the rest of the computations.
Imagine mathematics with
influential numbers! For each number is not empirical but influenced by
the one around it. I'm giving you high math now, and here's how it's
going to serve you: Because when you start to understand it, you're
finally going to understand what I'm going to call the Holy Grail of
Physics. That's a Human term [Kryon wink].
In your
straight-line thinking, in your bias, you have many 3-D formulas, don't
you? And when you look at the basis of physics, you talk about matter
having mass. In those things which have mass you've even figured out the
atomic structure and density. You are proud of the consistency of the
formulas, based on what you see around you, and you think they're
static, don't you? You think there is a formula for everything, and it
explains how things move and react. "If it has a certain atomic density
and mass, then it weighs this or that in a certain gravity.
You've got it all figured out.
Indeed, you have! But only in
3-D. So as soon as you become quantum with these formulas, they all stretch
and become different. All this to tell you yet again, that it is
possible for you to alter the mass of any object in existence. It
doesn't matter how large or small or how dense it is. You can alter the
mass of it, and therefore (pause..) the effect that gravity has on it.
There is no such thing as anti-gravity, only the control of mass. So
whatever formula you have in 3D that tells you how much something should
weigh, can be then changed by controlling the mass of the object in
question. Therefore you are not changing gravity (which is really a
quantum product of two other forces), but of the mass of an object. And
it has to do with controlling the atomic density, or apparent density as
seen by gravity.
In Yugoslavia, there's a famous workshop.
Historic it is, for it belongs to the man who thought out of the box,
Tesla. In that workshop, there are marks on the ceiling made by the
objects that took off from his workbench and went straight up! They
shattered, hitting the ceiling hard! Nikola was frustrated, for he had
discovered the creation of massless objects and didn't know how! He
thought out of the box... the only one in existence to ever give you a
blueprint on how alternating current might work. Oh, it's more than 3-D.
Study it, for it's elegant.
All of this that Tesla did was
created by magnetics, and this was also the basis behind the experiment
in his workshop. However, in Tesla's time there were no computers or any
of the finite instruments you have today to measure or create tiny
fluctuations in magnetic fields. He accomplished the creation of
altering the mass of an object, but he couldn't control it, and didn't
know exactly how he did it. Frustrated, he was. By the way, he's back.
I'm not going to tell you where. Maybe he will read this and know what
to do next?
[Kryon smile]
Clever, it is, how magnetic
fields can be arranged around other magnetic fields. Even solutions
[fluids] can be magnetized to create clever shaped fields within
fields... sometimes at right angles to each other, sometimes not, to
give you a condition that will create a change in mass. None of these
things are out of the purview of Human development. How long it'll take?
We don't know. That's up to you. But do you understand what it will
change? Everything! It means that the things of science fiction are
finally yours. What you called anti-gravity is simply an object with
controllable mass. It'll float no matter how big. It's doable. Maybe
it's time to implement it?
"Kryon, why do you tell us about
these things?" With this we close. The answer is that we want you
to stay here. All of this is given in love. We want you to stay here!
And you're not going to have much luck with that unless you start
thinking more quantum, unless you start accelerating the inventions and
put some of the politics out of the way. But the countries which must do
this are the ones who have the highest technical abilities and they
also have the highest influential structures that are in the way of it
all. It is time for the population to understand this and turn the
physicists loose and not strap them with those things which are
political, or industrially or efficiently "appropriate." Perhaps you
don't know what I speak of, but they do.
In the process of
this, there will be life extension; in the process there will
epiphanies; in the process you might even find that this message was
accurate and true. Somewhere down the line, if you do, then you've got a
puzzle, don't you, physicists? Don't you? If you're listening to this,
you've got a puzzle, because who is it who is speaking from the other
side of the veil, giving you information that is true and real and
scientific? At some level, you're going to have to say it's real.
At some time in the future you're going to have to admit that the
spiritual and the science is allied, and that the energy that created
the earth and the magnetics and the gravity and all of the things you
studied, is a piece of you... since the creator is inside of each of
you. Then maybe you'll open up?
It all has to do with this
puzzle: Is this real or not? Is Kryon real or not? Is love real or not?
Well, some of you know, because you've sat in the presence of the
creator today who loves you. This family on my side of the veil, loves
you. It's a wonderful Valentine message, isn't it? So we say to you,
dear ones, that all of the things that we talk about, whether they're
scientific, or have to do with your Akash, or your core soul, or a
Higher-Self, are given for one reason: to make the life you are living
on this planet easier. It's so you may discover the compassion that is
the glue that puts you together with creation, that changes the earth
itself, for the shift is upon you.
What you call the 2012
energy is already here, having arrived approximately 1998. Let this be
what it is supposed to be, a time of high consciousness, of scientific
evolution with integrity, with an economy that is a re-emerging with
integrity, with government that slowly changes old energy. There is a
new paradigm occurring, with things that you would never put together in
the past. This is an oxymoron - cannot exist together - integrity and
government - integrity and insurance - integrity with banking. A new
paradigm is upon you, and this shift is difficult. We have the warrior
and the worker in the chairs in front of me. They know it because that's
why they came: the Akash is alive and well in you, dear ones, and you
know who you are. I know who you are. And I celebrate each, each one.
And so it is.
KRYON
The information is free and available for you to print out, copy and
distribute as you wish. Its Copyright, however, prohibits its sale in
any form except by the publisher.
Lee Carroll
View Article Here
Read More
The Future of Technology in 2015?
Excerpt from
cnet.com
The year gone by brought us more robots, worries about artificial intelligence, and difficult lessons on space travel. The big question: where's it all taking us?
Every year, we capture a little bit more of the future -- and yet the future insists on staying ever out of reach.
Consider space travel. Humans have been traveling beyond the atmosphere for more than 50 years now -- but aside from a few overnights on the moon four decades ago, we have yet to venture beyond low Earth orbit.
Or robots. They help build our cars and clean our kitchen floors, but no one would mistake a Kuka or a Roomba for the replicants in "Blade Runner." Siri, Cortana and Alexa, meanwhile, are bringing some personality to the gadgets in our pockets and our houses. Still, that's a long way from HAL or that lad David from the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
Self-driving cars? Still in low gear, and carrying some bureaucratic baggage that prevents them from ditching certain technology of yesteryear, like steering wheels.
And even when these sci-fi things arrive, will we embrace them? A Pew study earlier this year found that Americans are decidedly undecided. Among the poll respondents, 48 percent said they would like to take a ride in a driverless car, but 50 percent would not. And only 3 percent said they would like to own one.
"Despite their general optimism about the long-term impact of technological change," Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center wrote in the report, "Americans express significant reservations about some of these potentially short-term developments" such as US airspace being opened to personal drones, robot caregivers for the elderly or wearable or implantable computing devices that would feed them information.
Let's take a look at how much of the future we grasped in 2014 and what we could gain in 2015.
Space travel: 'Space flight is hard'
In 2014, earthlings scored an unprecedented achievement in space exploration when the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a speeding comet, with the potential to learn more about the origins of life. No, Bruce Willis wasn't aboard. Nobody was. But when the 220-pound Philae lander, carried to its destination by the Rosetta orbiter, touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, some 300 million miles from Earth, the celebration was well-earned.A shadow quickly fell on the jubilation, however. Philae could not stick its first landing, bouncing into a darker corner of the comet where its solar panels would not receive enough sunlight to charge the lander's batteries. After two days and just a handful of initial readings sent home, it shut down. For good? Backers have allowed for a ray of hope as the comet passes closer to the sun in 2015. "I think within the team there is no doubt that [Philae] will wake up," lead lander scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring said in December. "And the question is OK, in what shape? My suspicion is we'll be in good shape."
The trip for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been much longer: 3 billion miles, all the way to Pluto and the edge of the solar system. Almost nine years after it left Earth, New Horizons in early December came out of hibernation to begin its mission: to explore "a new class of planets we've never seen, in a place we've never been before," said project scientist Hal Weaver. In January, it will begin taking photos and readings of Pluto, and by mid-July, when it swoops closest to Pluto, it will have sent back detailed information about the dwarf planet and its moon, en route to even deeper space.
Also in December, NASA made a first test spaceflight of its Orion capsule on a quick morning jaunt out and back, to just over 3,600 miles above Earth (or approximately 15 times higher than the International Space Station). The distance was trivial compared to those those traveled by Rosetta and New Horizons, and crewed missions won't begin till 2021, but the ambitions are great -- in the 2030s, Orion is expected to carry humans to Mars.
In late March 2015, two humans will head to the ISS to take up residence for a full year, in what would be a record sleepover in orbit. "If a mission to Mars is going to take a three-year round trip," said NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who will be joined in the effort by Russia's Mikhail Kornienko, "we need to know better how our body and our physiology performs over durations longer than what we've previously on the space station investigated, which is six months."
There were more sobering moments, too, in 2014. In October, Virgin Galactic's sleek, experimental SpaceShipTwo, designed to carry deep-pocketed tourists into space, crashed in the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing one test pilot and injuring the other. Virgin founder Richard Branson had hoped his vessel would make its first commercial flight by the end of this year or in early 2015, and what comes next remains to be seen. Branson, though, expressed optimism: "Space flight is hard -- but worth it," he said in a blog post shortly after the crash, and in a press conference, he vowed "We'll learn from this, and move forward together." Virgin Galactic could begin testing its next spaceship as soon as early 2015.
The crash of SpaceShipTwo came just a few days after the explosion of an Orbital Sciences rocket lofting an unmanned spacecraft with supplies bound for the International Space Station. And in July, Elon Musk's SpaceX had suffered the loss of one of its Falcon 9 rockets during a test flight. Musk intoned, via Twitter, that "rockets are tricky..."
Still, it was on the whole a good year for SpaceX. In May, it unveiled its first manned spacecraft, the Dragon V2, intended for trips to and from the space station, and in September, it won a $2.6 billion contract from NASA to become one of the first private companies (the other being Boeing) to ferry astronauts to the ISS, beginning as early as 2017. Oh, and SpaceX also has plans to launch microsatellites to establish low-cost Internet service around the globe, saying in November to expect an announcement about that in two to three months -- that is, early in 2015.
One more thing to watch for next year: another launch of the super-secret X-37B space place to do whatever it does during its marathon trips into orbit. The third spaceflight of an X-37B -- a robotic vehicle that, at 29 feet in length, looks like a miniature space shuttle -- ended in October after an astonishing 22 months circling the Earth, conducting "on-orbit experiments."
Self-driving cars: Asleep at what wheel?
Spacecraft aren't the only vehicles capable of autonomous travel -- increasingly, cars are, too. Automakers are toiling toward self-driving cars, and Elon Musk -- whose name comes up again and again when we talk about the near horizon for sci-fi tech -- says we're less than a decade away from capturing that aspect of the future. In October, speaking in his guise as founder of Tesla Motors, Musk said: "Like maybe five or six years from now I think we'll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination." (He also allowed that we should tack on a few years after that before government regulators give that technology their blessing.)Google has long been working on its own robo-cars, and until this year, that meant taking existing models -- a Prius here, a Lexus there -- and buckling on extraneous gear. Then in May, the tech titan took the wraps off a completely new prototype that it had built from scratch. (In December, it showed off the first fully functional prototype.) It looked rather like a cartoon car, but the real news was that there was no steering wheel, gas pedal or brake pedal -- no need for human controls when software and sensors are there to do the work.
Or not so fast. In August, California's Department of Motor Vehicles declared that Google's test vehicles will need those manual controls after all -- for safety's sake. The company agreed to comply with the state's rules, which went into effect in September, when it began testing the cars on private roads in October.
Regardless of who's making your future robo-car, the vehicle is going to have to be not just smart, but actually thoughtful. It's not enough for the car to know how far it is from nearby cars or what the road conditions are. The machine may well have to make no-win decisions, just as human drivers sometimes do in instantaneous, life-and-death emergencies. "The car is calculating a lot of consequences of its actions," Chris Gerdes, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, said at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, Ireland, in November. "Should it hit the person without a helmet? The larger car or the smaller car?"
Robots: Legging it out
So when do the robots finally become our overlords? Probably not in 2015, but there's sure to be more hand-wringing about both the machines and the artificial intelligence that could -- someday -- make them a match for homo sapiens. At the moment, the threat seems more mundane: when do we lose our jobs to a robot?The inquisitive folks at Pew took that very topic to nearly 1,900 experts, including Vint Cerf, vice president at Google; Web guru Tim Bray; Justin Reich of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher at Microsoft. According to the resulting report, published in August, the group was almost evenly split -- 48 percent thought it likely that, by 2025, robots and digital agents will have displaced significant numbers of blue- and white-collar workers, perhaps even to the point of breakdowns in the social order, while 52 percent "have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."
Still, for all of the startling skills that robots have acquired so far, they're often not all there yet. Here's some of what we saw from the robot world in 2014:
Teamwork: Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne in May showed off their "Roombots," cog-like robotic balls that can join forces to, say, help a table move across a room or change its height.
A sense of balance: We don't know if Boston Dynamics' humanoid Atlas is ready to trim bonsai trees, but it has learned this much from "The Karate Kid" (the original from the 1980s) -- it can stand on cinder blocks and hold its balance in a crane stance while moving its arms up and down.
Catlike jumps: MIT's cheetah-bot gets higher marks for locomotion. Fed a new algorithm, it can run across a lawn and bound like a cat. And quietly, too. "Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals. The only things you hear are the feet hitting the ground," MIT's Sangbae Kim, a professor of mechanical engineering, told MIT News. "This is kind of a new paradigm where we're controlling force in a highly dynamic situation. Any legged robot should be able to do this in the future."
Sign language: Toshiba's humanoid Aiko Chihira communicated in Japanese sign language at the CEATEC show in October. Her rudimentary skills, limited for the moment to simple messages such as signed greetings, are expected to blossom by 2020 into areas such as speech synthesis and speech recognition.
Dance skills: Robotic pole dancers? Tobit Software brought a pair, controllable by an Android smartphone, to the Cebit trade show in Germany in March. More lifelike was the animatronic sculpture at a gallery in New York that same month -- but what was up with that witch mask?
Emotional ambition: Eventually, we'll all have humanoid companions -- at least, that's always been one school of thought on our robotic future. One early candidate for that honor could be Pepper, from Softbank and Aldebaran Robotics, which say the 4-foot-tall Pepper is the first robot to read emotions. This emo-bot is expected to go on sale in Japan in February.
Ray guns: Ship shape
Damn the photon torpedoes, and full speed ahead. That could be the motto for the US Navy, which in 2014 deployed a prototype laser weapon -- just one -- aboard a vessel in the Persian Gulf. Through some three months of testing, the device "locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality," Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement. Those targets were rather modest -- small objects mounted aboard a speeding small boat, a diminutive Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicle, and so on -- but the point was made: the laser weapon, operated by a controller like those used for video games, held up well, even in adverse conditions.Artificial intelligence: Danger, Will Robinson?
What happens when robots and other smart machines can not only do, but also think? Will they appreciate us for all our quirky human high and low points, and learn to live with us? Or do they take a hard look at a species that's run its course and either turn us into natural resources, "Matrix"-style, or rain down destruction?Musk himself more than once in 2014 invoked the likes of the "Terminator" movies and the "scary outcomes" that make them such thrilling popcorn fare. Except that he sees a potentially scary reality evolving. In an interview with CNBC in June, he spoke of his investment in AI-minded companies like Vicarious and Deep Mind, saying: "I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome."
He has put his anxieties into some particularly colorful phrases. In August, for instance, Musk tweeted that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes." And in October, he said this at a symposium at MIT: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. ... You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out."
Musk has a kindred spirit in Stephen Hawking. The physicist allowed in May that AI could be the "biggest event in human history," and not necessarily in a good way. A month later, he was telling John Oliver, on HBO's "Last Week Tonight," that "artificial intelligence could be a real danger in the not too distant future." How so? "It could design improvements to itself and outsmart us all."
But Google's Eric Schmidt, is having none of that pessimism. At a summit on innovation in December, the executive chairman of the far-thinking tech titan -- which in October teamed up with Oxford University to speed up research on artificial intelligence -- said that while our worries may be natural, "they're also misguided."