I haven't posted in a while. Life has been good to me. I'm happily married, expecting a daughter in a couple of months, and I have a job I enjoy. What more could a man want?

Lately I've been watching as news stories come out that boggle my mind. Using table salt to quintuple the amount of storage space on a disk drive, 3D printers, tanks that make themselves invisible, and discovery of faster-than-light particle speeds. Data is getting more compact, we are in the early stages of digital replication technology, (don't even get me started on the cloaking fields), and evidence that we might make a journey to the stars faster than we imagined. Gene Roddenberry has to be smiling in his grave.

I've thought a lot about science fiction inventions that have come true. I wonder what a protein re-sequencer might entail. Using RNA and other enzymes to "grow" food or drinks such as coffee, etc. The trick of course would be speeding up the process. Already our 3d plastic printers allow someone to send a digital rendering of a shape and create a plastic rendering of that object. There is even an open source one that makes the majority of it's own components. Next we will have to have one that shapes metals. Though it won't be forged steel, (At least for a while), it can technically be done. An encouraging thought. Imagine printing out a motherboard... or maybe one day a silicon processor... perhaps an entire functioning computer.

These notwithstanding, everyone from George Lucas to Joss Whedon can agree that there is one thing we all would love to see someday... Hyperspace Engines.

In 2006 New Science magazine printed an article on the possibility. With recent developments in the LHC, I wonder how much closer such a design can be. Surely combining the velocity of particles to produce an even faster velocity has infinite implications.

I always hoped one day I might watch with my daughter as man becomes a two-planet species. I hope she can someday watch us go even further...