A surprising new book hits the market this week-- written and illustrated by a young couple from Charlottesville. It’s called Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Improve and/or Ruin Everything.
Zach and Kelly Weinersmith wanted to write a book that could guide young people toward a promising career, so they decided to research the future and chose ten areas to profile like cheap space travel or precision medicine. In each case they were surprised.
Take robotics for example. Plenty of factories have automated their assembly lines, but there are times when it’s hard for a robot, like the Semi-Automatic Mason or Sam -- to get it right.
“Sam the robot picks up bricks, slaps mortar on them and then puts them into place, Zach explains. "It turns out mortar changes consistency over the day as it dries out, so there’s a relatively complicated visual analysis that you do as you’re slapping mortar on a brick.”
Collecting asteroids that contain rare minerals and metals also sounds promising, but Kelly Weinersmith says it carries huge risks.
“The idea is you go out there, collect resources from asteroids, use those resources to build space stations, and then use those stations to explore the universe," says Kelly. One of the scary things is that now you are essentially going out and taking control of gigantic masses. You know these asteroids are huge, and space is the ultimate high ground, so if you were to fling that asteroid at the Earth, you could absolutely destroy large chunks of the Earth.”
Zach, who draws the cartoon Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, keeps the conversation light with a series of comic illustrations, and Kelly keeps it real with a PhD in biology. Together they explain why these new technologies are needed, how they would work and what could go wrong. The book is called Soonish.