I should probably do proper research before I make this post and I'm rushing because somehow I always end up wasting my day but what technology could you see humanity realistically developing in the future?
-It seems to me that telepathy chips are practically possible. They've already created cars that can be instructed via mental commands, so it seems to me that they should be able to create a chip that interprets neurological activity that corresponds with our thoughts and communicates that info. to telepathy chips in other people's brains.
-I think lucid dream machines are possible. Scientists have already induced lucid dreaming in 77% of test subjects by electrically stimulating the scalp at 40hz (I'm assuming this works by activating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex during REM sleep) but apparently this has to be done under the care of physicians. I'm sure they can eventually lift that number up to 100% or near that and create some kind of device that allows people to do this in the comfort of their own homes. There is a lucid dream sleep mask that you can buy on amazon for near $200, apparently it works by emitting flashes of light or beeping sounds when REM sleep is detected to help guide you to lucidity but it's not likely to work in isolation (it should be used in combination with reality checks, dream journaling, etc.) and results will vary. There are also herbal teas intended to help with lucid dreaming. Gamma brainwaves might help, I don't know if the electrical stimulation in the high-tech lab I mentioned earlier involved that but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find gamma brainwave entrainment videos on youtube intended to help with lucid dreaming. I think meditation might help with gamma waves, I can't remember, I stopped meditating a while ago.
Combined with the telepathy chips I mentioned maybe people could create shared lucid dream worlds or there could be something like the lucid dream version of the internet.
What I'd want more than anything is to be able to prescript dreams in which I assume the characters I interact with are real but I don't know how likely that is. Apart from basic lucid dream technology which is already in existence I'm not so sure how likely full-dive virtual technology is, if there's even a difference in terms of the simulated environment (lucid dreamers often say that their dream world is indistinguishable for waking sensory perception).
-They've already created synthetic meat, I'm just waiting for it to be made commercially available (I don't want to eat it, I just want an end to factory farming).
-I'm sure computer-driven cars are already possible, I don't know what's taking so long in terms of getting them on the market. I'm sure there are a lot of technologies that could be available but aren't for whatever reasons (maybe flying cars aren't practical or good for the environment. What about jet packs?).
-I've assumed for a while that we're never leaving the solar system. Apparently, it would take around 80, 000 years to get to proxima centauri b (a basically habitable planet but not one with the optimal conditions that life requires revolving around the nearest star, Proxima Centauri; around 4.3 light years away) but if we could learn to travel at 10% of the speed of light we could get there in around 43 years. Nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light so the warp drive in Star Trek isn't happening and if intelligent alien life exists (I took for granted for a long time, after reading an article by a biologist years ago claiming that the chances of sentient, never mind 'sapient,' life evolving on other planets is negligible; my wording/paraphrasing, that sentient aliens almost certainly don't exist, and in over 4 billion years life on this planet seems to have emerged only once, but I'm not as confident about that as I once was. I'm going to say that I take the practical possibility of intelligent alien life, or at least sentient alien life, seriously), we're probably never going to interact or communicate with them.
Do you think that generation ships are possible, where a group of colonists can live on board for decades or indefinitely before finding some planet to settle on/terraform, if they ever do?
For reasons that I won't get into I'm not so sure that sentient A.I is possible. The medical eradication of aging also seems too good to be true but that would be great (if not reversing the aging process then preventing people who have finished puberty or whenever from aging).
By 'possible' I mean 'physically doable' or even practically 'possible' but obviously anything that's logically coherent is 'possible' as far as we could know.
What about social developments? What do you think human society will look like in 100 years, or 500, or 1000? Back to technology, maybe if they put me in suspended animation (is/could that be a real thing?) or I travel at a fast enough speed (where I age slower than the rest of humanity/the universe and, for all intents and purposes, 'time travel' into the future) I could find out for myself.
I'm not sure that quantum mechanics justifies a belief in parallel universes but if they exist, obviously there's probably no way to travel to them. Even though I do lean toward idealism (I'm open to both dualism and idealism when it comes to the mind-body problem), I'm also not sure that quantum mechanics is evidence for it as is often claimed. I'm very uneducated on a lot of these issues though.