Hello holodeck! In our lifetimes? Dr. J. Storrs Hall is an independent researcher who came up with the concept of utility fogs back in 1993. He believes that utility fogs will irrevocably alter our physical landscape — and quite possibly our bodies as well.

Hall came up with idea for utility fogs when imagining what an advanced form of seat belt might look like.

“I came up with this vision of form fitting foam — one that could take on the shape of anything inside it and on the fly,” he told io9, “which got me to wondering if we could ever possibly build something like that.” The answer, says Hall, came to him by considering the nascent field of molecular nanotechnology. By designing and creating objects at the molecular scale, Hall envisioned a fog that could quickly morph along with the movements of anything around it — including the passengers of cars.

In essence, the utility fog would be a polymorphic material comprised of trillions of interlinked microscopic ‘foglets’, each equipped with a tiny computer. These nanobots would be capable of exerting force in all three dimensions, thus enabling the larger emergent object to take on various shapes and textures. So, instead of building an object atom by atom, these tiny robots would link their contractible arms together to form objects with varying properties, such as a fluid or solid mass.

Read the article at Io9, which also has a link to Dr. Hall’s paper. What an amazing concept!

Very cool, never heard of this before.  I don’t think it’d be world changing though. World improving yes, changing, no.  Seems like it’s just super advanced putty. But then again you never know.

Ray Kurzweil thinks that we’ll be replacing our bodies with things like that before 2100.

‘Fog’ sounds dangerous: one can inhale a fog.

But utility fogs may have an even more radical application than that — there’s also the potential for people to upload their minds directly into this nano-infused cloud.

“You could very realistically imagine uploading into it,” he said, “and then you’d be this sort of formless data amoeba controlling this formless physical amoeba and take any size or form you wanted.”

jipes, I was getting scared there, fortunately:

“ there are some barriers to development, and some limitations to the utility fog itself.”

Have to stop reading too fast.  My first response was, “What the devil are utility frogs?” 

Occam