Yes, I am prone to ruminate about the future for some reason. But it’s not always in the line of doomsday odds and possibilities, sometimes it’s about simple things, like light. I think about light a lot. We need light; even people who sleep all day and wish they were vampires will have a few lights on during their awake hours, you know, so they can see. There was a time in our recent history when people only had a few lights in the whole house, and those often dim, leaving a room murky and shadow-filled. A lamp by a chair and a bulb-sometimes naked-in the ceiling, and when the sun went down folks went to bed. Because it was dark and all. But now we can expel virtually every shadow in a house. I’ve got around sixty light bulbs inside my 4br house so, as it is with most modernized folk these days, I don’t have to go to bed when the sun goes down, because the darkness is outside of my walls.
And it is often these simple ideas that keep me wondering. Light: what will we be doing in the distant future to keep the darkness at bay? There’s emerging technology that will allow us to illuminate anything using quantum dots:
The light bulb is made out of metal and glass using primarily mechanical processes. Current LEDs are made using semiconductor manufacturing techniques developed in the last 50 years. But, if the quantum dot approach pans out, it could transform lighting production into a primarily chemical process. Such a fundamental change could open up a wide range of new possibilities, such as making almost any object into a light source by coating it with luminescent paint capable of producing light in a rainbow of different shades, including white.
I wrote a story once (that I subsequently deleted) in which the opening few paragraphs followed a guy walking around in the dark holding a lantern. The lantern in question, and the only part of the story I’m getting into right now, was a nostalgic bit of tech. It was designed to look like an old-time whale-oil device. It would hang on a gimbal, just like a shipboard lantern, so that in heavy seas it could swivel. But, looking more closely at it, you could see that it was actually a very high-tech gizmo, even though it only had a single switch (on/mode/off), a button, and a small dial.
It was powered by an organic, bioengineered blue pea, grown right in the back yard, using an extremely efficient power transference system. It could run for a long time on a single pea, never needing to be recharged or plugged in, but it could hold a dozen peas in its little power slot. In the story, the lantern was just a way to give an example of the living conditions for this character. It was a sample of the appliances he had in his home, a statement to the fact that the people in this future lived lives as gardeners in a high-tech, unplugged world. Compared to our world today, it would be like having the internet and all our little gizmos, television and computers, light and communications, without a single wire attached to the home.
Ultimately I went on a bit too long about the lantern for the piece to be an effective an entertaining piece of fiction. It might have been interesting, but it probably read like a technical manual. But just for giggles, and since I’m feeling the future lately, I’m going to extrapolate just briefly on this amazing lantern of the future.
The light will illuminate in any shade of the color spectrum imaginable. The light can flicker, giving the impression of a flame. Despite it’s broad range of available spectrum, though, it’s defaulted to the orange-yellow glow of old incandescent bulbs or firelight (the default setting is modifiable).  (As the main character was walking along across a grassy hillside, he had the lantern set to the default, flickering “lantern” selection. Looking at him walking along, he could just as easily have been a man in the 1800s. And that was one of the key facets of the story: his clothing and the lantern looked like relics of the 19th century, but there was a lot of incorporated tech that wasn’t noticeable.)
The lantern default beamwidth was omni-directional, like a light bulb, but it could be split into any number of sectors of any width, all the way down to a beam as compact and powerful as a laser. It could dim to nothing, and it could glow as bright as sunshine. He could turn the knob and illuminate a football stadium well enough to play a game. It could be used as a very powerful spotlight. He didn’t have to worry about an accidental glance in the direction of such a bright source of light: his eyes were equipped with implants that would immediately shade his vision to specified comfort levels. He could also see the infra-red spectrum and X-ray and his vision could telescope and microscope. (Since I wrote this story, I’ve read recently that the University of Washington is in the process of designing a set of contacts that will perform some of these functions already.)
By this time in the future people will probably be wearing light-emitting clothing, but I still believe in the power of nostalgia, and I think there will be people in the future who, like the character in this story, want the tech but also want the comfort they feel emanating from the past.
You know, now that I’m thinking about this story I may have to sit down and give it another try. There are juxtapositions I haven’t mentioned here that are still very interesting to me.
written by Matt Mitchell
\\ tags: , beamwidth, bioengineering, green power, illumination, lantern, light, spotlight, tech, technology, whale oil
