Sigh. One problem with futurism is that the size of the subject requires you to pass over all the little throwaway projects (like the ARPAnet in the late 1960s

Sigh. One problem with futurism is that the size of the subject requires you to pass over all the little throwaway projects (like the ARPAnet in the late 1960s) that are two or three incarnations away from being world-shaking. For example, although heat dissipation and power requirements make it impractical to run whole processors faster than a few GHz, it's possible to get amazing analog performance out of 20-nm MOSFETs. Ubiquitous Millimeter-wave radar is one obvious application, but IR-frequency amplifiers and sampling aren't out of the question. As anybody who's taken an undergraduate organic chemistry course can tell you, an IR photon has roughly the same energy as a quantum of vibrational energy in an organic molecule. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy In other words, imagine a camera that can tell you the chemical composition of anything it photographs...