Cloudscape

As and when self-improvement, which has already been part of our society for thousands of years, will become more and more advanced, there will eventually arise competitive sports in which the use of supplements ("dope") is no longer secretly done by some of the athletes but openly by all of them, as well as other forms of enhancement such as genetic and robotic. The use of these supplements will be supervised by doctors, however, and supplements which could be harmful to the athlete could be either forbidden (so that, unfortunately, there would still be illegal dope) or advised against. This supervision would have to be very strict, much like the dope tests today, so that there would be no risk of an overenthusiastic athlete experiment recklessly with the wrong enhancements, that is to say, enhancements known or unknown to be dangerous.

This would also be interesting in that it would allow researchers to find the best way of improving the human body's performance. That doesn't mean the athletes would be used as test animals for new enhancements, but that once was known that they are safe, they could try to find the ideal combination of enhancements. The doctors would place a limit on the number of enhancements, so that they would not harm their health, depending strongly on the nature of the enhancements.

Because this enhancement is a complicated process, the sports would be as much a cognitive sport to the doctors (or the athletes, in case they also occupy them with this), as a physical sport to the athletes.

Many people lost their faith in God because of the Theory of Evolution. How ironic that this very same theory would indicate the existence of a God. Bacteria, animals, men, gods, God. It's only a next step. Everything grows over time, and in the Universe has existed for an infinitely long time; thus, it is only natural that the Universe itself must be perfect - we only do not see it.

Unlike nanorobots, which used atoms in their environment as building blocks, picorobots would produce particles as their building blocks. One way to do this is hadronization - a process in which hadrons duplicate. This process arises when the quarks which constitute hadrons (such as protons and neutrons) are taken at a sufficient distance from one another. Because the strong force is proportional to distance (unlike other forces), the farther quarks are taken from one another, the more energy it takes to keep them apart. At some point, this energy will create new quarks between the other quarks. So if one tries to separate the quarks in a meson (which has two quarks, one quark and one antiquark), all one manages to do as one splits them in two is to create two new mesons. In this way, with enough energy input, one can create new quarks indefinitely: the energy is materialized.
Picorobots could also concentrate light by adding up the energies of their photons. In this way, two photons could be combined to one photon with double energy, and therefore double frequency. In this way, the photons could eventually be made so energetic that upon colliding with each other they would create matter, which the picorobots could use to create atoms. In this way, light could, in essence, be converted into matter. We’d long learned to convert mass into energy, but it wasn’t too long ago we’d learned to do just the opposite.

To travel back in time is to travel back in space. What appears to be the most esoteric of technologies, then, actually happens daily. Step backward in the selfsame way you stepped forward, and your body has traveled through time.
The same applies to a molecular, atomic or subatomic level: if two classical particles collide on a straight line, both will travel back in time as they rebound. If every quantum in the universe could move in exactly the opposite direction, it would regress to what it was earlier. Doing so in any closed system would cause the same for that system.
However, doing so would require to surmount the obstacle of Heisenberg uncertainty - at least, it likely would. If the movement of every particle in an isolated system would be reversed at the same moment, however, it’s possible that they’d move in exactly the same way, but in the other direction. This could be so if Heisenberg uncertainty is caused by the system itself. If it is not, Heisenberg uncertainty would violate causality, as it would mean that it is purely stochastic, independent of the state of the system.
It’s possible that one wouldn’t need to know the position and momentum of every the quanta in order to revert their motion, however: doing so would, in principle, require only one very simple alteration: changing the sign of their mass.
As kinetic energy is proportional to mass, if the mass will change sign, so will the kinetic energy. Therefore, its vector will change sign, which means that it will move in the opposite direction. If the mass of every particle in an object would change sign, then, the object would regress to its former state. This makes the manipulation of mass extremely important, as it may allow any lost information to be retrieved. Most notably, this technology could be used to revive people upon information-theoretic death. If this method would be applied on a large enough area, it could save anyone or anything from the worst cataclysm long after it has happened.
If we could also control the absolute value of mass, we could also control time in any way at all: that is, we could really manipulate time like we do in motion pictures, pausing, rewinding, going forward - even though we’d not need to know the past or future to do so: we could; we could slow it down or speed it up, raise it to infinity or stop it. And this all would in no way entail the absurdly high energies of ultrarelativistic speeds.
Another way of manipulating time without needing to reach the speed of light, however, is manipulating the speed of light itself, as lowering the speed of light could make it easier to travel through time: right now, we’d have to speed up to a speed of three hundred million meters per second, so that it would take a mass of two thousand tons an energy of 10^22 joules to slow down time thousandfold. But suppose that we’d have to speed to only three hundred millionths of a meter per second, then this would take only 10^–10 joules, 10^–32 times less.
Aside from time travel, changing mass would have many more applications. For instance, as E=mc^2, in accordance with the law of conservation of energy the speed of light should change if the mass of an object would change, which could make the applications in time travel said above possible.
Also, changing the mass of an object would automatically change its speed. In this way, though we cannot undo energy, we can undo its effects: for mass is what impedes energy it in its expression in movement. And if forces are mediated through exchange of momentum, then controlling mass, which will change momentum, could allow us to control the mediation of forces. If we could control mass, then, we could control the universe. The Higgs boson, supposed to be responsible for mass, fully justifies its apellation “God particle.”

An important reason why criminals need to be punished is that they lack the natural punishment of guilt.
. This issue was now resolved by simply inducing guilt in their minds through neurological procedures - something done by nanorobots present in their brain, which could there simply copy the guilt felt in a healthy person. This could resolve their psychopathy, and at the same time give them a more apposite punishment than one could imagine.

Foglets could cease fires by forming a wall around them and sucking away air from around it, gradually replacing it with a buffer gas such as nitrogen.

Not only in science, but even more in art did brain-computer interface find applications: for not only words or formulae, but even sounds or pictures could be converted from ideal to real. In this way, not only could one write or calculate within one’s very mind, but also compose, or paint. In anything logical or analytical, our computers would assist our brains by using their own logic and analysis; in anything artistic or intuitive, they would do so by enabling us to use our own artistry or intuition. Thus, not only could they augment our natural abilities, but they could also help us bring them to expression.
In essence, just thinking of something brought it into being. The challenge, now, was to think of it. Yes, this method didn't make art less challenging, just faster.

Colonies built inside asteroids could be illuminated by optic fibers which would run from the surface down into its interior. These thin tubes of reflecting material are as efficient than mirrors could be - actually, that's essentially what they were: tubular mirrors. And because light which entered it could not be reflected back into outer space, all of it ended up in the center of the planetoid. Not all photons reached its hollow at the same time because some covered more distance than others, but they all did eventually. Thus, these fiber optics could enlighten the asteroid as though it were exposed to open air.

Just like Leonardo Da Vinci based his plans of the first working robot ever built in 1495 on the human body, we will base our plans of the first working nanorobots on the human organelles. As nanotechnology already exists in nature, it's obvious that we can steal that technology from her. The only difference is that nanorobots would have to be controlled.

Synthetic bacteria could be used as detectors of substances by means of genes with special promoters: if the substance is present, it could bind to its repressor so that it releases the promoter, allowing the production of a special protein. To indicate that the substance is present, this protein could be luminous, such as luciferin.
For this purpose, bioluminescent bacteria such as photobacterium and vibrio are likely candidates. Vibrio regulates its luminescence through quorum sensing, ie based on its local density, by means of signal molecules: if many of the bacteria are present, there are also more signals among them, and these signals regulate their genes. If these signal molecules could somehow be replaced by another substance, the bacteria could be used to detect it.