Ada Lovelace is my Hero

I dedicate this ephemeral moment of blogginess to Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. If you are a geek, you may have heard of her (or at least the programming language named after her). If you are a girl geek, you probably know who she is already. Wikipedia (and a number of websites and hard copy books) can give you a bio, so I’ll just make a few notes on why she is important to me.

Ada lived on the bleeding edge of technology. She was a well educated woman who was comfortable being a futurist. She was able to see the possibilities of a theoretical machine, and work them out to extensive logical conclusions for her time.

It’s easy to get caught up in the now and the practical. It’s easy to say “Yeah, neat idea, but that costs way too much to ever be worth doing.” Today, I want to look at the tiny steps science is taking that may not pay off now, or even in my lifetime, but will change the world in 50, 100 or 1000 years.

Large Hadron Collider – It costs billions, it’s not even working, and if it does, there are grave doubts that it will show us the tiny particals we hope to see (where are you, Higgs boson?!) Regardless, this scientific masterpiece may change the way we understand the creation of our universe.

Exoplanets - These planets exist outside the solar system. As our telescopes and techniques get better, we’re finding dozens (a couple hundred so far). We can even see the rocky little ones now, not just gas giants 3x the size of Jupiter. We won’t be leaving the Earth en-mas in my lifetime (unless I get my android body), but some of these planets may be the future homes of humanity, or a popular get-away-from-it-all vacation spot.

Quantum Teleportation – Right now, we can teleport a photon across the room, but it’s not exactly star-trek. But think what a few decades of research could do with this. Even if I will never be able to beam up, it would be cool to get an instant quantum-download on my wearable as the data is seamlessly teleported into place.