The Future This Week: NASA, Robotics, & Virtual Reality

In The Future This Week, Serious Wonder straps on its VR headset in search of this week’s headlines of the future, from everything NASA related to robotics education. The future is certainly reaching beyond the scope of mainstream, linear thinkers, with NASA making near-future predictions of discovering alien life, to free online courses on robotics, to virtual and augmented reality becoming disruptive technologies.

The future has always been quite tricky in predicting, but has never been short at amazing both its naysayers and optimists alike. If you thought sci-fi predictions of the future were strange, just you wait and see what is on its way in the fields of space travel, robotics, and virtual reality. We’re taking a giant leap into the realm of no return, but if what we’re to discover and achieve is as amazing as it first appears, none of us will ever want to go back. Welcome to the future!

NASA and IBM have teamed up to host the International Space Apps Challenge, whereby they’re challenging thousands of participants to partake in a global hackathon in order to tackle any and all problems in long-term space exploration. SOURCE

The Queensland University of Technology has taken a page out of the ever-growing book known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and are now providing free online education on the field of robotics. SOURCE

Top NASA scientists have recently come out and declared that, within 10 to 20 years, we’ll finally discover extraterrestrial life on another planet – that is, microbial alien life, as opposed to the little green men we’re used to throughout sci-fi literature. SOURCE

Given the exponential increase of both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies as of late, recent estimations are placing both VR and AR to reach $150 billion by 2020, effectively disrupting mobile tech. SOURCE

Photo Credit: TechCrunch