The Future This Week: Aquabots, Nuclear Fusion, and Future Sex Toys (NSFW-ish)

In The Future This Week, Serious Wonder swims ashore in search of this week’s headlines of the future, from swarms of intelligent aquabots to the incremental steps being taken to finally achieve nuclear fusion. This week we’re given an entire assortment of futuristic topics, most notably Luxembourg joining the asteroid mining space race and the surprisingly mass market demand for a new future sex toy/video game controller.

The future can be strange at times, though almost always surprising. It comes in all shapes and forms, in all crevices of society. The impact of which it is making here today is undeniable and only further substantiates just how revolutionary the world will be in the coming decades. Whether we’re here on Earth or are exploring the cosmos, we are in for a ride of our lives. Welcome to the future!

Portuguese researchers demonstrated the first swarm of intelligent aquatic surface robots in a real-world environment, reaching the scale of thousands, making them ideal for tasks such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and maritime surveillance. SOURCE

Joining what is to be a potentially trillion-dollar future industry, the Luxembourg government has announced that they’re making plans to become Europe’s hub for mining asteroids for space resources. SOURCE

Photo Credit: Gizmodo

Physicists from the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald, Germany recently turned on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, in order to produce hydrogen plasma in a process similar to what happens on the Sun. SOURCE

Due to a unforeseen surge of online popularity, the manufacturers of a pioneering virtual reality male sex toy/video game controller had to pull their product off the market in order to accommodate the increasingly high demand. SOURCE