I won't attempt to explain the chain of reasoning that led to this topic this morning. The poll itself doesn't need much explanation, though: As any geek knows, the tv show(s) CSI: Descriptive Subtitle rely heavily on fake technologies. which of these would you most like to be real?
Yes, I have read the relevant xkcd comic. Personally, I lean toward the image enhancement, because if we had their image processing capability attached to the Hubble, we'd be mapping continents on Earth-like planets in the Andromeda Galaxy. But I'm sure there are valid-seeming reasons to prefer something else.
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As a photographer, I have to go with #2 -- I could fix every blurry or lo-res photo I ever took.
What cisko said. I could take all of my photos with small, light, cheap wide-angle prime (with its focusing ring glued down), then just shout "enhance" at my computer until I had a frame-filling shot of a tiny bird in a tree half a kilometer away. No need to spend k$6 on a five-kilo exotic lens!
Rapid, cheap, and effective gas chromatography would be my pick. If it worked as well in real life as it does in CSI, not only would medical diagnostics become a lot faster and more accurate but it might be scalable to make the Ultimate Recycling Machine (zap waste and separate it into its component molecules for reuse or safe disposal) come true.
-- Steve
If you will allow; how about this technology: Scientist/technicians/researchers given unlimited time, unlimited budgets, access to the newest and best machinery available, and mandated to experiment and explore an issue down to the molecular level in support of the public health and welfare, and the abstracted virtue of truth and justice.
It's less a scientific technology and more a bureaucratic, social organization, good government, resource allocation sort of technology. Every time I watch the show I wonder where what planet they are on.
I mean, where I live the government balks at a requirement to do DNA testing while the fate of a person's live, freedom/ incarceration/ death penalty, rests in the balance. A person's life and justice at stake and we can't muster up a fist full of dollars to do the testing.
On CSI they test DNA at the drop of a hat, any hat, hundreds of samples, and get results in a couple of hours. They have small armies of highly educated and highly paid technicians spending days assembling/ dismantling/ testing/ examining even the smallest possible clue. What planet are they on?
Where can we get the social organization, good government, resource allocation technologies that will move us in that direction?
Oooh. I was going to go with #2, but Art makes a compelling point.
It would also be nice to have people you could trust so completely that you let a small team handle every aspect of a criminal investigation without fear of corruption or prejudice tainting their work...