As time passes, new, wonderful technologies come tumbling onto the scene at an ever-increasing rate.

As I watched a video clip of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner flying, I was amazed at just how narrow the wings are in relation to the body. It looks as if the wings are too narrow to hold the plane in the air. Looking at it, it just ‘feels’ wrong.

Being a physicist, I know which mathe- matical equations are used to get the plane in the air. I understand the maths and physics, so I am quite happy to believe that the plane will not only stay in the air, but also actually fly very well.

So where am I going with all this? The point is that, these days, there are so many new technologies seeing the light of day that at the time just ‘feel wrong’. I can name many – for example, cellphones. When I was a graduate student, I would have found it hard to believe that a little radio-type device that could fit in the palm of your hand could be used to phone virtually anywhere in the world.

I have just got a new cellphone that has the global positioning system (GPS) on it. You can find a particular house number address in it and then tell it to take you there. A voice called ‘Ellen’ then says, “Turn left here”, and so on.

I would never have believed GPS at the time that cellphones were first launched. I can name many more developments that I would never have believed, and I am a qualified scientist.

The point that I am driving at is this: just imagine how many ‘unbelievable’ technologies will be coming our way in five years to ten years. If we could not believe the ones that we have now, we certainly can’t begin to imagine what is coming.

I know of some exciting developments coming down the pipeline because, being in the science game, I keep tabs on some developments. For example, something that actually exists now is self-cleaning windows. There is some very cunning science behind a self-cleaning window, but it works. Once the lab guys understand the science and realise what is actually happening, then often it is rather rapid as the new development hops from the laboratory onto the shelves of the shops.

The field of robotics is advancing at a great rate. There are now robots that can even think, to some degree. They can make decisions – for example, ones that have been developed for exploring other planets can wander around looking for rocks, and the robot can spot a round white stone and pick it up. Then, if the robot sees another round white stone, it will say to itself, “No, I already have one of those, let me find something different.”

People in the field of economics often make the mistake of projecting certain prices and trends years into the future, but by assuming that the technology will not change.

Generally speaking, those types of prediction can be guaranteed to be the ones that are wrong. Technology will change to such a degree that any commodity price prediction something like five years into the future, I would suspect, is probably less than 25% probable – like this peak oil thing. I read an article in the press, which predicted a world peak in oil production in the next few years, but I am sure that it ignored all the Canadian oil sands.

Canada has about as much oil as the Middle East, but it is locked up in sand. It has to sort of be hack-sawed out of the ground, not pumped. But there are technologies on the near horizon that will be able to get the oil out of the sand profitably. So my prediction is that the peak oil predictions are wrong.

In ten years, we will look back and say, “Gee whiz, remember back in the days before 2010, when we never had this gizmo, and that gadget, and the bunga-bunga system – how on earth did we survive without them?”

To me, seeing the Dreamliner fly just emphasises how many things that seem intuitively impossible now will be commonplace in a time that is just around the corner.