{"id":865,"date":"2013-12-18T02:28:12","date_gmt":"2013-12-18T00:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=865"},"modified":"2015-04-21T01:18:51","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T23:18:51","slug":"anything-can-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/anything-can-happen\/","title":{"rendered":"Anything can happen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently in the comments section of this column, a loyal reader asked: “What is the next big, bleeding-edge<\/span> thing?”<\/p>\n

We are confronted with bleeding-edge things all the time that are changing our lives in one way or another. Mobile phones and the Internet \u2014 and the combination of the two \u2014 are good examples. Robotic assistants<\/a> are helping out on the battlefields. 3-D printing<\/a> offers lots of possibilities. And now the NSA<\/a> is able to store and sift through<\/span> private information about everyone on the planet. Predictions made in the 1980s about life today missed every one of these fundamental changes.<\/p>\n

Some of the things that were supposed to be part of our lives never materialized<\/a> \u2014 how about those electric cars? \u2014 while others (driverless cars, hypersonic planes, orbiting hotels, the “Hyperloop”) are pie in the sky that someone would like to build just as soon as someone else finds the money for them.<\/p>\n

So I can’t say for certain which category this latest idea falls into. If it materializes, however, it could change lots of things about the way we live.<\/p>\n

The idea is drone delivery. Amazon wants to use what are basically toy helicopters to deliver packages to customers. In this way, goods weighing up to 2.3 kilograms could arrive at a customer’s doorstep within 30 minutes of an order being placed.<\/p>\n