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Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.
Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.
This week's installment takes us into the future, when cars drive themselves, we find out we're not alone and healthcare finally works.
We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.
The Discovery of Earth's Twin (Science)
It’s somewhere out there. The perfect planet. A world the same size, shape, distance, and composition as our own: Earth’s twin. Astronomers don’t know exactly when they’ll find it but chances are very good that it’ll be in the coming years. And it’s even more likely that they won’t just find one world like this, but instead hundreds. NASA currently has the Kepler space telescope in orbit around the sun. Its mission is to discover strange new worlds and, even more importantly, determine the percentage of stars in our galaxy that could potentially host life. That is, the number of stars that have planets with the conditions that we know are conducive to developing organisms. This means they are about the same size as Earth and orbit at the right distance to have liquid water on their surface. Scientists don’t think that these are the only circumstances under which life arises, simply the only ones that we have an example where they do. Hopefully, sometime before the end of the decade either Kepler or some other planet-hunting telescope will peer out and spot a solar system around a sun-like star that looks like our own. Orbiting within it in a period of around 300 days will be a tiny, rocky planet that looks very familiar. It will still be a very long time before we can determine whether or not such a world has life. But at least we’ll be able to gaze up and know that, out in the universe, there is some place like home. Image: NASA
Since 2007, Wired.com's This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein's Fridge, Dewar's Flask, Mach's Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World*. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available for pre-order today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.*
