Electronic textiles
If we meet again in 2020, our clothes will most likely be made from electronic fabrics. Why carry around so many gadgets that are so easy to lose when we can just carry our computers around? We will create clothes on the surface of which the video of our choice will be constantly projected (unless we get tired of it to the point that we have to turn it off). Just imagine what it would be like to wear, say, a long raincoat that houses a display that continually shows the night sky in real time. It will be possible to talk on the "phone", simply by making a hand gesture that activates the electronics on the lapel of the jacket, and then only thinking about what we would like to say (the rest will be taken over by a special interface). The possibilities of electronic textiles are truly endless.
Amorphous metals
Amorphous metals, also called metallic glass, are composed of metal molecules with a disordered atomic structure. They can be twice as strong as steel. Due to their disordered structure, they are able to distribute the impact of external energy more efficiently than the crystal lattice of a metal, which has vulnerable points. Amorphous metals are made by ultra-fast cooling of molten metals before they can re-align into their previous crystalline structures.
Amorphous metals may become the next generation of armor for military equipment before being replaced in the middle of the century by "diamondoids", nanomaterials in which carbon atoms are linked together in the same way as in fragments of the crystal lattice of diamond. From an environmental point of view, amorphous metals have properties that increase the efficiency of electrical networks by as much as 40 percent, thereby avoiding the release of thousands of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere.
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Artificial diamonds
We are beginning to cover more and more artificially grown diamonds using chemical vapor deposition, which heralds a time when all machine parts will be made from this material. Diamond is an ideal structural material: it has colossal strength, but at the same time it is light, it is made from a widely available element, carbon. It is characterized by such properties as almost the maximum possible thermal conductivity and the highest refractoriness among all materials. By introducing the minimum amount of impurities, you can get a diamond of almost any color imaginable. Imagine an airplane in which hundreds of thousands of moving parts are crafted from perfectly cut diamond parts. Such a machine will be just as powerful as any modern fighter jet,how much is the current F-22 superior to the Fokker Dr. I issue of 1917.
Aerogels
Airgel occupies 15 pages of the Guinness Book of Records, more than any existing material. Some call it "frozen smoke". This truly incomprehensible material is made by supercritical drying of liquid gels consisting of aluminum, silicon, chromium, tin or carbon dioxides. It is 99.8 percent void, which makes the airgel translucent. It is a fantastic insulator: if you have an airgel shield, you can easily protect yourself from the jet of flame from the flamethrower. It stops cold as effectively as it does heat. It is quite possible to build a warm house on the moon from airgel. Aerogels have incredible surface area due to their internal porous structure: an airgel cube with a side of 2.5 centimeters has a total surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite their low strength, aerogels are considered a potential component for military armor due to their insulating properties.
Carbon nano tubes
Carbon nano-tubes are long chains of carbon molecules linked together by the strongest chemical bond possible, a spatial sp2 bond that surpasses even the one that connects carbon molecules in a diamond. Carbon nanotubes have numerous amazing physical properties, including so-called ballistic conductivity, which makes them ideal for use in electronics, and so high tensile strength that they are the only substance that can be used to create a space elevator. The specific strength of carbon nanotubes is 48,000 kNm / kg, which is the highest among all known materials. In comparison, high-carbon steel has a strength factor of 154 kNm / kg, which means carbon nano-tubes are 300 times stronger. They can be used to build towers several kilometers high.
Metamaterials
Metamaterial is any material whose properties are determined not so much by the properties of its constituent elements as by an artificially created periodic structure. They can be used to create a microwave invisibility cloak, a 2D invisibility shield, and materials with other unusual optical properties. Mother-of-pearl got its iridescent color thanks to organic metamaterials. Some have a negative refractive index, an optical property that can be used to create "super lenses" with an optical resolution less than the wavelength of the radiation that creates the image! This technology is called subwavelength intrascopy. Metamaterials will be used in phased array optical devices,capable of creating perfect holograms on a two-dimensional display. These holograms can be so perfect that a person, standing 15 centimeters from the screen and peering into the distance with binoculars, will not even notice that it is a hologram.
Metallic foam
Metallic foam is what you get when you add a foaming material, titanium hydride powder, to molten aluminum and then cool. The result is an extremely strong structure, while relatively light due to the fact that it is 75-95 percent air. Due to their unusually low density, metal foams are supposed to be used as building materials in space colonies. Some metal foams are so light that they can float on the surface of the water, making them ideal for building floating cities, such as those described by Marshall Savage in his famous book, The Millennium Project.
Superalloys
Superalloy is the term used for metal that can function at extremely high temperatures, up to 1100 C °. They are popular as material for superheated zones of rocket engine turbines. They are also used to make state-of-the-art breathable structures such as hypersonic ramjet aircraft. Flying across the sky on a supersonic liner, we must remember that we owe this opportunity to superalloys.
Transparent aluminum oxide
Transparent corundum (aluminum oxide) is three times stronger than steel and yet transmits light. The number of possible applications for this material is amazing. Imagine a skyscraper or a whole city, made mostly of transparent steel. The horizon of the future may look completely different: it will not be a monolith, but a cluster of points floating in the air (opaque residential and other premises). The giant space station, built from transparent aluminum oxide, can cruise in low Earth orbit without creating an unpleasant black spot when it flies over people's heads. By the way, you can finally make real transparent swords from it!
Artificially grown fullerenes
Diamonds are, of course, very strong, but aggregated diamond nanotubes (called amorphous fullerene) are still stronger. Amorphous fullerene has an isothermal bulk modulus of 491 Gigapascal (GPa), which is higher than that of diamond - 442 GPa. In the figure, you can see that the nanoscale structure of fullerene gives it a beautiful rainbow appearance. Fullerenes can be much stronger than diamonds, but this is very energy intensive. After the "Diamond Age" we will surely enter the "Fullerene Age" and our technologies will become even more advanced.