Fun Science: This Texas Couple Predicts 10 Emerging Technologies, From Space Guns to 3D-printed Organs

In Zach and Kelly Weinersmith’s Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, you’ll run across the story of the engineer who built a giant space gun in Barbados.Gerald Bull dreamed of using mega guns to launch missiles and satellites into outer space. The guns would be far cheaper than rockets, he thought. With funding from U.S. and Canadian defense agencies, he managed to blast projectiles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. When government funding dried up, he turned to the arms trade to fund his plans, was charged with illegally transferring munitions, served four months in jail, was hired by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to work on a supercannon called Project Babylon, and died under murky circumstances in a Brussels hotel in 1990.Bull’s story is one of many surprises in the Weinermiths’ entertaining and substantive tour of futuristic technologies in Soonish (Penguin, $30), which the authors will discuss at Interabang Books at 7 p.m. Thursday. “We tried to cram as much humor and information into the book as possible,” said Zach. “We figured one would buy the other for us.”  Continue reading...