A bit of futurology. It will be interesting to come back to this post sometime in the future.
I believe that the next monumental breakthrough in the next 15-20 years will involve the use of living “external” muscles, specially grown for specific tasks. The technology for cultivating muscles for any purpose will take longer to develop, but growing such “technical” laboratory animals from a test tube, essentially “for parts,” seems not so impossible a task. Of course, everything is complicated from an ethical point of view: nobody wants to think about a horse with a microprocessor on its back whose will is essentially disabled, but it’s hard to predict where ethical principles will stand in 20 years if we are still unsure about the ethics of IVF, for example. But the principle is just so: a reference organism is taken, and its development is controlled in such a way as to give it the desired properties at the output.
As soon as the artificial muscle is obtained, and the issue of “energy supply” to keep it in “form” for the necessary time is resolved, humans will obtain mechanization of a completely different kind. And from there, artificial wings are not far off 🙂
Technically, growing animals or even individual organs (including muscles) for technical needs is already possible now. Also, myostimulation has long been used to make the necessary muscles contract. It remains to combine this with electronics.
Sources:
–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NkAlNQd50
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9ZY4DeIdW4 – from U.S. Army CCDC Research Lab Dec 17, 2020
–https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5127204
– https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.201404062
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 