Somewhere in Colorado, there is a Museum of Future Inventions. A think tank called the Da Vinci Institute built it to display ideas solicited from the public about cool things yet to be invented.

I don't know what's in that museum. The Institute hasn't leaked much information about itself. Therefore, I've decided to draw up my own list of future inventions. After all, if necessity is indeed the mother of invention, what we get tomorrow will reflect what we need today.

Here, then, are my nominees for the eight greatest inventions of the next fifty years.

1. Newfangled Super Power Source
Last year, in a college classroom, a student solemnly told me, "We have to save oil because it takes, like, a hundred years to make more."  Actually, of course, fossil fuels took millions of years to form, but that's irrelevant now. The conditions that created oil, gas, and coal no longer exist. No more is forming. Once we've used up all the oil, we'll never have more. Ever.

How much is left? Enough for about fifty years, tops, according to experts like Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. After fossil fuels are gone, one of two things will happen.

1. Civilization will shut down...
OR:
2. We'll switch to some other energy source

I can't see our busy little species giving in to option one. We'll come up with something--but what? Hydrogen fuel cells don't look promising anymore. Cold fusion only interests kooks. The mysterious Patterson Cell is a hoax, folks. What's left? I'd bank on sunlight. Giant mirrors will orbit the Earth, collecting solar energy and focusing it on power stations below, whence electricity will be distributed to all. That's where I'd put my money. If I had any.

2. The Waste Converter
Thirty years ago, I happened on a restaurant in the middle of the Yucatan jungle, serving only European hippies who were camped on wild beaches nearby. When the waiter at that place cleared a table, he simply flung the garbage out the back window, figuring the jungle would swallow it. That's what people did with trash throughout most of history. Once cities formed, we had to go the extra step and bury the stuff because we were making more waste than any jungle could swallow. Now, with consumption (and its post-products) soaring, no form of dumping will work much longer. To avoid choking the world, we'll soon have to convert trash into non-trash.

How? Inventors like Ray Kurzweill (a modern Edison) talk about self-replicating microscopic robots that will be able to manipulate matter at the molecular level. I picture shoveling truckloads of nanobot-dust into landfills where they get busy transforming the steaming piles into---what?

Hey, once the oil is gone, we'll need a new source of plastic. Fifty years ago, plastic was the new garbage. Fifty years from now, garbage will be the new plastic.

3. The Weather Wand
Mark Twain once said, "Everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it."  Now it turns out we have been "doing something" about the weather--warming up the world by burning fossil fuels. And we'll burn what's left in a hotter, faster fury, because nations like China and India are industrializing--a billion more cars will make a difference.

Here's my point, though. Once we realize we can change the weather, we won't put up with inconvenient weather anymore. We'll use those space-based mirrors and stuff to manipulate high and low pressure zones and ensure sunshine for the seventh game of the World Series. Politicians will promise sunny weekends and deliver. Rain will fall only at night. Man-made breezes will herd smog.

Chaos theory says messing with weather can be unpredictably catastrophic, but that won't stop us.

After all, the World Series only comes once a year.

4. Biological Identification Card
In the "crime sector," the biggest growth industry of the next 30 years will probably be identity theft. Consumers will demand a foolproof way to identify themselves.

Meanwhile, government security agencies seek ever more reliable ways to identify any individual anywhere. Corporations, too, will want better identification technology to help them check credit, cut down on fraud, etc.

As these interests converge, someone will invent a nontransferable ID based on biological markers such as DNA. You'll have to submit a hair to buy a beer or board an airplane. Bald people will have trouble.

Or the identi-tag might rely on some other unique tag such as a person's brainwave patterns. In fact, researchers in Seattle are currently developing "brain fingerprinting," an EEG-based system that can supposedly determine whether a person's brain contains specific bits of information.

Right now, an interrogator still has to ask questions while measuring a subject's brainwaves, but in the future, I picture machines that will scan your brain and check your thought patterns against your files to determine who you are without even slowing you down. Some might not relish living in a world permeated by such a technology, but invention is driven by current needs, not future consequences.

5. Automatic Personalized House
Today, you can wake up to coffee already made by an appliance that "knows" your schedule. To some of us this seems like personalized comfort carried to an extreme. But every comfort level becomes normal, then indispensable, then inadequate. Futurist Glen Hiemstra predicts that within a decade, houses will routinely have up to 100 computers "embedded in all kinds of appliances and amenities," the way today's houses have plumbing and electricity in their walls.

A network of programmable computers will let occupants fine-tune their house to their idiosyncratic needs. At first blush, such a house may not seem like "an invention," since all the components exist. But many great inventions had this cumulative character. The car, for example, emerged as a gradual accretion of existing inventions engineered to work together. At some tipping point, people suddenly saw the conglomeration of devices as one new thing. Similarly, houses that cater to their occupants' whims might suddenly seem less like houses and more like something new, a second skin.

The language will then produce a term to distinguish the newfangled domiciles from clunky "houses" that don't do anything. Once "fully automated, programmable, digital house" gives way to a term like "exoself," a momentous new invention will have entered the world.

6. Dr. X's Patented Genetic Cure-All
For endless centuries, the human flesh was heir to boils, fevers, catarrhs, gouts, eruptions, and hundreds of other awful symptoms. Doctors had remedies for every symptom, but none that really worked. Then, Louis Pasteur and a handful of others discovered microorganisms, the key to all infectious diseases. That single handle brought hundreds of killers to heel, wiping some of them clear off the earth.

Today, doctors attack tumors the way they once attacked fevers, boils, and catarrhs (whatever those are). Someday soon, however, we'll discover the powerful basic principle that generates all tumors. Doctors will then stop cutting, burning, and poisoning cancer patients and start treating their underlying illness. 

As it happens, medical researchers are currently unlocking the genetic anomalies that cause such illnesses as Parkinson disease and multiple sclerosis. Cancer can be described as a genetic disorder--as outlaw cells that start multiplying randomly in defiance of their genetic code. Research aimed at defeating genetic and degenerative disorders may also turn up the cure for cancer.

After that, people will routinely live into their mid-hundreds. The Social Security fund really will go broke.

7. Artificial Sense Organs
My friend Mike Chorost is completely deaf but can nonetheless hear, thanks to a cochlear implant. This computer chip implanted in his skull stimulates his auditory nerve endings directly, giving him sensations that correlate to sounds. His brain has learned to interpret these sensations, and thus for all practical purposes he can now hear.

Neurostimulation technology can be applied to other nerve cells. A nerve is a nerve is a nerve. Retinal implants, for example, may enable the blind to see. The hardware will not necessarily be limited to the range of signals human senses can register. People with digital implants might someday see like hawks and hear dog whistles. External hardware may also extend the senses. Steve Pittman, a technology consultant with IBM, thinks we're on the verge of inventing self-adjusting glasses that provide telescopic or microscopic vision, depending on where the viewer is focusing. 

8. Instant Sleep Chamber
The one invention in the Museum of Future Inventions that I know about is the Instant Sleep chamber, which gives you the benefits of a full night's sleep in seconds.

At first, I wondered. We spend roughly one-third of our lives sleeping and I for one consider that the best third. Kierkegaard once said, "Sleep is the highest accomplishment of genius." Why would anyone invent a device to do away with sleep? If they did, surely nobody would buy it.

Ah, but those who dispense with sleep gain seven or eight hours a day. They could spend that time working, while their competitors slept. In a dog-eat-dog world, they would get an overwhelming edge. If anyone began using this device, their rivals would have to start using the same tool too, just to stay even.

So, if an instant sleep chamber were invented, it might indeed take hold, even if no one wanted it, because even though necessity is the mother of invention, invention can also be, and very often is, the mother of necessity.