It’s always exciting to review the major scientific achievements of the past year, but there’s something that’s even more exciting if possible: the anticipation of what the new year has in store for us. Because we have 12 months of discoveries, announcements, launches and astronomical events. Lots of news-filled days and 2024 promises to be a great year. Men on the moon (or almost), mosquitoes transformed into biological weapons, the possibility of “weighing” the ghost particle, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and, of course, numerous announcements related to the already ubiquitous artificial intelligence. And it’s true that we can wait a few months to meet them, but being able to satisfy our impatience for now… why don’t we pay attention to the calendar?
for reason
However, before listing the most anticipated events, we should make a reminder, because unlike most professional projections in the technological world, science is not governed by such a strict calendar, in fact, scientists themselves want it. But, unfortunately, there can be numerous setbacks during research or development of a technological product, which we will discuss here. In the aerospace world, the delay is daytime. So that part of the following milestones may be delayed until 2025. However, this may (most likely) happen during the next 12 months.
We return to the moon
Those famous Apollo missions are a thing of the past and, for a long time, people wondered why we didn’t return to the moon. The truth is that we have never stopped visiting it, but no human has set foot on it for 51 years. We have sent robots and thanks to them we know more about our satellite than ever before. However, NASA has decided to bring back the epic stories of the past with its Artemis project. In fact, its first mission took place in 2023, in which the agency sent a ship with a fake crew to orbit the moon.
In 2024 we will take another step in this direction, and the Artemis II mission will send a ship, now manned by real people. Especially Christina Hammock Koch, Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Henson. If all goes as expected, astronauts will be able to orbit the moon several times, but we will have to wait until 2025 (at the earliest) to set foot on the lunar regolith again. And, of course, while this is happening, other space agencies are trying to follow suit, so it’s not surprising that, within a few years, stepping on the moon has lost much of its romanticism.
A new generation of AI
Artificial intelligence was the most media scientific/technological topic of 2022, it was again in 2023 and, no doubt, it will be again in 2024. We can even tell it blindly, seeing the accelerating trend the latter has followed over the years. However, we have more accurate data, communications in which new versions of the most spectacular artificial intelligence are announced by the end of 2024. For example, the well-known natural language generation model, GPT, is finalizing its fifth version. We still don’t know what it can offer us that GPT-4 doesn’t already offer, but it promises to impress us as much as its previous versions.
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