Google's top-secret lair, dubbed the "Google X" labs is a crazy and amazing place where ideas of the future are born, and sometimes actually see the light of day in public. Two of the lab's most coveted projects — self-driving cars and Google Glass — have already begun to deliver to a geek's drool-worthiest sci-fi dreams. But did you know that Google X once considered working on levitation and teleportation, before the ideas were ultimately scrapped? Insane, we know.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Brad Stone has written up a fascinating feature titled "Inside Google's Secret Lab" that provides a deeper look at Google's "factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things." If you thought Google X was ambitious about creating the future, you're only scratching the surface.
In fact, Google X was created back in 2005 with the purpose of bringing back high-tech research; the kind of stuff that used to be reserved for NASA and other government research labs. Finding a breakthrough that'll lead to tech revolutions is mainly why Google X exists. While software is what Google is an expert at, Google X is all about hardware.
One particularly juicy nugget in Stone's piece reveals Google once considered the possibility of figuring out levitation and teleportation, according to Google X director Astro Tell:
Teller and colleagues say they’ve spent time contemplating levitation and teleportation. The latter was nixed as an area for further study in part because any unique item that you would want to teleport—a Picasso, say—would have to be completely destroyed before it could be reconstituted on the other end."
Stone also reveals Google X has an "airborne turbine prototype, called Wing 7, is a 26-foot-long carbon-fiber contraption with four electricity-generating propellers that flies in circles at altitudes of 800 to 2,000 feet, sending power down a lightweight tether to a base station" that — if successful — could get rid of fossil fuels. Nothing's guaranteed, but it's research Google X thinks is worth looking into, because, well, why not? There can't be an app for everything, know what we mean?
Our only hope is that Google reconsiders researching levitation and teleportation. We want ourhover cars and we want to say "Beam me up, Scotty" and not make an ass of ourselves in public.
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