Innovating for the Impossible

Here’s a fun thought experiment: imagine what innovations would be necessary, feasible, or useful if the fundamental biological or physical restrictions of our world were different: not generally, but in a specific area.

For example, let’s say that the hair on our heads grew not at the rate it does now - approximately 0.5mm/day - but at 1m/day. It seems clear that hairdressers, as least as they are currently organised, wouldn’t be able to keep up. Either we’d need hairdressers to be everywhere and very efficient, or, more likely, we’d need some form of automated haircutting machine - perhaps with one installed in every bathroom. Brides-to-be would struggle to look just-so at the right moment, so there’d need to be an emergency hairdresser on standby.

Another example, perhaps even more far-fetched, but nevertheless pertinent - what if rubbish expanded in volume in an unbounded way after being disposed of - at a modest rate of, say, 10% a year? We’d already have had to have found a way of either vastly cutting down on rubbish disposal or offloading it to other planets - or perhaps, more sinister, cutting down on the population generating it.

Both of the above scenarios are clearly nonsense given our current understanding of science, but they help in jogging the brain into thinking in a more open-minded mode, and they clarify the consequences of our actions (although rubbish doesn’t expand, we are using more landfill space every year - the scenario merely amplifies the logical conclusion).

Here’s some more to try:

• The average air temperature at ground level in temperate areas is -50°C.

• Most insects are fatally dangerous to humans, and almost impossible to vaccinate against.

• Water cannot be frozen artificially.

• Paper decays within 2 months.

Is this a new technique? I’ve never come across it anywhere.