It's always exciting to review the major scientific achievements of the past year, but if possible, there's something even more inspiring: anticipating what the new year has in store for us. Because we have 12 months of discoveries, announcements, launches and astronomical events ahead of us. Many days full of news and 2024 promises to be a great year. Humans on the moon (or nearly so), mosquitoes being turned into bioweapons, the possibility of ghost particle “weighing”, Europe's most powerful supercomputer and, of course, countless announcements related to the already ubiquitous artificial intelligence. Granted, we may have to wait a few months to meet them, but now we can settle our impatience… why don't we check the calendar?
By The reason
However, before listing the most anticipated events, we must make a reminder, because unlike the most commercial publications in the world of technology, science is not governed by such strict calendars, in fact, scientists themselves prefer to be so. But, unfortunately, there are countless setbacks that can arise during the research or development of a technological product that we are going to discuss here. In the space world, delays are time of day. A portion of the following milestones may be delayed until 2025. However, this is what will (mostly) happen in 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 never stop 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 yesteryear with its Artemis program. In fact, its first mission took place in 2023, in which the agency sent a spacecraft with a dummy crew around the moon.
We'll take another step in this direction in 2024, when the Artemis II mission will send a ship, now manned by real humans. Especially Christina Hammock Koch, Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen. If all goes as expected, astronauts will be able to circle the moon multiple times, but we'll have to wait until 2025 (at the most) before a human sets foot on the lunar regolith again. And, of course, when this happens, other space agencies are trying to follow the same steps, so it won't be surprising if, in a few years, stepping on the moon loses its romanticism.
A new generation of AI
Artificial Intelligence is the hottest media science/technology topic of 2022, it was again in 2023, and undoubtedly, it will be again in 2024. We can even tell blindly, seeing the accelerated trend the latter are following. However, we have more accurate data, in which the release of new versions of the most spectacular artificial intelligences will be announced at 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 will offer us that GPT-4 doesn't already offer, but it promises to impress us just like its previous versions.
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