Why did the future as imagined from the 1950s and 1960s never come to reality?

Phrossack said:

The Moon is barren, lifeless, airless, cold, and with excessively low gravity. People would only want to live there because of the novelty value- it seems cool because it's on another solar body and nobody has done it before. Once living off of Earth becomes more common, it will lose that novelty and become less attractive.

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The moon likely is already a colony, of a non-human civ. 99,99999% of the human population is not likely to ever experience moving further up than a high mountain top anyway :reptilian:

Kyriakos said:

The moon likely is already a colony, of a non-human civ. 99,99999% of the human population is not likely to ever experience moving further up than a high mountain top anyway :reptilian:

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A link to credible proof of this, please?

Cutlass said:

There was an episode, IIRC it was the reboot of The Twilight Zone, where they transported a person, which was a copy, but the tech then destroyed the original body. Except a mistake was made, and they didn't know if the transport worked, so they didn't destroy the original, and then had 2.

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And that is my problem with teleportation. It allows for an unlimited number of copies. Oddly no author of science fictions seems to want to play with the implications of such a technology.
Same goes for "mind uploading".

innonimatu said:

And that is my problem with teleportation. It allows for an unlimited number of copies. Oddly no author of science fictions seems to want to play with the implications of such a technology.
Same goes for "mind uploading".

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Can't speak to S/F fiction as I don't read it, but brain-taping, cloning, multiple copies of the same individual, and the like are standard tropes of transhuman, near-future S/F RPGs like Eclipse Phase and Transhuman Space.

There is even a published adventure for the Eclipse Phase called Ego Hunter wherein the players take on different "forks" - copies of the same individual's identity uploaded into different bodies - to try to work out what happened to their original self.

My solution to the philosophical teleportation problem is rather simple: I don't think there even as a 'Me' or 'I' to begin with. That is just an idea which I cling to because I really really enjoy it (as in, the alternative is some kind of existential horror). I am not sure weather it is possible to really let go of that idea and hence rejoice in the wonder of teleportation in good conscience without going a bit crazy in return (incidentally providing another explanation for Kirk's behavior).

Leifmk said:

Flying cars are indeed one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. (It's kept from the title spot only by completely insane crap like Project Pluto, in my opinion.)

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Promptly goes to look up Project Pluto. That was really developed for seven years? They were studying the possibility of using nuclear bombs to propel spaceships at the same time (Project Orion), but for obvious reasons never tested the method.

sydhe said:

Promptly goes to look up Project Pluto. That was really developed for seven years?

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Yep, got as far as building and testing an engine prototype before someone realized maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Or maybe it was just that useable ICBMs were coming along as a cheaper and more effective alternative. It's this kind of crap that has me convinced that Dr. Strangelove only barely qualifies as satire or even fiction.