I am kind of disappointed. I was looking at this guys old blog about "the future" and it seems like most people there had a very optimistic perspective about what the 21st century was going to be like: Hover cars, lunar bases, underwater cities, virtual reality, holograms, food pills, Robots, Interplanetary Travel, and so on by the year 2000. Why did that vision of the future never happen? It seems the only science fiction technology that we have are computers and the internet and online games. Why did that future never come to be?
Why did the future as imagined from the 1950s and 1960s never come to reality?
- Thread starter Civ001
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I think the thread title needs a small but crucial change...
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Some people might argue it's apocalyptic and less "futuristic", whatever that term might yield.
Because as a general rule, people imagine future technology in terms of their own technology, but better. But technology doesn't advance in that way: much of it comes from unexpected side effects of research and development. E.g. no-one invented the Internet or the World Wide Web as we know them today; they emerged from earlier technologies in ways that weren't planned by those original designers. Tim Berners-Lee did not plan for Facebook and Youtube.
Most people are bound by their own historical constraints and can't make the imaginative paradigm leap on their own that would be needed to anticipate future technological changes. When H.G. Wells imagined the future, he could picture moving walkways, intrusive advertising, and even text speak, because those were reasonable extrapolations from his own day. But he couldn't possibly have imagined computers and the information revolution, because that was a whole new level of technology. The same goes for the "atomic future" of the 1950s.
Thorgalaeg
Deity
Maybe but in general terms we are way backwards compared to expectations. I would change ipods by flying cars, cities in the moon and atomic toaster any day of the week.
Leifmk
Deity
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.)
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Dude we will land a probe on a comet in a few months, we have vehicles exiting the solar system itself, and in a year another probe will fly 3,000 miles away from Pluto and go on to explore the trans-Neptunian planetoids.
We have autonomous cleaning robots that require minimal maintenance, the beginnings of a HUD-like interface, prosthetic limbs that can feel and receive nerve input, and are talking about building solar freakin' roadways!
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Well we might as well shoot ourselves then, because we've clearly failed at civilization itself.
Phrossack
Armored Fish and Armored Men
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Yeah, but we're not living on the Moon
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.
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Because, like we do today, people of the past predicted the future in term of what would be awesome, not what would be useful. They worked on Rule of Cool essentially.
We have the technology to build most if not all these things. We could. We just haven't found a good answer as to WHY we'd build them. There's no approach that makes flying cars more practical than the landbound ones we have now. No approach that make the resources it would take to build a moon city not better used elsewhere.
So instead we launched ourselves in the biggest communication and social revolution since Gutenberg, possibly since the alphabet. Which has changed the world in ways that flying cars and moon cities couldn't possibly do, at a fraction of the cost.
We have the technology to build most if not all these things. We could. We just haven't found a good answer as to WHY we'd build them. There's no approach that makes flying cars more practical than the landbound ones we have now. No approach that make the resources it would take to build a moon city not better used elsewhere.
So instead we launched ourselves in the biggest communication and social revolution since Gutenberg, possibly since the alphabet. Which has changed the world in ways that flying cars and moon cities couldn't possibly do, at a fraction of the cost.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Well, isn't there large deposits of Helium-3, which supposedly would be the miracle cure to all our energy problems?
Thorgalaeg
Deity
Bad idea? I would love to have a flying car as economical, safe and easy to drive as a normal car, however is it is something impossible to achieve with our current flying technology based on wings, props and jets. We would need anti-gravity or something like that.
Do you -really- want to give this person another axis in which they can operate? No, Leimfk is absolutely bang on.
I suppose flying cars are attractive to people who really enjoy driving, and think it would be cool to have a Jetsons-like society.
I'd prefer the transporter, replicator, and holodeck, thankyouverymuch.
I'd prefer the transporter, replicator, and holodeck, thankyouverymuch.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
The thing is, (and I hope this won't wind up into a debate) with teleporters/transporters is, that is it you who is beamed down to the surface/ship once you use it?
Thorgalaeg
Deity
That is something impossible to know.
(it is difficult no to take the bait, the topic is fascinating)
(it is difficult no to take the bait, the topic is fascinating)
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Aside from any discussion of soul - how much of your brain information would be retained in the copy? That's a more answerable and somewhat more vital question than any philosophical debate about souls.
If getting warped like that came with your very own amnesia spell, it would not be a useful technology.
If getting warped like that came with your very own amnesia spell, it would not be a useful technology.
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