You had places where people had to go into booths and pay to see porn?? Why would anybody do that?
People went about their lives despite knowing that at any time they could just die?!?!
The utter lack of Massively Multiplayer Online Horrific Rape Simulators. Which, aside from a few loonies, most people play after getting home from work, having dinner with the family, leading otherwise happy, normal lives, etc. (Well, aside from the Gold Farmers who’re slaving away in Puntland or Niugini.)
I used to predict that some day the idea of being lost would become completely foreign. With GPS navigation in smartphones, that’s pretty much already happened!
Eventually, the idea of forgetting something will be just as foreign, as will the idea of misplacing something. “Google, locate my car keys!”
that reminds me of Sleeper(1973).
The funny thing is I’m reading a science fiction book now where this came up in the section I just passed. The protagonist’s group has to hide their presence from hostile scanners, so they’re dumping all their wireless gear. The problem is all their gear is wireless; as their tech points out after cracking open one of the PDAs to see if he can disable the wireless transmitter, every individual component of the PDA – display screen, CPU, and storage – talk to each other wirelessly within the PDA itself. The signal is extremely faint since it only needs to travel a few centimeters, but there is a signal. The reason it was designed that way is because, in their time, wireless transmitters are materially cheaper than physical wires.
And, you know, I can see it. If you need just a little bit of cheap material to make two wireless transmitters, and to make a wired connection you need a slight bit more of a slightly more expensive material, and bandwidth has broadened enough that there’s no substantial difference in speeds, it would make sense to do it that way.
The only exception was power, which is cheaper in that setting to do through wires than through wireless. That, I think, might actually be proven false within the next century as RF technology improves, at least regarding small components that only need trickles of power.
What’s this money stuff? Didn’t people have personal finance rings to buy things?
And people actually watched entertainment that was flat?
And people played games looking at a screen? How is a game even worth playing without virtual reality?
And people were really ugly back then. Couldn’t their parents afford to tune their genes before birth?
People had to take out a phone to call someone? And press buttons or touch the screen? They didn’t just talk? (Think ST:TNG communicators vs ST:TOS ones.)
I think you’re misunderstanding the point of the thread. To take your example of baseball caps: No one is suggesting that the need for hats will go away. YourAdHere said:
[QUOTE=YourAdHere]
Also, baseball caps will probably look silly and old timey once the newest trend for head gear in the west comes about. I find hats and head wear in particular really tend to point out what age a person comes from (in the west)
[/QUOTE]
Baseball caps have been around approximately as long as baseball has been around. However, baseball caps didn’t become everyday headwear for most people until fairly recently (10 years ago? 20?). In another 100 years, this scenewill look as dated as this onedoes to us now, due in no small part to the clothing and headwear. Both sets of people are adequately clothed for protection from the elements; in fact, the people in the newer picture are wearing clothing made from many of the same materials as the people in the older picture. Nevertheless, the clothing that people choose has changed in the hundred years that passed between the two pictures.
“Remember back in 2011 when they had great forests, trillions of animals in the seas, and breathable air?”
“STFU, and get back to stirring the algae pond! When done here, we need to go clean the biotic food processors - apparently, everything coming out of it, even bread and milk, is now tasting like chicken.”
That reminds me of a cool background bit from some sci-fi story. The viewpoint character was thinking back to when she watched The Wizard of Oz as a girl, and how the screen image went from flat to three dimensional when Dorothy reached Oz.
The strangest things of all will be our predictions of what the future would be like.
Wow,the masses actually spent 40 to 60 hours a week going to work at a place they hated?
People back in 2011 thought that skinny people were more desirable than fat people. How quaint. And they even thought that being thin was healthier.
Women actually gave birth through their vaginas, like animals. How barbarian.
The average human penis was only about 15 cm long. (pause for laughter) Didn’t those idiots ever here of genetic manipulation?
Back then, people thought gold was really worth something. Diamonds too.
People used to actually interact *in person, *often actually touching each other. Ewwwww.
If people aren’t touching each other, why does penis size matter? 
There is a large contigent of people who think this will happen any day now. I’d think it was hilarious if I didn’t know they were being serious.
These are usually the same people who talk about books being “cheap,” the Internet being “everywhere” and eReaders being “ubiquitous.” The last one is my favorite because it assumes that people who read paper books are in the minority and that all kids under the age of 18 grew up with an eReader so the idea of a paper book is just odd.
I saw a special on the Discovery channel about healthcare in the future. It showed a twentysomething guy pouring saved urine into his toilet because he’d been out drinking. As he was leaving home he got into a flying car accident. At the hospital he was given nanites to fix his legs and schedualed for a hear transplant. Which was cancelled when someone at his insurance company noticed the blood tests the hospital took weren’t consistant with his morning urine sample and cancelled his policy. He was forcibely put in the “Non-Insured” ward to die until a kind hearted doctor was able to make the hospital computer think he was an elderly man with platnium coverage who died that morning.
“Oh, Sweatheart men didn’t go to booths just to watch porn. They went to masturbate in public and possibley hook up with other men on the down low”.
I think textbooks will soon be antiquated though. Every student will be assigned an eReader with that years texts uploaded. Another generation and paper tests will be obsolete also - students will ‘write’ their answers directly onto the tests which are displayed on their desktop whiteboard (and the teacher will be able to simultaneously monitor each of them and note if two classmates sitting next to another just happen to have all the same answers, right or wrong…)
Kids will look at pictures of children of the past and wonder why they carried such heavy backpacks. And will have no clue what a pencil case or pencil sharpener is. “You had to write on paper - how did you edit anything? An eraser? What is that? And you had to hand it in to the teacher? Grandpa, you’re silly.”
You went swimming in open water? With, like, animals and plants and stuff in it? And lots of other people? But how did you keep from touching stuff? And what about the radiation?
…You wore clothes? Right in the water? Didn’t that get in the way of swimming?
I think Zits did this one: “What time is it?” “I don’t know, I don’t have my phone with me.”
Just think how today’s people react to '70s porn, only 40 years old. Yuck.
Nice one Kath!
Future artifact tag in what ever their equivelent of a museum is…
Credit Cards - Primitive Personal Tokens of Power and wealth, enabled a cruel money lending system that could keep a person in debt for life.
Head Stone (Marked “1915 - 1968, Ethlel Grude, She rests in glory with the lord”)
Members who are unfamialr with death are encouraged to investigate more introductory levels of learning, as exposure could be traumatic. Marker used to identify placement of protien unit when it expired.
Members who are unfamilair with “religion” are stronglly advised to pursue learning only with extreme care, under skilled instruction. The memes and ideas it carries require special understanding. May cause insanity.
Bottles of Prescription Pills, Powerful and mysterious pellets and potions of power and healing, prescribed by medicine men. Investigators are warned never to sample “pills” found in such containers. Results have been dangerous and strange. The rumours of the mysterious blue pill of potency “Viagra” is puerly a myth.