But it was also 30 years away 40 years ago. 
So many creatures.
Buggalo (Futurama)
Sky Bison (Avatar)
Ohmu (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)
Splat (Strange World)
Magic Space Tardigrades (Star Trek Discovery)
Creepers (Mickey 17)
Warawara (The Boy and the Heron)
There are also magical blob creatures in the video game Stardew Valley that do all your chores for you.
Really there is no end. I’ll even take Cthulhu. Better way to go out than our current situation.
Related: I desperately need a squid gun.
Rick’s Portal Gun.
I’d miss you all, but I’d be ggggoooone!
Transporter for sure. No more traffic, no more air travel, no more parking lots. Moving would be SO easy.
Yes, we are moving to a new house. 120 miles away. My wife and I have taken about a dozen SUV loads there. We can only load the car half full or so because our dogs come too. Each trip.
A money tree
The Smurfs
Gordon Shumway (aka ALF)
Magic brooms
Flying carpets
Genies in a bottle
Gold at the end of rainbows
Tigger
Was this before or after Lego Dimensions was released?
Why? A holodeck doesn’t actually transport you to someplace else. You’re inside a big room in the middle of the Enterprise the whole time.
Worst case scenario, other people on the ship notice you’ve been in there for a few hours too long and they turn the Holodeck off.
Well, they actually did a PG-rated version of that with Barclay and his “Goddess of Empathy”.
Most of the ones that immediately came to mind (transporters, replicators, life extension) have already been mentioned; I’d add a personal AI assistant that (reliably, which is the fictional part) screens my calls, flags things relevant to my interests that I probably would have missed, etc.
Well, unless the ship’s computer gets infected with a virus, or an alien intelligence takes over the ship’s systems, or someone with the right technical skill overrides the safety protocols and makes it impossible to shut it off, or…you get the picture.
The non-PG usage of the holodeck is also canon:
Stranger
I always wonder how that would affect cities and suburbs. Cities (well, some of them) still have the “pull factor” of having 10+ restaurants a short walk a way and such. The social amenities. But if you only work in the city and live in the surburbs 45+ minutes away, you can just move to a much cheaper area and commute just as quickly. Though you’d still look for the good schools, if you had kids, or whatever whatever thing (besides commute) that made you pick this suburb over another.
Admittedly, this is kinda presuming we have a “receiving” transporter pad (sometimes do, sometimes not, in the shows) because of 300 people wanting to go to the same restaurant at the same moment. So I guess it depends on if each commercial facility has their own (which would take some space/operators?) or we have them in place of subway stations or parking decks or whatnot.
If transporters were real and commonly available, you could live anywhere in the world and go anywhere else for dinner or a concert.
Was just editing about that. My thought was about needing receiving locations because of so many people wanting to go the exact same place at the same time and not wanting them to materialize together. And “traffic” management of the individuals being transported so they aren’t all on top of each other. The restaurant can’t seat 2000 at once, and doesn’t have a receiving area big enough for all of them, and whatnot.
You have the entire world’s (or your countries,depending on international transport rules) restaurants available instead of just local ones - I wonder if it would lead to more reservations for more popular places given supply at any one location can only grow so much. Of course, the interstate locations, chains, and so many other things would change so much.
It’s fun to think of the more mundane reactions/responses of society to that sort of thing, as well as the big political and economic ones. Though actually, of course, those can lead to big economic changes, as well (in addition to the first-degree economic issues). I do enjoy speculating on real-world effects on things like this that aren’t really explored in fiction, as they aren’t exciting like the bad guys/plots. World-building starting with reality and introducing fantastical technology, I mean.
Is getting stuck in the holodeck any worse than the ship’s computer malfunctioning and you get stuck in engineering?
You have to wonder if that would still be an issue if transporters were common. There are school systems that let parents choose to send their children to a different school outside of their local district with the main limiting factor being the parents are responsible for transporting the child back and forth. But if you could just pop your kid in the transporter and send them a top school that’s a hundred miles away, I feel it would be much more common.
Not full-on vagina dentata, but a condition where, if the woman’s frontal lobes aren’t in a complete state of consent, she’d involuntarily perform a Singapore grip sufficient for penectomy.
The manosphere. would howl that this would only result in hypergamy (as they already howl now anyway): a condition where all the women take turns on only a few guys. A logical fallacy based on the artificial environments of online dating and hookup bars, held dear by two types of manospherians: the Andrew Tates who claim to be one of those few guys; and the anonymous incels who despair of ever being one.
A flying car for me, not for thee.
Whenever I ask someone a question they aught to know the answer to but say “I don’t know” the green slime from above pours on their head.
Fair point. Though, realistically, how school funding works should change. But regulations often have a tough time keeping up with technology. Elite schools (for children, not colleges, I mean) would likely have even smaller acceptance rates than today.
EDIT: Oh, and I’m sure most of have read discussions about how the US college experience has changed for people who “go away” to college since cell phones and such became always present. We’d probably see an even greater degree of change with the ability to commute to any university just as easily.
More of an aside than anything else, but I recently watched the first season of “Light & Magic” on Disney+. It’s a documentary series covering Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) from the first Star Wars movie all the way up through The Mandalorian. A lot of the focus is on how Lucas revolutionized the film industry by making everything digital - effects, editing, filming, distribution, projection, etc. For filming The Mandalorian, they used something called “the volume”, which is a giant circular soundstage where the walls are screens that you can project any background onto. There are sensors all around the top of the walls that track where the camera is within the volume and adjust the projected background so that it is correct from the camera point-of-view. And as I’m watching this I think to myself “they built a frickin’ holodeck!”
Well, it is when you are in a simulation of a “Gunfight at the OK Corral”, or a spy caper where you are strapped to a missile impending upon launch, or a mobster story where suddenly the gats spit real hot lead into your belly.
I haven’t been in one of these studios but I have been in an immersive 3D projection environment, and it isn’t quite as realistic as you’d imagine from seeing it on camera. The lack of depth perception (or in some cases the exaggerated forced perspective) makes it a very odd experience. I’m sure it is easier to act against than a greenscreen, and more to the point makes it easier (and cheaper) to match lighting and shadow in-camera versus post-production image manipulation but it doesn’t fool your brain into thinking that you are really there.
Really? If a woman decides in mid-intercourse that she’s not enjoying this as much as she imagined, or her partner has bad breath, or she’s just bored and wants it over her “vagina dentata” should permanently mutilate the man before she even has the time to say, “I want to stop” and he has a chance to comply? This is really want you want?
Stranger
Well, that would be one way to get the GOP to support full dental coverage