I’m well aware of it (and it’s been pointed out on this Board more than once). But the example from operation Moonbase is probably not as well known.
Heinlein himself derided such predictions as pretty trivial (although that may hsave been his usual showboating), but they’re probably the best examples of how to tell a science fiction story – by having characters simply employing the futuristic technology without harping on it, and letting the audience observe it and work out what it was and how it got that way. And, instead, the writer concentrates on the social (and higher technological) implications of the evice.
By contrast, an example of how not to do it is Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century. The main character is a perfectly ordinary citizen of his time, and yet he’s always getting gobstruck by all the “futuristic” devices he encounters in his day-to-day life.
I’m not sure it’s just Euro units. The modern front-load units use very little water, so they work in a toss-wait, toss-wait mode that gives soapy and clean water time to work without agitation. But our Samsung turns out even big loads in well under an hour. I think the idea that continuous agitation is necessary (or better) is wrong - it was just easier to build machines that ran that way.
True. Even less remembered are the screwy phones from “Waldo,” which had some kind of double dial.
You’re missing the point a bit. We’ve established fictional cordless phones back to 1939, in works N+P should have been familiar with… but when it came to their own slightly futuristic world, with things like mega-arcologies and implanted communication units, they overlooked a technology that already existed in reality.
It already is. Getting a DNA sample requires probable cause and a court order. (Its a lot more complicated than that and there are exceptions and differences from state to state but that would be a thread hijack)
I recall someone (Asimov, Heinlein?) saying that many science fiction stories predicted a moon landing. And many predicted television. But no science fiction writer predicted we would be watching the first moon landing on live TV. Is that actually accurate?
I think the movie GATTACA got it right, though, in portraying stealth DNA checks and consequences even though it was technically illegal. We’re significantly advanced since then and it would be little trouble to collect a DNA sample from an individual and have it tested.
I believe so, and I believe it was again Heinlein who said it.
Clarke, on the other hand, predicted so many small/common social/technical things that we can forgive him for his blunder about Martian mountains. He tossed off so many casual little future observations that proved accurate that it’s a bit eerie.
How come we don’t have those neat self-opening doors (that slid into the walls) as in STARTREK? Human servants are so much better than robotic ones…I’ll take upper-class 1900!
Sure. And I could run up to someone and jab them with a needle and run away. But it still wouldn’t be admissible in court. Currently when we have someone we want to match DNA with, when we have DNA evidence and the suspect already has DNA on file from another case, the court will not recognize and the lab will not do a comparision without a fresh exemplar sample taken from the suspect. And that exemplar requires a court order or consent. I have no doubt legal precedent will evolve on this issue. But thats the way it is right now.
In the 1956 movie “Forbidden Planet” Dr. Morbius plays music from the extinct alien civilization the Krell for the officers of the spaceship C-57D. This is done via a small cone shape object about the size of a piece of candy corn. Not too far removed from an ipad mini since in 1956 music came on 12" albums or 10" Ree-to-reel tapes.
The results didn’t end up in court in GATTACA, either. Just finding out that an employee or citizen had health or mental issues, or genetic potential for them, was enough to ruin their lives. I can see this becoming reality before the next tick of the tens digit; get a surreptitious DNA sample from job applicants, run a $10 test, and reject them because… well, for whatever reason. Nothing to do with being admissible under the legal system.
See, my conceit when watching Star Trek is that everything we see is being fed through the universal translator into a more modern-sounding idiom. It’s a variation of the literary agent hypothesis.
When Franz Josef designs was doing the Star Trek Blueprints and the Star Fleet Technical Mamnual back in the 1970s, their conceit was that they were only showing 20th century equivalents. Which is why they showed Spock’;s tricorder filled with clunky individual capacitors and resistors and a mini-CRT screen.
