This thread is inspired by several others…and as a reader of much sci-fi from the 1950’s I’d like to getyour opinions regarding why all the cool stuff never happened!
For example:
-Nuclear power: the atom was going to power everything from factories to homes…even atomic-powered cars! Now, nuclear plants are so expensive to build and maintain, that they are being shut down and replaced with coal-buring plants!
-Paperless communications: why are we still getting mail? I thought (by now) everything would be done on-line
-Personaljet planes…why not?
-Those cool futuristic fashions (capes, form-fitting duds)…but we stilldress likewe arein EDWARDIAN ENGLAND!
-disease-there should be cures forall diseases by now!
To quote the noted philosopher Yogi Berra “the fure ain’t waht it used to be!”
What went wrong?
The idea that Nuclear Power would be so cheap that it wouldn’t be worthwhile metering was not, I think, widespread. But someone said it, and now it keeps getting quoted.
The problem is that there are a lot of costs associated with nuclear power – mining a huge quantity of ore to get the needed material, then isotope separation to get the only isotopes you need. Then operations costs and disposal costs. Add to that a lot of costs associated with greater need for public safety, legal costs, and security costs.
Nuclear power can be done relatively safely (look at the U.S. Navy’s record on this, and at the new "pebble-bed reactors), but you still can’t eliminate a lot of those other costs.
I don’t think this was a 1950’s idea – the “paperless office” was n IBM promotion from the late seventies and eighties, I think.
Me, I like memos you can touch. You don’t have to worry about them getting erased with a magnet, or lost due to a hard drive failure (and no backup). You don’t need a computer to read it.
Uncomfortable fact: The US has a lot of computerized records it can’t read anymore, because the systems used to encode them are obsolete, or forgotten. I read this in an issue of American Heritage/Science and Invention years ago. Say what you will about 18th century technology, but I can still read old copies of Philosophical Transactions.
I live in Boston, where people cheerfully drive in places where there are no actual roads. The thought of these people driving in three-dimensional space scares the hell out of me.
SF movies have generally been pretty poor places to pick up fashion tips (although Bicentennial Man did a pretty good job). Do you really want to dress like a superhero, as in Things to Come?
Yeah, right!
I attended a lecture by Frederick Pohl many years ago. He expressed outrage that, having lived into the future, it wasn’t the one he was promised.
But, heck, we’ve got Personal Computers, Cell Phones, The Internet (predicted by H.G. Wells and Murray Leinster). No teleportation, spaceports, or humanoid robots, though. Yet.
So you feel the next step beyond early 20th century fashion is early 17th century fashion?
Everything didn’t turn out so “lousy.” I think we’ve made fantastic progress, even if we don’t all have personal jet powered gyrocopters. Think of what life (especially medical technology) was like just fifty years ago. We have it easy.
We can communicate instantly with people all over the world, bidirectionally, for very little cost.
Polio, smallpox, chickenpox, measles and countless other diseases have been defeated.
People are living longer and longer than ever before.
The US and Russia are working together in space.
There was no global thermonuclear war.
The average standard of living in the world continues to gradually increase.
New technology and regulation has reduced polution orders of magnitude faster than was thought possible in the 1970s.
Due to technological advances in farming and preservation, far fewer people are suffering from starvation.
The iron curtain is gone. East Germany, Russia, and the former Soviet republics are free. China is inching in that direction slowly.
So, yeah, no Star Trekkian future just yet. But things are a helluva lot better and cooler than they used to be. And I look foreward to a future that while not being perfect or ideal, will likely be vastly superior to the present.
And I have a cape.
Well said friedo. I never understand why in movies they always portray the future as being so apocalyptic.
Forget all that, I just want my sexbot!
Chicken pox and measles haven’t been defeated, but the number of cases has been cut dramatically. Both illnesses still exist, as does polio, mostly in underdeveloped countries. Chicken pox, however, still occurs in the US.
And we now have fun new diseases like AIDS and SARS.
Amp, check out the Real Doll website, which I will not link here. You’ll be surprised.
Why don’t we have robot flying cars and weekend vacations on the moon? The two great enemies of humanity: Greed and Ignorance.
Most science fiction (and historical fiction) is more about the present than the future (or the past.) Other time periods offer a convenient vehicle for exploring contemporary themes.
Example:
In the original Spider-Man comic books, Peter was bitten by a radioactive spider. But in the recent movie, it was a genetically engineered spider. Why? Because the Big Fear back in the day was nuclear weapons and nuclear power disasters. Everyone was predicting either a nuclear war or that some radioactive waste would mutate dingos in the outback and give them LASER VISION! Now, everyone is hopping mad about genetically engineered foods, gene therapy and whatnot. Same thing.
So in lots of movies you have unimaginative writers taking current issues and extrapolating them. Pollution is a major issue right now. So it makes sense to conceive a future world where everything is horribly polluted. But I would bet that better and better technology leads to less pollution in the future. Similarly, poverty is a major issue right now. So a lot of futures depict massive abject poverty on a far greater level. But all over the world, the average amount of wealth is increasing, albeit slowly. So poverty will not be eliminated 50 years from now, but the poor people will be richer.
Anyway, I think it’s a pointless exercise to gripe about the fact that we don’t have flying cars or moon bases and such. Sure, that would be nice, but, man, I can download free porn at 10 megs a second! So it’s all good.
Phnord Prephect, I have, ummmm, already researched the Real Doll Website. I was thinking of something more along the lins of the sexbot in the movie Cherry 2000.
A lot of 1950s science fiction was of the “infiltration” subgenre. “They” were infiltrating society and would destroy our world from with.
Sound familiar?
After looking at that site and reading the FAQ and letters from… heh… satisfied customers, I can truthfully say that I am very, *very surprised.
The future is here!
“Form-fitting duds”? Go to Wal-Mart and take a good look around at your fellow citizens. Are you SURE you want to see them in form-fitting duds??? 
One thing I think about a lot. When I was a kid, I had a book that explained how the technology of the time worked, in kid-terms. The back pages of the book included two that dealt with ‘future’ technology. Speculative stuff. One of the things I always looked at in awe on those pages was a device that everyone would have in their home that could be used like a telephone, television, and a whole library of information at one’s fingertips. I think about that picture, and how much I looked forward to it as a child, every time I type at my keyboard.
Actually the numbers of people living on starvation levels of food haven’t changed all that much over the last 30 or so years, if anything they’ve gotten a bit higher.
What first strikes me is the state of medicine today, as opposed to 50 years ago. We have procedures and medicines that used to be reserved for the most speculative sci-fi. Heart transplants, limb reattachments, cancer-fighting drugs, amazing diagnostic devices, dental implants, mood-altering drugs, not to mention cloning. I think of the things that my grandparents died from, and how their lifespans would have been extended with today’s “routine” procedures and medications.
The thing that went wrong was with the predictions, not with the outcome.
We might also consider the fact that “The World Of The Future” was, as a rule, being designed, painted, and portrayed by artists and PR pundits… NOT the people who were coming up with the technology, and NOT the people who were going to have to live with it.
Even as a child growing up in the sixties, I took one look at the idea of “food pills,” and thought, “This is superior to actual food HOW?” Yeah, maybe the astronauts could live on the stuff, but they didn’t have a Burger Chef on the moon, either.
A while back, on MST3K, they showed this bizarre short film from the World’s Fair (1961? 1963?) that showcased the fantastic technological innovations of Bell Telephone. It was hilarious by today’s standards… because we HAVE all that stuff. Call waiting, direct dial, touchtone phones, conference calling… old news to us, but BIG news to them.
(My favorite part is when the clean cut young couple of 1963 is shown a fantastic techno-toy they don’t have a name for, yet. You and I would come to know this gadget as a “pager.” The one they show them is the size of the BOX my cell phone came in, and looks to weigh several pounds…)
…but Bell was right. This was an example of the people in charge of the technology also being in charge of the hype. And all the dreams came true, with the exception of the Picture Phone, and even that’s not too far fetched, now that home internet access and webcams are becoming so &%$#@ popular…
True, a dome-house on the moon would have been fun. We could have had them by now, too.
And I still want a flying bubble car, like on The Jetsons…
…but I still look around me every day and realize I’m living science fiction.
In 1985, I worked at a radio station, briefly, doing the hourly news. My job was to pull everything off the AP ticker and write it into a coherent script, every forty-five minutes.
When I started that job, I was pulling a scrap of paper off a telex machine every few minutes.
When I left, I was reading it off a green CRT screen. I adored that ancient, prehistoric computer system. Its operating system was a nightmare to learn, it had NO graphics capability… but I could yank news off the AP wire ANYWHERE, with search capability not far removed from what we have now. Admittedly, there was a lot less cyberspace to search, back then…
…but if I wanted to find out how many cars had been stolen in Des Moines, Iowa, since yesterday, I could. In seconds. Weather conditions, anywhere on the planet? Number of robberies in the tri-state area? Anything happening in Dime Box, Texas at the moment? Give me thirty seconds, and I could find out.
When I sat in front of that CRT screen, I felt like God.
…and the Bell Telephone film didn’t even show cell phones. They apparently hadn’t even STARTED on that stuff back then. The closest thing we’d see that decade were the communicators they used on “Star Trek.”
I now have my very own li’l communicator. And the machine I am looking at as I type this makes that ancient CRT computer look like a friggin’ Speak-N-Spell.
This IS the future! And we are LIVIN’ LARGE!
Now if we could just figure out a way to upgrade the damn politicians…
I just think back 25 years ago, where my family phone was this big rotary-dial thing, the TV was a 9" black-and-white deal, and state-of-the-art electronics consisted of the Atari 2600.
Then I think about the cell phone on my hip, with storage for 900 phone numbers, an appointment calendar, downloadable color games, and wireless access to the internet.
As Wang-Ka said, we’re living large. We just need to upgrade the politicians… 