How can I make "the future" come to reality?

So I look at this trope here:

And I am very dissapointed by the lack of cool Sci Fi things we have in reality. I would like to know what career choice do I have to pick where I can make reality look like the world of tomorrow?

Did you read the XKCD comic in your link? In what way is a pocket-held all-in-one videophone gameboy encyclopedia GPS camera stereo not a cool SciFi thing?

The only thing not cool about it is that you’re used to it.

While we’re mining tvtropes, the converse trope is Zeerust – where the “vision of the future” is stuff that no one currently wants or cares about and is so obviously rooting the values if the time and place the work was written instead of being currently relevant.

Jet packs and flying cars are visions of a future from a time when transportation was evolving in new and exciting ways, and people imagined the future as “more of that happening”. As noted in the XKCD, what actually happened was telecommunications took off instead and became the new, exciting thing.

I think you’ll find that “the future” has a habit of showing up whether we do anything about it or not. Is there a specific change that you’d like to help along? “Making stuff more futuristic” is a pretty vague goal.

The Future is never about the future. It is always about today.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he was solving a problem he had of communicating with other scientists. The jetpack and rocket belt were strictly solutions for military uses, to get soldiers over obstacles in the field. Every bit of the real future and every bit of the imagined future were solutions to the problems of the day, problems that were thought to be susceptible to improved technology.

And the ones that worked worked far better than idiot cool SF toys. You want people flying cars over your house? People are idiots.

Go into engineering technology of some sort if you want to do something for the future. Find a problem. Solve it. That’s it. Nobody’s ever done it differently.

Since the OP is looking for advice, let’s move this to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Business and finance.

The reason why the world doesn’t currently look like a 1920’s sci-fi comic strip is financial, not technological. We already have sufficient technology to take trips to Mars, build permanent colonies on the Moon, building underwater cities, and so forth. However, doing so would require vast sums of money, and no one wants to spend that much on things with no apparent chance of profit.

But if you became the next Warren Buffett and had $100,000,000,000 to toss around, you could build all that stuff.

Join the Methuselah Foundation. Then you might get to live to SEE the future too. :smiley:

Reality never looks like the future.

My signature, that I haven’t used in a while, answers the OP: