Get one! There’s a tricorder app!
Heinlein’s roads were really just very wide railroad cars, where you could eat while traveling, just like the real railroads - and going to limited places, also like them.
Cars today are getting less and less like 1935 cars all the time. When I went out in the dark for the paper this morning my Prius sensed that I (or my key) was there and turned on the interior lights for me. We have mapping build in, we have bluetooth, we have some simple collision avoidance, and Google people are sitting in self-driving cars on the road I take to work.
Futurama in the NY Worlds Fair of 50 years ago (which I went on lots) had plenty of cars, though self-driving ones. Of course it was in the GM pavilion.
To try to stay slightly GQish, predictions usually are either of trends at the time of the prediction or what the person making the prediction wants to happen. If you read Galaxy and If in the very early '70s 2014 was an overpopulated polluted, crime-ridden nightmare. We have a lot better future than that one.
People thought of computers as getting more powerful, which was obvious, but not smaller, which was not. They also tended to assign robots to do the things people did just like people did them. Rosie used a vacuum cleaner just like a '60s housewife, whereas today our robots are vacuum cleaners, which is much more efficient. Instead of a robot chopping and cooking we can buy pre-chopped components, if we want them, and cook in the microwave much faster.
I own around half of all the 1950s sf magazines published, and have read most of them. The big sin of most writers as futurists (not that this was their role) was picking one thing to extrapolate and keeping everything else constant. Writers imagined flying cars but not working from home.
Which probably were chopped by a robot, just one in a big efficient factory somewhere where it can work 24/7, not in your kitchen where it only works a few minutes a day.
Be of good cheer!
Orwell’s 1984 arrived no more than few years late, thanks to our friends in NSA & Homeland Stupidity.
One of the things I say about 50’s and 60’s Robots was that one guy built them out of parts, turned it on and it worked and had intelligence. :eek: (The whole “And then a Miracle happened” paradigm.)
And not one of those people ever guessed that one of the richest men in the future world would be the guy who wrote the operating system for most of the computers.
Everything Whynot said, and:
Picturephones? Are you kidding?
(Actually we do kind of have that anyway, what with Skype and similar technology, and it “fits” seamlessly into our computers and or mobiles that we already have. As far as I’m concerned that’s true progress–the possibility of piggybacking new functionality onto the devices we already have. While it’s true that we do need to upgrade our computers and phones from time to time, in order to support these features, that’s still better than having to go out and buy an entirely new kind of device, like the Picturephones that were exhibited in the 1960s.)
Still happening. Her, the overpraised new movie, is the perfect 1950s science fiction story.
I think Exapno was trying to say that since aircraft demand higher performance (and specifically power/weight), they need to spend a higher fraction of their total mass on engine.
It’s not really true, though. For instance, a 767 weighs about 90 tons and has a pair of 4-ton engines, for 9% of the mass. A Honda Accord weighs around 1450 kg and has a 167 kg engine, for 11.5% engine fraction. Obviously these values differ based on the plane and automobile, but they’re also clearly in the same ballpark.
That said, turbojet engines have a fantastic power/weight ratio, and so the plane as a whole also has a higher power/weight ratio.
Flying cars will probably never make sense. They’re a complete non-starter without automated systems to control them. But the same level of automation applied to cars will make them far safer, faster, and better able to prevent traffic jams. For longer distances, trains and larger aircraft will remain a better option.
I saw an episode of Outer Limits the other night, from 1964. The episode was The Duplicate Man, set in the ‘future’ (about now, I would say). The cars shown were just sports cars with some fancy grillwork added. Phones were rotary dial(!) with video capability. Nobody seems to have anticipated cell phones, though there were car phones. Clothes? Men wore tight-fitting suits without lapels and narrow ties (current men’s fashion is not all that different except for the lapels). I prefer the styles of the early 90s for men.
http://wearecontrollingtransmission.blogspot.com/2011/03/spotlight-on-duplicate-man.html
The predictions of flat-screen TVs have come true, but high-definition was not really thought of. The world of today is not really all that different from the 1950s, except for cell phones and small computers.
Seriously, you can have bacon in like 15 or 20 seconds.
Flying cars make no damned sense from a safety and liability angle. Do you really want that asshole down the block flying over your house at 3am? Do you want drunk drivers slamming into houses and the sides of apartment and office buildings? What happens when they lose power or run out of fuel mid-air?
Even if they were well within our capacity to build them, we’d never allow them. The insurance alone would bankrupt you.
Oh, and food in pill form? People like to eat. Pills are self-defeating.
From Flying Cars:The Extraordinary History of Cars Designed for Tomorrow’s World, by Patrick J, Gyger, p. 10
It’s interesting how long photographic film has lasted. I do not own a digital camera, because I have two Leicaflex SL2 bodies and 8 lenses. So long as I can use film, I’m not switching.
It’s interesting how long photographic film has lasted. I do not own a digital camera, because I have two Leicaflex SL2 bodies and 8 lenses. So long as I can use film, I’m not switching.
Look at the clothes, furniture, and camera in this scene from *2001: A Space Odyssey:
*
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-crmL62FoESo/TiTBk-yyUdI/AAAAAAAADBo/a2jA1ru-sno/s1600/20015.png
If anyone hasn’t seen the iconic illustrations done by Art Radebaugh on “The Future We Were Promised” they are really magnificent eye candy. I don’t think the original website that featured them so gloriously is up any more, but you can still see some of them in some form here:
Dick Cheney walked around for a year and a half with a mechanical pump instead of a heart, and then had a heart from another person put into his body. Who the hell ever dreamed of something like that?
what happend? obama, thats what happend…
We still have time to make this prediction come true if we act now.
this makes me really depressed. it’s 2014 and we haven’t been back to the moon since 1972 - not one person has been there in my entire lifetime.
Meanwhile the number of Americans who believe the bible is literally true and who believe in satan and the virgin birth but not in evolution keeps rising to ridiculous levels. things are worse now than ever before. what a horrible future.