As I mentioned a while back, a few weeks ago I met a woman and we hit it off in spite of having no language in common. I had daydreamed about this, but didn’t think it was actually possible.
And at the other end of my life… when I was five years old in kindergarten, I desperately wanted a specific piece of Hot Wheels track. I dreamed about it and yearned for it. But Christmas came, and it wasn’t there. I slowly forgot about it. Five years later, I got it for my birthday…
Black president.
Also in middle school my class was required to do a project where we predicted some kind of future technology. I came up with a flip phone that would cost $500 (when that was considered an absurd price for a cell phone and unattainable by all but the wealthy.) The phone had all sorts of cool technology including the ability to send pictures to people or use the camera to have a live video chat with the person you were calling and could easily fit in your pocket.
Me too.
Oh, yes. I say this every time. My dentist has a cool machine that takes a picture of the exact shape of the space in my tooth from a piece breaking off, or a large filling coming out, and mills a piece of something or other (a cap? a crown?) that fits in precisely. All done in one sitting.
Ditto with anesthesia for surgery. One minute you’re awake, next minute you’re awake again and the procedure is over. No nausea, no struggling to wake up, just a missing bit of time.
Oh yeah. My folks got one of the first ‘electric’ kitchens in Illinois. We had a freaking microwave in 1972, and a smooth glass top stove. We where a feature article in the newspaper.
Got a glass top again with my remodel, yes, gas is better, but this thing is awesome.
Cleaning? hmmm, hmm done.
When I was a senior in high school in 1979, I read a news article about a pregnant woman who had no uterus and whose fetus was attached to her abdominal wall. In sociology class later that week, I said, “If a woman can have a baby without having a uterus, all that would be needed needed for a man to carry a baby to term would be an artificial placenta. And that can’t be too far away, since scientists are working on creating artificial skin.”
(Somehow, the rumor spread at school that I was advocating that men should carry babies, and then it morphed into people saying that I wanted to be the first one.)
Anyway, it happened in 2011.
Me too. Hey, waitaminnit.
[Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy]
Is Obama…the Mule?
[/Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy]
And, to be clear: big Obama fan here. I think his ability to achieve much of his stated agenda in the face the opposition he has faced means he has done an amazing job. This is just speculative fun.
TrPolar - congrats. Was advanced alien tech involved? Okay, maybe not. How about Google Maps? 
For me that’s more like weed – expected but just a matter of when. Where I am surprised is that we got that before a female Veep (I don’t count Billery) or President. That was my only shocker in it all.
I remember in 83-84 in a middle school political science/current events class and I was arguing in support of socialized medicine in US. We aren’t there yet but we getting closer.
Back in the late 80s when I started playing guitar I thought it would be so cool if there was a cable channel devoted to guitar players. Lessons, concerts by big time players, gear reviews, etc.
Well, it never happened on cable TV but it sure as hell happened on YouTube.
Ooh, who was it? Franco? Rocky? Mean Joe? Stallworth or Swann?
I’m still waiting for flying cars, personal robots, and humans to colonize the moon and Mars.
You’ve probably realized that getting married is the easy part. Actually staying together is the toughie.
If you mean Thomas Beatie, he didn’t use an artificial placenta. As a female-to-male tran, he never had his uterus removed. So a person with a functioning uterus and ovaries became pregnant and delivered a live baby, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking.
Nope. Splat.
A hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy - a handheld computer that contained encyclopaedic information about everything. I couldn’t really conceive how it could work, but hoped it might happen anyway. It’s actually way better than I’d dreamed, by about 1000x.
I also wanted to have a collection of all my favourite movies, all lined up in a row on my bookshelves. Now I have all that and more, in multiple formats.
I used to want what we now know as a hands-free cell phone.
Now I kind of find cell phones annoying. Useful, yeah, but socially disturbing. Don’t expect me to always be accessible, OK?
I think that brings up a good point that as we get more “stuff” we add on new problems. Like your example of people on cell phones all the time or your having a quiet hike in the woods and your phone rings. Those hands free phones where you see people talking into the air.
Even things like gay marriage - now they have to deal with divorce issues.
The most advanced technology back then was the steam engine, didn’t help much.
Back in the time of things like K-Tel compilation albums that you could only order off of TV, I always wanted the ability to only pick and have which songs I wanted for each disc. Now with things like iTunes, you never have to deal with stuff you don’t want to hear, let alone own. Soooooo cool.