Yeah, it isn’t just the phone, it’s the Internet. Imagine trying to describe to your 1980’s self how the phone part of that iPhone is pretty much inconsequential. The connectivity and media abilities are what makes it. That you can instantly connect with an almost unlimited number of communities, order any item that ever existed while sitting at a restaurant table and have it delivered tomorrow, that you have instant fingertip access to virtually the sum of Human Knowledge every moment of every day. That you can pick and choose a huge number of movies and TV shows and watch them any time, any place, on a whim. That you can take a picture and send it to millions of people at the push of a button, film something and have those millions watching it within minutes, watch other people doing the same, or simply search for images of anything imaginable on a whim.
To the children of the 60’s (of which I am one), THAT is fucking miraculous, and far more amazing than the robots and other bullshit we imagined.
Now imagine what we can do in another 200 years.
Then step back and realize that most of the miraculous shit of that era will never even have entered your imagination today, just as the internet really wasn’t on our imaginative radar 30-50 years ago.
I’ve always imagined it to be something like Switzerland. Peaceful, blah, nice place to live, good schools, good place to raise your children, everyone has some weapons training, but a place some people might want to leave for adventure.
80s me would be thrilled by the technological changes, but huh, that’s the future for you. We always thought the future would be different; it wouldn’t be surprising to discover that it was, even if it was in ways we hadn’t precisely predicted. And some of it would seem just like Star Trek (smart phones = Star Trek communicators), but sooner, and without the space travel, damn it.
But my point is, we DID imagine it. It’s just an extension of what sci fi and futurist were predicting. Back in the 70s I dreamed up what the interface for a music player that could randomly access songs would look like - it looked a lot like iTunes. And when computing power was available, someone else who dreamed like me made it work. While we never heard the term “cloud storage”, for anyone that watched Star Trek the concept is easy to grasp.
Having the sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips isn’t that hard to fathom for anybody who ever had a set of encyclopedias. Our modern world does it better, but the concept is as old as the library of Alexandria. It’s an evolution, rather than a revolution.
Having access to unlimited movies is not that hard to grasp for anyone who had a VHS tape collection. Now, we just get more, and it’s easier. The idea is the same. Having it available from your phone is more of a “cool!” factor than anything that would make our primitive minds shut down…
What is surprising is how LITTLE a lot of life has changed. We aren’t commuting in Jetsons aircars, or jet packs. While the features have changed, cars still drive the same way, road signs look pretty close to what they did in the 80s, and most of the roads are right where they were back then. Stop lights are still red-yellow-green.
If anything, commercial airline travel is worse now than it was back then. You used to be able to fly direct. Now with hub and spoke routes, it takes longer and is more hassle to get anywhere (but, it is cheaper). The future gets points for non-smoking flights, though.
TV may be high def, but the viewing experience hasn’t changed (except it might take a while to figure out a busy remote control). Going to movies is the same experience as well, though in both cases the 80s person would say we sure have a lot more commercials in the future!
Us stone age people were mail ordering back in those dark ages as well. It may have taken two weeks round trip if you mailed the order, but you could phone order. Even now I don’t use priority shipping. My Amazon orders take about a week, on average. About the same, over all.
I don’t know it would be THAT inconceivable, since again, we had the Star Trek model to draw from. Having a computer being able to tell you whatever you needed to know was one of the most ubiquitous things about that show. They also looked up whatever archives they wanted to on their computer-connected data pads, such as Moby Dick or Poe or whatever, and you could infer that they could access anything they wanted, from the details of the Eugenics wars to the temperature of some resort on Riga.
So the concept of such things was already in our imaginations, but the execution and scope of it all would still be a total head trip, I agree. Especially the online-ification of social and commerce interactions, where everyone is their own little diva/PR machine and that’s the new normal. And the utter necessity of being competent with computers to be a functional human, or at least a functional professional - even people in purely physical fields like massage therapists need email and probably a website and preferably some knowledge of social media to promote themselves. That would have been strange to imagine.
And yet, how often was it shown taking hours or days to ‘research’ things? “Find me records on X”. “Access the Federation Memory Banks for Y”. How long does that sort of thing take today? Seconds? And very often such things were a Big Deal. It was a Plot Point, not usually an inconsequential action, as it is for us today.
And oh sure, you could order something from a catalog 30 years ago. You had to have the catalog, and you could only order what is in it. Today I can search the entire planet for a rare item in seconds, find shit I didn’t know existed until that moment, and have it overnighted to my house.
/me looks at his Youtube video, up for several weeks, with 360 views. “Millions of viewers, eh? I had no idea! How do you do that?”
Then again, the entire video is animated, entirely by filming scenes in Second Life (it’s a machinima) and the quality of the video is WAAAAAAY beyond anything Hanna Barbara was doing 30 years ago (granted, a low bar, but it’s also waaaaay beyond anything animated other than major movie features 30 years ago), but it was also done entirely by me, in my spare time, on my home computer, with no extra hardware. Inconceivable, 30 years ago.
I think that the technological advances would be easy to adapt to for a person born in the latter half of the 20th century:
Anti-gravity? Cool!
Energy weapons? I want one!
Transporters? Let’s Go!
Warp drive? Let’s have lunch on Protos VI!
Replicators? Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!
Holodecks? I’ll bet you haven’t thought of this…
None of the technology would be shocking. Amazing, perhaps, but easy to comprehend.
What would be difficult to adjust to would be the social changes. Those are only obliquely referred to in ST, but read The Forever War to get an idea of how society might change in a few hundred years…
I agree the interconnectedness of modern life is a big change. But, you don’t HAVE to take part. Business can still function without a web presence. Lots of people, not just old farts, don’t have Facebook, or use The Twitter.
Like Doc Brown (of course your president has to be an actor - he has to look good on TV!) I think an average 80s-er could adjust pretty fast. You don’t have to be an expert in computers to use one, like you don’t have to be an expert on telephony to make a call.
Take a person from the 1880s - well, there’s someone who would be lost.
The larger point of my post was that while many of the ramifications of the tech you listed would be obvious, most of the ‘miraculous’ stuff would be ways of using those things that we had perhaps only begun to dimly imagine. The ‘killer app’ that takes a piece of tech and turns it on it’s head or makes it useful in new and different ways.
One of the things I like to point out is that, in the stories of the 50’s and 60’s, its the guys who make the robots that are the richest guys in the world. In the world of the early 21st century, it’s the guys who wrote the damned software running those computers that have all the money. That sort of distinction wasn’t even remotely imagined back in those early days (when you pretty much built the robot, turned it on and viola! it had sentience!)
Oh, an example of what can be done by one person via machinima … not my video, a much better video, a story of a warrior and a geisha set in ancient Japan … check it out … It has about two seconds of nudity about 2:30 in and a lot more nudity at about 13 minutes, but other than that it’s mostly safe for work. I’ll spoiler box it, but the first two minutes are safe if you are curious, and the quality of the animation is startlingly good. Hanna Barbera could only dream of this sort of thing 30 years ago.
Yes, people had encyclopedias back in the 80s, and they imagined computer systems that could do what an encyclopedia does. An encyclopedia can be expected to give you a list of the Prime Ministers of Denmark from 1700 to the present, no problem. But now, suppose you told someone from 1984 that you could use a computer to look up the middle name of a character on an obscure TV show that aired decades ago… And have the answer in less time than it took you to type the question. What the heck kind of encyclopedia would have that in it?
*In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.*
Pretty much the Internet in a nutshell, as imagined by Douglas Adams circa 1979.
“Drama is about change. TV is about things staying the same.”
Manga and anime suffers from this problem less, because the series are often preconceived with a beginning, extended middle, and end ahead of time. So you can upturn your premise in season 2.
People of that time may have heard of LexisNexis and they might have searched for abstracts or even some full text stuff at a University library. If there was a conceptual leap to be made, it would be that you could search all databases at once, such that they all mixed together seamlessly. You don’t have to search for something at the New York Times or at the Wall Street Journal or even both together. You can search all the fulltext documents, all around the world, some even made by individuals. In fact you don’t even think about where the databases are physically located: it doesn’t really matter.
Hmmm. The singularity discussion is interesting, and related to the OP, but I think it deserves a thread of its own, prolly over in IMHO. So I’ll go start one, feel free to check in if interested.
How do we know they don’t? No one seems to get cancer or AIDS or heart attacks in the Federation. They only get weird alien muto-retroviruses.
The humans of the Federation aren’t some hive-mind transhumans or cyborgs. That’s the Borg’s job. They are probably just like us, but with better health care, better genetics screening and some cybernetic technology (Picard has an artificial heart IIRC).
I have to think post-Eugenics war, Federation society is a bit leery about too much generic modification.
My guess is Earth society is probably pretty vapid. Similar to the culture of the Capital in Hunger Games or the population of Elysium in that film, but without all the wealth inequality issues as there are no poor people. At least not on main planets like Earth or Vulcan.
Most Earthlings probably have a pretty decent standard of living. Any issues related to pollution, food, environment, housing can be managed by technology. There are still hierarchies and different social classes. If you did absolutely nothing in life, you would probably still end up with what we consider a decent apartment in some arcology mega-structure in the middle of Iowa. A famous starship captain OTOH, might have a sweet apartment in San Francisco with bayside views. As prime locations (and certain other resources) would still be scarce in the future, there would still be some form of currency or economy. Maybe one amasses “credits” for various accomplishments on behalf of humanity whenever you save the Earth from invasion or cure some retrovirus. People obviously still have jobs in the future and they aren’t all aligning warp cores on starships. My sense is that a lot of service jobs like running the Picard family vineyard or tending bar on 10-Forward are more like hobbies than based on any real economic need.
The best and brightest go off to places like Starfleet or various academic or administrative institutions. But most Federationales probably spend most of their leisure time (of which they have a lot) playing around on holodecks or watching and commenting endlessly on 24 hour holo-news stories about a Bajoran terrorist attack, the ongoing search for a missing Intrepid-class starship that disappeared without a trace or some famous starship captain who died on the maiden voyage of some new explowarship rescuing a bunch of El-Aurian boat people.
(a) Even with advanced health care, previously unknown diseases (both natural and technogenic) will continue to crop up. When Dr Pulaski was aging prematurely and it was suggested that they run her through the transporter to get rid of whatever it was that ailed her, Geordi said something like “Well, I’ve never heard of it being used exactly in that way…” You gotta wonder: It’s the 24th century, they’ve had transporter technology for 200 years, and it’s never occurred to anyone before??? :dubious:
(b) In the animated episode with Robert T April, he and his wife refuse the opportunity to rejuvenate themselves after they’ve restored the Enterprise crew to their proper ages, all on the grounds that “We’ve lived a good life; we don’t need to repeat it,” or words to that effect. He’s offered a chance like that, and he turns it down? For both himself and his wife? And she doesn’t object in the slightest? Holy crap, we’re talkin’ some real moral high ground here! :eek:
