What piece of (Plausible!) Retro-Futuristic Tech would you create?

Let’s pretend you’ve been approached by the League Of Futurists who have decided that it’s about bloody time we got some of that cool Futuristic Stuff that everyone was promised back in the Golden Age Of Science Fiction (say, 1946-1978 for argument’s sake). As a member of the demographic who likely is interested in this sort of thing, they want to know where they should direct their limitless, infinitely resourced research and development efforts next.

They’ve already invented Flying Cars and are hard at work establishing a small but Lunar Colony- really not much more than a Space Station but On The Moon. It goes without saying that to establish a Lunar Colony they’ve also had to establish a more efficient Space Shuttle-type craft that can make the journey in a reasonable period of time at a reasonable cost.

Now, there’s a catch- despite the infinite funding and resources, whatever you want them to develop has to be plausible within realistically acheiveable technological parameters. So, for example, a 1920s-Style Death Ray is plausible and can be developed. A Teleporter or a Full-HD Holodeck is not plausible because we just don’t have the technology or computing power to do that at the moment and no amount of money or Scientists (in Lab Coats, no less!) can fix that anytime soon. However, the Death Ray is OK because we have Industrial Lasers and had money been poured into research for Death Rays at, say, the start of the Cold War (and had been maintained to the present day), I think we’d have a functioning Laser Gun of some point.

So, basically it needs to be something that almost exists today, or would exist if the funding and research had started back in the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and carried on to the present day. Hopefully you get the idea.

Any technology that you specify will be developed "properly:, ie to a commercially functional and generally useful level and not just a prototype held together with duct-tape and fencing wire.

My nomination is: Self-Driving Cars. As in, climb in, tell the on-board computer where you want to go, sit back, car drives you there while you read a book or watch TV or talk to someone or stare out the window.

Your turn…

Nuclear engined spacecraft. In all the old sci fi I read as a kid, we were flying all over the Solar system in them. There’s nothing impossible about them, and there’s been experiments in that direction; but the general hostility towards nuclear anything has kept them from being really developed.

The problem there is that the same general hostility would probably keep them from being used, even if they were developed.

Heinlein’s Shipstones, from Friday.

Robots that look like robots.

A Project Orion nuclear pulse ship. Also a space elevator.

Also, someone should make a cellphone that looks and operates exactly like an original Star Trek communicator. This could be done fairly easily since voice dialing is common these days.

We should just recite Robert Heinlein’s stuff.

My first instinct, given the parameters, was the aforementioned Heinlein Torchship. Continual thrust, nuclear-powered by direct conversion of matter to energy system ships that could later be upgraded to interstellar work if the state of the art catches up. The advantages to mankind of having access to the natural resources of the entire solar system is unfathomable. At a minimum it means an increase in average wealth at an unheard of scale.
Alternately, then, one of three things

  1. Healing functions and longevity. Something similar to Niven’s Autodoc that could repair and rescale human tissue and extend life for hundreds of years.

  2. The above conversion of matter to energy. By increasing energy availability and eliminating scarcity the engineering projects that can be accomplished become effectively unlimited.

  3. The flipside of #2: the ability to change one form of matter to another. Need more gold? Put in some granite? Even if it were only one element to another and not to any finished product (a la replicators) it would still end competition for resources and increase wealth and decrease suffering.

power satelites
not the first choice I want to make, but, everything can build from there.