From the link:
OK, I’ll bite. What the hell is a night vision phone? One with a display that you can see at night? Or is it actually a light amplification device using the camera capabilities?
Seriously though. Or at least a half decent, affordable hovercar. The 21st century has been rather disappointing so far. If I don’t see at least one giant robot war within my lifetime, I want my money back.
fair enough, but wow what a pain in the ass!
I have been meaning to start a thread like this for a while.
When I was a kid my mom (early 1970s), who knew how much I loved SciFi bought me a book with predictions about the future. The book was printed in the mid-60s. I recently had my mom send it to me, the book is old and brittle but I will have it repaired and pass it on to my child. She’ll also have a hoot with it in a couple of decades. Among the things the book predicted would probably happen by this decade:
Underwater cities.
Cities in space.
Artificial wombs.
Lifespan would be dramatically lengthened.
Robots would do the hard work.
Automated traffic.
There´s more but you get the idea. What they failed to predict? The internet and cellular telephony. Actually their predictions were totally off.
My choice of 200 movies to watch on my personal television screen when flying Emirates Airline.
I remember when people envied Howard Hughes because he owned the MGM film library and had his own movie room with a projectionist on 24-hour call. Now we have so many ways of taking movies with us on the go with portable DVD players and iPods. Also cell phones with streaming video make me go “wow”. Not to omit playing music on computers and MP3 players without the need for some kind of disc or record.
I don’t remember which James Bond film, but it was with Sean Connery…at any rate, at one point in the film they did a close up of him looking at his watch and it was (gasp!) a DIGITAL watch (with the old red LED numbers) and the audience was amazed.
Our neighbor bought one a few months later and I don’t remember the price, but I can remember my dad saying he could have paid three months mortgage on our house for what the neighbor paid for that “fancy” watch.
You can buy better digital watches for about $2.00 at your local thrift shop today.
The latter… a light amplification device…
FML
Just how many BBCs are there?
I’m not so sure. I think we could do underwater cities within the next 5-10 years if we devoted the resources to it–maybe not the size of Mumbai or London, but I think we could do it if we really wanted to. I just can’t see the demand.
As for cities in space (the moon counts IMO), Stephen Hawking predicted a couple years back that it would happen soon in a vague sense. That’s good enough for me. (Edit: Now that I think about it, maybe he just said we’ll have to colonize the moon soon. Either way, it seems to me that the money would be a bigger issue than the technology.)
Artificial wombs? Well, have you ever heard of test tube babies? And even in 2000 we were having serious debates about the ethics of cloning.
Lifespan dramatically lengthened? Maybe not, but the general idea–that advancements in medicine would change our society–was spot-on.
Robots doing the hard work: Not too far off. They can vacuum your floor and cut your lawn. Not too bad, right?
Automated traffic: Not far off, either. Prototypes of what essentially amount to autopilot cars been run successfully here and in Germany. Given that the two countries already have expansive freeway infrastructures, it’s not a stretch that big cities could have automated commutes within the next decade or two.
Only one BBC, but if you mean “how many BBC channels”, there are eight BBC TV channels available in the UK. (Plus lots of national and local radio channels).
JERRY: And what about the floating cities?
GEORGE: And the underwater bubble cities?
JERRY: It’s like we’re living in the '50s here.
Roger Moore, Live And Let Die (1973), Hamilton Pulsar P2.
Say, your real name isn’t Calvin is it?
The disappoint for me is the design of the things we do have. I’ve been waiting for all of those cool future car designs and all we got is boxes.
No, they predicted we would build them. Not that we would be able to do so.
They did predict that cloning humans would be possible (which it somewhat is), and also predicted that it would be an ethical minefield. So they were close on that one, but the artificial womb they talked about is nowhere near happening. And entirely artificial womb will be out of our reach for quite a while. And in-vitro babies had already happened by the time the book was printed (baby Brown?).
They meant regular people surpassing the 100 mark by far, and in good health.
Feh! Nowhere near what they predicted.
No hover cars, no robots driving my car.
The problem with their predictions – which were all based on already-happening scientific and technical research – was that they were off by decades. The future arrived faster than they thought. Some of these things will not likely happen within my baby daughter’s lifetime either.
It’s like they thought that 2000 was some magical number, and here we are 7 years later and people are still warring and nobody is paying attention to the larger and vital issue of domestic robots. I also want a refund.
I think it was Things To Come (1936) that had a scene of airplanes flying around a city as cars drive through one – complete with traffic signals. What was not taken into account was that, while airplanes are not especially difficult to fly, they do require a certain amount of skill and focus that (in my opinion and observations) is lacking in a parge portion – if not the majority – of car drivers. Not to mention the problem of hovering a fixed-wing aircraft that is not equipped with vectored thrust. But the dream of a ‘flying car’ lived – and still lives – on. When Molt Taylor created his Aerocar (in-flight photos) it was less a flying car than a roadable airplane. But such was the technology at the time. Paul Moller dreamed of something that was much closer to a flying car: The Moller Skycar. Instead of being an airplane that could be driven on the ground, it would be an powered-lift aircraft that could be used as a car without the need to convert it.
Unfortunately the design does not realistically take into account the ineptitude of many drivers. Supposedly a computer will do most of the flying, while the pilot directs it. But look at the number of crashes drivers have in a two-dimensional environment, and think about how they might handle having another dimension to keep track of. I might go on, only there have been a lot of flying car threads already.
Anyway, anyone who wants a ‘flying car’ can buy a new Robinson R-22 that already exists and is certified for about 1/5 the cost of a Skycar, which may never be certified or exist beyond the prototype.
As for being a ‘pain in the ass’, the Aerocar could be converted in five minutes – not much more time than it takes to unstow and erect the convertible top on my MGB.
I don’t recall which which SF author first came up with the things, but it’s definitely a better future in which they actually exist.
(Paraphrased)
"You remember when everybody thought the year 2000 was going to be like “The Jetsons”?!? … Now here it is, 2000! Man, it’s not even like “The Jeffersons!!!”
– Chris Rock.
Well, the distinction between “flying car” and “roadable aircraft” is a useful one. The distinction is important because while we may have mass market roadable aircraft, we will NEVER have flying cars, unless someone invents cheap antigravity.
Flying is not driving. It is flying. If your car breaks down on the road, you coast over to the shoulder and call AAA. If your airplane breaks down in the air, you call your wife and tell her you love her one last time before you plow into a cornfield. A commuter “flying car” would be used to drive from your house to a nearby airstrip, where you would take off, fly to the nearest airstrip to your work, land, and drive from that airstrip to the parking lot at work.
But the thing is, why exactly do you need to drive from your house to the airstrip in the same vehicle that you use to fly from your home airstrip to your work airstrip? We already have reasonably priced light aircraft that you could fly from one small airstrip to another. It would be cheaper to have buy two safe, reliable, mature technology cars and one safe, reliable mature technology light plane than to have one experimental and risky roadable airplane. Or if we imagine airstrips common enough that everyone has one nearby, how about a bicycle? Or a bus?
All science fiction style “flying cars” require antigravity to hover and take off. Real-life aircraft cannot hover without enormous output of power. But of course, we aren’t going to discover antigravity today or tomorrow, or in any time in the forseeable future, or in the unforseeable future for that matter. In short, they require magic. We don’t have magic, we have helicopter blades and propellers. And these will always be tempermental failure-prone and risky devices. When people stop thinking about flying cars and start imagining roadable airplanes, the advantages of an airplane that you can drive on surface streets don’t seem that great. The “flying” part of the flying car is the most important part, any flying car will have to be optomized for flight or it will be a deathtrap. Which means it’s a roadable airplane.