Automated Traffic - OK, so they got it wrong about cars. But planes fly themselves (as mentioned above), and modern trains, from subways to high speed lines, do the same.
Artificial wombs - I suppose their mistake was not predicting the huge social changes which meant that the stigma of adoption (mostly) disappeared, and that the ethical world changed so that IVF and surrogacy are commonplace. All these were easier options!
Lifespan - someone else can google it if they’re that interested, but my WAG is that we’re 10-15 years up compared to thirty years ago. I regard that as pretty dramatic.
I was reflecting on this the other day, re-reading Heilein’s “Waldo”. One character is trying to figure out how Waldo would play solitaire in zero0g, and imagines using magnetized cards. Workable, but nowadays you’d feel certain that he’d do it on some sort of computer interface – you don’t have to worry about the cards floating away or anything. In fact, it’s likely that his game of choice wouldn’t even be a card game.
I can’t fault Heinlein for not predicting the ubiquity of the computer or the form it would take (and he did populate his stories with them later on), but tghis does follow the pattern.
On the other hand, he correctly has characters using portable phones (see “Space Cadet”). The time is almost past for the cordless phones with separated desk and handset (as he showed in the TV series that became “Operation Moonbase”). we still have such a set in our house, but people are switching to cell phones in place of them.
I went to a lecture by Isaac Asimov back in the late 70s wherre he read an excerpt from “Foundation” in which Hari “Raven” Selden talks about doing something on his “pocket calculator” with its red readout display. “I even got the colors of the LEDs right!” he crowed. Which was true – then. Within a very few years everyone switched from those power-gobbling red LED displays to more efficient liquid crystal displays, though. Nowadays most people don’t even carry pocket calculators.
I wish I could remember where I heard this one from, something along the lines of: “Grandad, is it true that you used to call a building, hoping that the person you wanted was there?” Fixed lines, for private use, are surely going to die a very long and protracted death. (Especially in places where most internet access is by ADSL…it’s all very well using Skype, but we’re still also paying for a landline whether we like it or not.)
Heh. I remember looking forward to Space: 1999 every week, and the awe-inspiring moment when I calculated that I wouldn’t be that old by the time living on a lunar colony was an option.
Ripped off! (I wasn’t even that greedy, I wasn’t holding out for hot shape-shifters or anything, I just wanted to live on the moon.)
(On balance, I think the unexpected computing and communications technology in the home is a fair trade.)
Damn, do you need ActiveX or something to get that to work? I really want to see it
[edit] Never mind, it’s working now. Must have been a temporary glitch.
No, just Google Earth. Unfortunately the page Struan linked to doesn’t (for me anyway) have the correct link, and the dumbass site uses frames. But if you follow the left-hand navigation link from the front page marked “View in Google Earth”, you can download the little .kml file that will put the 'planes into “My places” in Google Earth. Just enable this, then zoom in and see the little 'planes flying around! Mucho cool.
Cool! Except I can’t get it to work. I do a search (random, then chose a flight at random) at that site, and I click the little Google Earth icon next to the flight I want to see… and it opens up Google Earth with a nice long view of the USA, and no flights in sight… I guess I expected it to rotate the globe so I could at least know what part of the planet the flight was on, but I spun that thing all over and never saw any sign of it. What am I missing?
Dunno Opal, I just checked the “Open ATC Air Traffic” box in “Temporary places”, then zoomed in on Ireland and the UK and there were a bunch of triangles with their flight paths visible. A limited selection, I’d imagine, as there’s suspiciously little traffic around Heathrow.
I zoomed in on the US and got nothing, but then realised that if you double-click the words “Please select the regions you would like to see” it expands out and you get a whole load of options - maybe try messing around with that. A bit counter-intuitive.
On further examination, you can choose “The Americas” and then double-click an individual flight and it will take you right to it. Amazing.
The bit I’m having problems with is recognising the airlines. They have different abbreviations from normal.
Oh BTW, Opal, on reading your post I see you’re attempting to access the stuff from the website. I have no idea if this works or not, but I’m accessing it from “My Places” within Google Earth and it’s working.
That’s odd I can’t see any North American traffic, but I can see some in South America. It is a hobbyist thing so perhaps no-one has a working feed in the US running right now.
However, if you go here there’s more US flights than you can shake a stick at.
