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 Boggy Man wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

Earth001 wrote:
Robots

Err, lol? You do realize that we have robots, right?

I think he means the good kind of robots, the anatomically correct ones that look like Natalie Portman.

GET OUT OF MY MIND YOU MINDWIZARD!!!

Be grateful, my generation were promised hoverboards....

 filbert wrote:
Be grateful, my generation were promised hoverboards....

First clue that was not going to happen..white hair wigs with curls are still being worn in government

 Slarg232 wrote:


Nations no longer are racing to do anything other than not blow the crap out of the planet. Say what you want about the Cold War, it was the only "War" in history that actually lead to scientific/technological progress. 

IIRC, WW1 produced superglue, tanks, submachineguns, and either antibiotics or dephibilators or maybe both.
WW2 produced better tanks, aircraft, warships, guns including personnel sized MGs, basic assault rifles, modern rounds with the explosives contain in the casing with the round, and most importantly, beyond all else, Nuclear power. Be it for bombs or power, a massive discover.
Vietnam produced Napalm and many years later resulted in Apocalypse now.


Wars throughout the middle ages produced technological breakthroughs by the dozens. Chainmail armour, arrows to pierce the armour, plate mail to resist them, firearms to break them open. Cannons, siege towers and catapults to open up the castles which were in themselves massive architectural breakthroughs.

The fact is, war drives innovation.faster than anything else.

I was so set for 3rd Impact. I had popcorn and everything.

They have one year left to get the hover bords working or I'm going to sue some one!

When I was 20, Germany was TWO countries, and The USSR was one great big concatenation of member states where everyone hated their neighbours but "just got on with it" because to not do so meant disappearing.

A year later, Germany was ONE country and the USSR had started its slide into becoming the 26 1/2 separate conflicting member states.

Whilst certain "mega" corporations have arisen, it did not herald he arrival of a distopian non-apocalyptic future where everyone wore mirrorshades indoors at night.

I think things have become much more money orientated. A good example of that is Concorde: it's kind of sad that in the 1970s they had a supersonic passenger plane, yet in 2014 that's all gone because it isn't 'economically viable'. Achievements used to be important to people, now everything is measured in money.

People are also a big obstacle. Only yesterday I read an argument on here about the value of scientific research. I remember having similar arguments in 2011 when the large hadron collider was in the news for costing 7 billion. People were complaining about how that money could be better spent on something 'useful', apparently unaware of how much money gets blown on things like the Olympics, or just disappears into corporate pockets. Scientific research is one of the few things that we do actually get value from. And I swear I'm going to punch the next idiot who comes at me with a badly formulated moon landing conspiracy theory.

I think people are heading for extinction. Not because of nuclear war. Just because we're too petty to build a future for ourselves. We're just going to sit around forever squabbling over things like Palestine and Obamacare instead of making progress. Eventually something is going to come along and wipe us out. My bet is on volcano.

 Smacks wrote:
Achievements used to be important to people,

They still are. It's just that achievements cost money and the people with money tend to like money more than achievements that may or may not happen after they've spent a lot of their money.

now everything is measured in money.

Everything has always been about money since ever. Even before money was invented it was about 'money.'

Only yesterday I read an argument on here about the value of scientific research.

You should read all the anti-intellectual crap they were saying in the 60's. And the 50's. And the 20's. And the 10's. And ever.

Just because we're too petty to build a future for ourselves.

So business as usual

Notice everyone using their Debit/Credit more then using actual money

 Jihadin wrote:
Notice everyone using their Debit/Credit more then using actual money

In America*

 Soladrin wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Notice everyone using their Debit/Credit more then using actual money

In America*

Edited for correction

Thought you were French Sol

 Smacks wrote:
I think things have become much more money orientated. A good example of that is Concorde: it's kind of sad that in the 1970s they had a supersonic passenger plane, yet in 2014 that's all gone because it isn't 'economically viable'. Achievements used to be important to people, now everything is measured in money.

No, that's not really a good example. The Concorde didn't represent any major scientific discoveries, it was just a straightforward application of well-understood technology. The only reason for it to exist at all was as a business investment, so once it ceased to be profitable and eventually operated at too much of a loss to justify the prestige value it was retired.

I'm still dissapointed that with all the build up y2k didn't happen.

 Bullockist wrote:
I'm still dissapointed that with all the build up y2k didn't happen.

Im only 20, but I was 5-6 during 1999 and I remember one day after playing power rangers some kid started talking about in the holidays how planes are gonna fall out of the sky. We were all secretly scared during that new year for fear of falling planes.

Years later I learnt about Y2K a lot more, and how it was pretty much 2012 thing.

Funnily enough, recently we had to update some of the DOS system programs that havent been used to accommodate the post year 2000 date format recently.

Earth001 wrote:
I am 20 and I like to read/watch a lot of sci fi things. As I was reading a blog called paleofuture I noticed that many people in the 20th century had made predictions about what the future will look like in the year 2000 or the 21st century. They imagined things like Flying Cars, Jetpacks, Robots, Interplanetary Travel, Undersea and moon colonies, domed cities, food pills, 150 year life spans, and so on in the next 50 to 100 years. I would like to know why did that world of tomorrow never make it to reality?


I have noticed that there have been some minor changes in our time line such as: Computers, the Internet, Video Games, Smartphones and Tablets, Hybrid Cars, HDTVs, Burj Kalifa, a black president, no segregation, no USSR, and that is about it.


But I am stil waiting on my cool future that the 40s,50s, and 60s imagine to arrive. Will these things ever come?

The biggest reason we didn't get those specific things was because the people predicting those things didn't know why those things would be insanely difficult to achieve OR would really serve little practical purpose.

Flying Cars: Its tough to build something as small as a car which can both achieve sufficient lift while also carrying a comparable amount of people, and anything which can does so with incredible inefficiency. Ultimately, the wheel is a pretty darn efficient invention.

Jet Packs: Same problems with flying cars.

Robots: One word, energy storage. Batteries are the biggest thing holding back so many different things we could do. In cases where we don't have that issue we can actually build robots. They assemble cars and so much more. Whats preventing them from being every household's maids and butlers is battery life.

Interplanetary Travel: Not a ton is holding us back besides having more important things to do on Earth. With a little focus we could easily develop engines capable of reasonable travel times to Mars, but then we have another problem that going there doesn't yet have any tangible benefits. Mars doesn't have significant resources or anything that would make trips pay for themselves(important for long term viability) as far as we know.

Undersea and Moon Colonies: No need for them. We're not about to run out of space on land or Earth, so we'd need another reason(such as space resources) to build permanent human habitation on the moon. Undersea cities are simply impractical when we've got plenty of dry land to build on.

Domed cities: No reason to build said domes. Domes to hold a stable environment would only be necessary on another planet with a hostile environment.

Food pills: Again, no reason for them. Plus eating is actually an enjoyable activity, why take all the fun out of it?

150 year life spans: It appears that, even if someone is totally healthy, we as a species have a hard lifespan cap. Anyway, the life expectancy number is still rising and predicted to be over 100 shortly.


Basically, all those promises were just made by people with active imaginations and ignorance of the limiting factors that would be discovered in the next 50 years. They were good predictions based on prior trends, but ultimately they were just wrong.


Anyway, some of the things you listed are big freaking deals. The internet for one. Nobody seems to have predicted anything remotely resembling what its become. Computers have also come a long way. Even beyond what Star Trek has.

Speaking of Star Trek, tons of their mundane tech actually exists. Cell Phones do far more than their silly little Communicators(which are just glorified radios/transponders)

Also: the hovercars 'n' crap -- that wasn't a future we were ever seriously promised. It was a future some people imagined. What we got instead was the future other people invented -- which is a much harder job -- but this future is also, on the whole, more awesome.

 d-usa wrote:
But if we don't eat we don't poop. And I love pooping!

While arguing with strangers on the internet!

Hey we've got antibiotic-resistant bacteria now, so that's something.

 Talizvar wrote:


I remember looking at a Turbo Grafx 16 game system (1987) and thinking that it would be cool if a whole music album would fit in one of those cartridges (about size of domino).

I like to work these things out in reverse. How many floppy disks would you need to back up your hard drive, or even just your phone? Which room of your house would you give up to store them all? All my music fits on a Micro SD card the size of a stamp.

How many of us almost been killed by the spaghetti cord of a telephone..the 4' one that's been stretched to 12'

I remember those!

 Deadshot wrote:

 Slarg232 wrote:


Nations no longer are racing to do anything other than not blow the crap out of the planet. Say what you want about the Cold War, it was the only "War" in history that actually lead to scientific/technological progress. 

IIRC, WW1 produced superglue, tanks, submachineguns, and either antibiotics or dephibilators or maybe both.
WW2 produced better tanks, aircraft, warships, guns including personnel sized MGs, basic assault rifles, modern rounds with the explosives contain in the casing with the round, and most importantly, beyond all else, Nuclear power. Be it for bombs or power, a massive discover.
Vietnam produced Napalm and many years later resulted in Apocalypse now.


Wars throughout the middle ages produced technological breakthroughs by the dozens. Chainmail armour, arrows to pierce the armour, plate mail to resist them, firearms to break them open. Cannons, siege towers and catapults to open up the castles which were in themselves massive architectural breakthroughs.

The fact is, war drives innovation.faster than anything else.

I'm pretty sure Superglue was invented for the Vietnam war not WW1

It was WW2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate

oooh, I got one, where are the skytowers that go into space to launch space ships from, they would be cool.

I also notice science tends to follow sci fi fiction, is that a strange coincidence?

We Still haven't found a stargate near Jupiter or even a magnetic anomaly on the moon, Clarke lied!!

 Hlaine Larkin mk2 wrote:
We Still haven't found a stargate near Jupiter or even a magnetic anomaly on the moon, Clarke lied!!

What about William Gibson! we are still jacking off instead of jacking in.

When i the 80's the threat of Nuclear was real, i was really scared in my youth , because we lived about 20 miles away from the American Awacs base and hearing big jets with different sounds than normal was always frightening. Watching the day after and (the original) red dawn didn't help to lift my spirits.

Complaining about the lack of robots pretty much sums up the OP's thinking perfectly. There will probably be more robots on earth than people in the next year or so, if it hasn't already happened. But we ignore that because all these technologies are amazing when we dream about them, when we actually get them they quickly become part of the mundane, taken for granted and only seen for their limitations.

I drove to work this morning in a car, hurtling along at 100kms an hour. A journey that might have taken a few days 150 years ago was done in 40 minutes, and I throughout this miracle of modern technology all I saw was the traffic and idiot drivers around me.

It's why Alien is such a great sci-fi movie - because those guys are hurtling through space thanks to extraordinary technology, but to the crew its utterly mundane, something to be tolerated so they can get home to their families. There's a depth to that writing that is missed in so many sci-fi films that mistakenly think that wondrous technologies will continue to be seen as wondrous once they're introduced.

 Jihadin wrote:
The movie Red Dawn (THE ORIGINAL!!) had a good vibe of realm of possibility to it back then

It really didn't.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Deadshot wrote:
Vietnam produced Napalm and many years later resulted in Apocalypse now.

Napalm is a WWII development.

The fact is, war drives innovation.faster than anything else.

Nah, not in the slightest. You might see some ramping up of spending on tech that means some tech is developed sooner than might have happened otherwise, but elsewhere you'll see lots of tech projects get dropped because the needs of the war are so much more pressing. And then you've got the waste and destruction of the actual war. The result is that people might be able to rattle off a nice list of technologies that were used during the war, but they don't realise that technologies are constantly being developed, and the real result on progress is a massive delay in new tech after the war, as resources are piled in to reconstruction, and scientific networks have to be slowly pieced back together.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Smacks wrote:
I think things have become much more money orientated. A good example of that is Concorde: it's kind of sad that in the 1970s they had a supersonic passenger plane, yet in 2014 that's all gone because it isn't 'economically viable'. Achievements used to be important to people, now everything is measured in money.

Why shouldn't a high end passenger airline survive on economic realities alone? Are you arguing that the public purse should subsidise rapid passenger travel for the rich?

I think people are heading for extinction. Not because of nuclear war. Just because we're too petty to build a future for ourselves.

We've always been petty, and we've always squabbled. And yet we've built a society of amazing complexity with incredible thousands of technologies that are regularly taken for granted. I see no reason that will change.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Flying Cars: Its tough to build something as small as a car which can both achieve sufficient lift while also carrying a comparable amount of people, and anything which can does so with incredible inefficiency. Ultimately, the wheel is a pretty darn efficient invention.

They've had flying cars that can perform a commute to work in a fraction of time it takes a car for decades. It isn't the tech. It isn't even the cost (though the models built so far all cost a silly amount). The bigger problem with flying cars is with the amateur who is supposed to own and operate the thing. Think about how much work goes in to maintaining a modern aircraft - checks and double checks of every part of the plane, in part because of the scale of the machine, but mostly because if something goes wrong that plane drops out of the sky.

Now consider the average car - fueled up once a week, trip to the mechanic once a year (twice if you're good) and tires changed pretty much as rarely as possible. Because if the car breaks down you just pull over, you don't start dropping from the sky.

And that's before we start talking about the issues with driver competence, and how terrible an idea it is to put the people who currently drive our cars - barely trained, barely paying attention - in to flying cars.

 Peregrine wrote:
No, that's not really a good example. The Concorde didn't represent any major scientific discoveries, it was just a straightforward application of well-understood technology. The only reason for it to exist at all was as a business investment, so once it ceased to be profitable and eventually operated at too much of a loss to justify the prestige value it was retired.

No one said it had to represent new scientific discoveries. Half the things we see in sci-fi films would just be a straight forward application of well-understood technology. Things like a base on the moon, a tunnel under the Atlantic, even flying cars and jet-packs. They are all possible with today's technology, they just aren't economical. Also you have to remember that Aerospatiale and BOAC weren't private companies, they were state owned. Governments tend to be more interested in prestige ventures.

 sebster wrote:
Why shouldn't a high end passenger airline survive on economic realities alone? Are you arguing that the public purse should subsidise rapid passenger travel for the rich?

No I'm not, and I think the requirement for high speed travel has become somewhat diminished since the advent of things like email and video conferencing. However I think there is some slight of hand at play when you invoke 'the rich' in a future that doesn't put money first.

We've always been petty, and we've always squabbled. And yet we've built a society of amazing complexity with incredible thousands of technologies.

Only because of handful of people have dragged us there. If not for them we'd probably all still be living in caves, flinging gak at each other (in fact, having lived in a social housing project as a teenager, I can attest that it was a lot like that). Which was my point: people are an obstacle.

I've given a lot of thought to technology being taken for granted. I think it's more complex than people just being ungrateful. A lot of gripes about technology are fairly aimed at things being badly organized, inconsiderate and generally stupid. For example, I regularly fly with Easyjet. Easyjet charge a small fortune for checked luggage. This means that every passenger has the maximum amount of carry-on luggage. So we end up with a situation were the bulk of the luggage is in the passenger compartment instead of the hold, where it is supposed to be. This is annoying and hazardous. To compensate for this they sometimes ask you if you want to check your bag for free, which of course you don't because all your stuff for the flight is in there, and it will just delay you leaving the airport. The whole system is badly thought through, and it's not the fault of the technology. Even if it was a rowing boat, it would still be stupid.

Edit: reworded

 sebster wrote:
how terrible an idea it is to put the people who currently drive our cars - barely trained, barely paying attention - in to flying cars.

This. Flying a plane is HARD. Imagine trying to park your car while going 65 mph with your passenger constantly trying to turn the steering wheel in the wrong direction. And that's just a routine landing, add in emergency situations and it only gets worse. Flying cars are never going to become common until we have an autopilot that can handle everything (including emergency situations, making decisions about bad weather, etc) and the owner is not allowed to fly their car. Anything less than that would be a horrifying slaughter.

 Smacks wrote:
No one said it had to represent new scientific discoveries.

But that's what you were complaining about, this idea that we're sacrificing science and progress in a misguided lust for profit. While this is a valid concern it doesn't have anything to do with things like the Concorde. You don't get to talk about how much society sucks when your example is a useless toy whose retirement was only mourned by a handful of plane lovers.

However I think there is some slight of hand at play when you invoke 'the rich' in a future that doesn't put money first.

And if that future doesn't put money first there will be no need for the Concorde. Its sole reason for existing was to be an expensive toy for the wealthy, it had no practical value. Remove the emphasis on accumulating wealth and showing it off to everyone around you and you'll find that conventional airliners work just fine and are a lot more efficient.