10 ms·

Today's real life is yesterday's science fiction.

160 points by raldi 15y ago

jeggers5 15y ago
Loved reading that, especially the comments. Really makes you think how far we've come over the years, and we haven't really noticed. Suppose it's been so gradual that it's hard to. A cure for cancer would really be a massive milestone for me in the future (and maybe teleportation!)
- Vivtek 15y ago
  I dunno, my stepfather just finished having prostate cancer. The "cure" is getting here, bit by bit.
  - jeggers5 15y ago
    That's fantastic :D ye hopefully we'll have a definitive cure in a few years, even for the people who only notice they have cancer when it's in its later stages. Of course by the time we have a cure, there will be some other disease we have to deal with :P
    - jeggers5 15y ago
      wait, by 'finished' do you mean he died? because I didn't mean to say that's fantastic at all I assumed you mean he was cured?
burgerbrain 15y ago
I enjoy on occasion pointing out to people how the worlds most popular drink is a rather acidic stimulant infused with CO2 that comes in pressurized aluminium canisters. The present is weird.
- raldi 15y ago
  How about when Arthur Dent tried to explain tea to the ship's computer, and it was baffled that he wanted the flavor of boiling water poured over leaves and mixed with a fluid squirted out of the bottom of a cow?
  - rajasharan 15y ago
    The computer was not baffled but took up the whole ship's computing resources to make the tea there by causing the ship to go out of control. On a second thought yeah it was baffled.
- cantbecool 15y ago
  Coffee?
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    I was thinking Coca Cola, but coffee is pretty weird too :) I don't really have much to back up "most popular beverage", but I recall reading somewhere that the phrase "coca cola" is the most universally recognized fragment of speech in the world. Technically I suppose water would be more "popular", but different languages tend to have their own words for that.
  - shii 15y ago
    What kind of coffee are you drinking that comes in aluminum canisters? Genuinely interested.
    - matthewcieplak 15y ago
      UCC Coffee? http://www.amazon.com/UCC-Original-Coffee-Milk-11-3-Ounce/dp/B0041CH3Z8 http://www.amazon.com/UCC-Original-Coffee-Milk-11-3-Ounce/dp...
    - megablast 15y ago
      Very common in Japan, where you can buy all manor of drinks from vending machines on the side of the road, everywhere you go.
JohnnyBrown 15y ago
I hate how HN is turning into Reddit.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
People ask me why I like to keep around some old computers. My response is that you can't see where you are going unless you know where you have been. This is my version of 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it' (or the more modern 'repatent it')
redthrowaway 15y ago
I hate this submission, but only because it lead my to use a proxy to bypass "reddit.com" in my hosts file. Now that I've experienced how easy it is, I'm sure I'll be going back. So much for productivity.
- starpilot 15y ago
  Looks like you should add HN to your hosts file as well.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    We've already established that it does no good.
    - sorbus 15y ago
      In that case, either add the proxy to your hosts file, find the willpower to resist distraction, or establish a system of incentives to stop you from getting distracted (unblock Reddit from your hosts file, then write a program to, for every minute you spend on Reddit, donate a dollar to a charity that you hate).
cowboyhero 15y ago
It's a good post and it reminds me a little bit of those old tv commercials from Qwest and AT&T about how you'll be able to "watch any movie ever made in any language" in a dumpy roadside motel or 'send a fax from the beach' that were run in the 1990s. But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network. There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs). There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces). Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  Yes, and running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other over and over. Everything is incremental. It's how we get from "here to there" in every conceivable sense, but it's ok to step back sometimes and marvel at how far we've come. Just because we're not colonizing planets doesn't diminish all of our other accomplishments. The glass is half full. I'm certain of it.
  - wging 15y ago
    This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
- raldi 15y ago
  I'm surprised you don't think computers have changed much. To me, sitting at a desk staring at a big CRT while using dialup AOL is a completely different experience from sitting in bed with a laptop or on the couch with an iPad watching YouTube over wifi.
- hnhg 15y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted so savagely. You've just set the bar high. I do disagree with you, though. The internet and its potential still amazes me...
- 15y ago
Dove 15y ago
Yeah, well. I still want my flying car.
- dennisgorelik 15y ago
  Flying cars would come in 4 more years (according to "Back to the Future"). It's more likely though that instead of flying cars in 2015 we would get self-driven cars.
to3m 15y ago
Must admit, the example story did not impress. Today is not exactly science fiction, compared to 1995, more like a better version of it that ran with some stuff. You'd have to go a bit further back, I think, for today to truly appear to be science fiction. Putting myself in my 1995 shoes, on reading this story, I'd probably have sniffed and gone, "Surely there will be something better in the future than a Psion Series 3 with a colour TFT (like on my dad's old laptop) that runs Dragon Dictate and links up to GPS? This story is so unimaginative. "The author can't even be bothered to invent new musicians. Trent Reznor! Hahaha. Like he'll still be popular. What next, the Rolling Stones? They should do what they did in Dune - set the story in 20011, then make shit up. Much less embarrassing. "Besides, it isn't even vaguely realistic. Americans... in hatchbacks?"
- to3m 15y ago
  To save my post from seeming too sarky, my 1990 self would probably have been impressed. 1992 1/2... maybe. 1995... not really. In 1995, I had a pocket computer. I had heard of GPS. I had used Dragon Dictate. My dad's OLD laptop was good enough to play Doom on, using the inbuilt screen. My mother had a mobile phone, my father had a mobile phone. (Not as practical as a carphone, but they had them nonetheless.) From my perspective... 1995-2011 was hardly science fiction, though of course there's always time for (say) 1996-2012 to count ;) Progress, yes. "Science fiction"? Well... personally, I set the bar for that rather higher.
  - ugh 15y ago
    Well, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES. You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical. — † Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.
Vivtek 15y ago
I've been having lots of 21st-century moments lately, yes. This illustrates them rather well.
shahan 15y ago
Good post, but it would have been difficult to write without including IT (or media). You'd have to use the year 1795 or something. There are probably lots of fields today where Aristotle, if he would be brought back to life, would go "meh". (But he would think it was damn cool that he could be brought back to life.)
- raldi 15y ago
  What fields do you feel are stagnant?
- omaranto 15y ago
  I don't know about other fields, but math has made amazing progress. In my undergraduate studies I couldn't really tell because aside from some cute but not overly impressive graph theory I didn't learn anything more recent than the 1930s (some basic algebraic topology, a little functional analysis, some ergodic theory, some differential topology, ...). Most of the stuff I learned was, of course, much older. But know that I know some of what mathematicians have been up to since then I am constantly amazed.
paulnelligan 15y ago
16 years from now - I'm guessing we may be seeing the start of an energy revolution ... which will be even more significant than the communications and data revolution which just happened. Also, a lot more progress will have been made in the area of genetics and medicine ... exciting times!
russell 15y ago
I marvel how the world changed during my mother's lifetime, 1910-1999. Her family was the first to get electricity in the town and her uncle was the first to get a car. It died after a couple of thousand miles. No one had told him to change the oil. Airplanes were in their infancy. If you wanted to go to Europe, you took a steamer, but of course no one she knew ever did anything like that. In her lifetime she saw transcontinental telephones, radio, antibiotics (she was a nurse), nuclear weapons, airliners, television, the interstate highway system, 4 states added to the union, a man on the moon, computers, and the internet, although she never did try that. I started reading science fiction in the 1960s and the authors didnt come close to reality. Heinlein wrote a novel that featured an automatic drafting machine, but it was a robot, not autodesk. The societies were often quite dystopian, American dictatorships or theocracies. An the flying cars, automated households, and colonies on mars never came to pass.
- candeira 15y ago
  I tell a similar story for my grandfather, who lived pretty much the same years as your mother. When my grandfather was born, his father's business was a horse changing station for the Madrid-Bilbao stagecoach. Eventually my great-grandfather sent his older kid (my grandfather's brother) to France to study cars at Renault, so he could turn the business into an automobile repair shop and service station. In the 70s my grandfather would fly to the US on a Jumbo jet. From stagecoach to trasatlantic flight in one generation. Heinlein's novel: I think you are talking of Door Into Summer. It also contained a precursor to the Roomba. It was called something like the Mechanical Maid, but the description is of a vacuum-cleaning creeper.
te_chris 15y ago
One of the things that really gets me is the fact that we're now disappointed when we go to a place and they don't have a way for me to open up my nicely designed aluminium computer and just browse the internet with nothing more than a password. And then further than that, that we're getting to a point where that is beginning to matter less and less thanks to advances in cellular technology. When I stop to think about what we can do with cell phones and their networks it's just mind boggling - from what the cellphone can do, to the fact that you press a button, and suddenly my laptop and my friends are browsing broadband internet sourced through my cellphone (which has a processor core 3 times more powerful than the machine that my dad paid $5000 NZD for in 1998 - which was super top of the line, PII 300, 3d accelerator, video capture and EVERYTHING!). Proliferation of wireless and cellular technology is just so damn cool.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  I tap a button on the side of a pendant sized device and say the name of the person I want to talk to and it happens. Not quite Trek, but damn close.
kleiba 15y ago
And I didn't even manage to cram in, "Technology exists that can let anyone, anywhere, listen to any song or watch any movie ever made, instantly and in excellent quality [...] - well, I'm glad you didn't, because it is not true, at least not if you live in Germany. Here, it's more like: "This content is not available in your country." So much about anywhere...
- rmc 15y ago
  Piracy allows you to do it. I know it's not legal, but you can easily and quickly, and for free get (almost) any TV show, film, or music album (and soon, book) rapidly via P2P networks. In '95 piracy meant buying dodgy low quality VHS tapes from the back of someone's car in a car boot sale. The quality and selection was no where near as good. Now you can pirate the TV show about 1 hour after they are first shown and watch them before they are aired in your country. You can stream loads of sports events as they happen live. You're an american in germany and want to watch the superbowl live? no problem!
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
On one hand the present is so strange as to be beyond sci-fi. On the other hand, most everything he mentions is internally-directed tech: computers get smarter and we are more and more self-absorbed in them. "Big" sic-fi, like jet packs and field propulsion are still nowhere in sight. So yes, if you want to plug a computer into your neocortex in 20 years and become one with the collective, life is looking awesomely like sic-fi. But if you want to visit the moons of Saturn, or have a Mr. Fusion power your time-machine car, it ain't happening.
- rubinelli 15y ago
  Well, we do have our jet packs http://martinjetpack.com/ http://martinjetpack.com/ and flying cars http://www.moller.com/ http://www.moller.com/ Maybe we just need a successor to concrete to start a new age of huge civil engineering feats -- I'm still hoping for the space elevator.
- Murkin 15y ago
  The strange thing is how some things took a huge leap (3g Internet on a cigarette pack sized computer with GPS) while others are stagnant (my car is, comparatively, barely changed). The trick is to guess what will stay the same and what will jump eons forward. They have been speaking about nano-tube based building materials, alternative fuel and better batteries for decades now. And then you have Kinect..
  - gte910h 15y ago
    My car gets 50-55 MPG and could auto-route me places if I want. It starts when I shove a piece of plastic in in and push a button. It makes no noise below 10mph, later models of this car make no noise below higher speeds. My car has changed loads.
    - robinduckett 15y ago
      I drive an Audi A1 Petrol with no electric hybrid motor and get more than 55 MPG, which begs the question, why do you drive your car like a maniac? P.S. A friend of mine drives a Citroen C1 Petrol and gets 70MPG regularly, sure it's a tiny car, but still, I don't see how 50-55 MPG is so mind blowing.
xradionut 15y ago
I've read a good chunk of science fiction over the years, but the most accurate Cassandra I've talk to in my life was my aunt and her colleges whom were historians, futurists and history profs. Many of the recent big changes in the national and international economies and political environment were discussed/forecast by them over two decades ago. And a few science fiction writers have gotten some of these trends right, while failing on the little details like gadgets. Yesterday's historian is today's prophet. Instead of tracking the evolution of gadgets, tools and tools, it's more important to notice the social and political changes in one's lifetime. Many of those have been impacted by technology, not always a positive way when viewed on a macro-scale. While technology advances, basically civilization/society is still the same bunch of greedy primates that existed by the Tiber over two millennium ago.
v21 15y ago
The difference between things that came true, and things that are still as far off as ever seems to come down to how much energy they take to do, and (which is much the same) whether the advance depends on Moore's law or not. Tiny computers that auto-translate - not much energy, just raw computing power Jetpacks - lots of energy, applied in a big dumb way.

160 points by raldi 15y ago

Loved reading that, especially the comments. Really makes you think how far we've come over the years, and we haven't really noticed. Suppose it's been so gradual that it's hard to. A cure for cancer would really be a massive milestone for me in the future (and maybe teleportation!)

Vivtek 15y ago
I dunno, my stepfather just finished having prostate cancer. The "cure" is getting here, bit by bit.
- jeggers5 15y ago
  That's fantastic :D ye hopefully we'll have a definitive cure in a few years, even for the people who only notice they have cancer when it's in its later stages. Of course by the time we have a cure, there will be some other disease we have to deal with :P
  - jeggers5 15y ago
    wait, by 'finished' do you mean he died? because I didn't mean to say that's fantastic at all I assumed you mean he was cured?

burgerbrain 15y ago

I enjoy on occasion pointing out to people how the worlds most popular drink is a rather acidic stimulant infused with CO2 that comes in pressurized aluminium canisters. The present is weird.

raldi 15y ago
How about when Arthur Dent tried to explain tea to the ship's computer, and it was baffled that he wanted the flavor of boiling water poured over leaves and mixed with a fluid squirted out of the bottom of a cow?
- rajasharan 15y ago
  The computer was not baffled but took up the whole ship's computing resources to make the tea there by causing the ship to go out of control. On a second thought yeah it was baffled.
cantbecool 15y ago
Coffee?
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I was thinking Coca Cola, but coffee is pretty weird too :) I don't really have much to back up "most popular beverage", but I recall reading somewhere that the phrase "coca cola" is the most universally recognized fragment of speech in the world. Technically I suppose water would be more "popular", but different languages tend to have their own words for that.
- shii 15y ago
  What kind of coffee are you drinking that comes in aluminum canisters? Genuinely interested.
  - matthewcieplak 15y ago
    UCC Coffee? http://www.amazon.com/UCC-Original-Coffee-Milk-11-3-Ounce/dp/B0041CH3Z8 http://www.amazon.com/UCC-Original-Coffee-Milk-11-3-Ounce/dp...
  - megablast 15y ago
    Very common in Japan, where you can buy all manor of drinks from vending machines on the side of the road, everywhere you go.

JohnnyBrown 15y ago

I hate how HN is turning into Reddit.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

People ask me why I like to keep around some old computers. My response is that you can't see where you are going unless you know where you have been. This is my version of 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it' (or the more modern 'repatent it')

redthrowaway 15y ago

I hate this submission, but only because it lead my to use a proxy to bypass "reddit.com" in my hosts file. Now that I've experienced how easy it is, I'm sure I'll be going back. So much for productivity.

starpilot 15y ago
Looks like you should add HN to your hosts file as well.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  We've already established that it does no good.
  - sorbus 15y ago
    In that case, either add the proxy to your hosts file, find the willpower to resist distraction, or establish a system of incentives to stop you from getting distracted (unblock Reddit from your hosts file, then write a program to, for every minute you spend on Reddit, donate a dollar to a charity that you hate).

cowboyhero 15y ago

It's a good post and it reminds me a little bit of those old tv commercials from Qwest and AT&T about how you'll be able to "watch any movie ever made in any language" in a dumpy roadside motel or 'send a fax from the beach' that were run in the 1990s. But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network. There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs). There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces). Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.

bradleyland 15y ago
Yes, and running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other over and over. Everything is incremental. It's how we get from "here to there" in every conceivable sense, but it's ok to step back sometimes and marvel at how far we've come. Just because we're not colonizing planets doesn't diminish all of our other accomplishments. The glass is half full. I'm certain of it.
- wging 15y ago
  This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
raldi 15y ago
I'm surprised you don't think computers have changed much. To me, sitting at a desk staring at a big CRT while using dialup AOL is a completely different experience from sitting in bed with a laptop or on the couch with an iPad watching YouTube over wifi.
hnhg 15y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted so savagely. You've just set the bar high. I do disagree with you, though. The internet and its potential still amazes me...
15y ago

Dove 15y ago

Yeah, well. I still want my flying car.

dennisgorelik 15y ago
Flying cars would come in 4 more years (according to "Back to the Future"). It's more likely though that instead of flying cars in 2015 we would get self-driven cars.

to3m 15y ago

Must admit, the example story did not impress. Today is not exactly science fiction, compared to 1995, more like a better version of it that ran with some stuff. You'd have to go a bit further back, I think, for today to truly appear to be science fiction. Putting myself in my 1995 shoes, on reading this story, I'd probably have sniffed and gone, "Surely there will be something better in the future than a Psion Series 3 with a colour TFT (like on my dad's old laptop) that runs Dragon Dictate and links up to GPS? This story is so unimaginative. "The author can't even be bothered to invent new musicians. Trent Reznor! Hahaha. Like he'll still be popular. What next, the Rolling Stones? They should do what they did in Dune - set the story in 20011, then make shit up. Much less embarrassing. "Besides, it isn't even vaguely realistic. Americans... in hatchbacks?"

to3m 15y ago
To save my post from seeming too sarky, my 1990 self would probably have been impressed. 1992 1/2... maybe. 1995... not really. In 1995, I had a pocket computer. I had heard of GPS. I had used Dragon Dictate. My dad's OLD laptop was good enough to play Doom on, using the inbuilt screen. My mother had a mobile phone, my father had a mobile phone. (Not as practical as a carphone, but they had them nonetheless.) From my perspective... 1995-2011 was hardly science fiction, though of course there's always time for (say) 1996-2012 to count ;) Progress, yes. "Science fiction"? Well... personally, I set the bar for that rather higher.
- ugh 15y ago
  Well, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES. You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical. — † Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.

Vivtek 15y ago

I've been having lots of 21st-century moments lately, yes. This illustrates them rather well.

shahan 15y ago

Good post, but it would have been difficult to write without including IT (or media). You'd have to use the year 1795 or something. There are probably lots of fields today where Aristotle, if he would be brought back to life, would go "meh". (But he would think it was damn cool that he could be brought back to life.)

raldi 15y ago
What fields do you feel are stagnant?
omaranto 15y ago
I don't know about other fields, but math has made amazing progress. In my undergraduate studies I couldn't really tell because aside from some cute but not overly impressive graph theory I didn't learn anything more recent than the 1930s (some basic algebraic topology, a little functional analysis, some ergodic theory, some differential topology, ...). Most of the stuff I learned was, of course, much older. But know that I know some of what mathematicians have been up to since then I am constantly amazed.

paulnelligan 15y ago

16 years from now - I'm guessing we may be seeing the start of an energy revolution ... which will be even more significant than the communications and data revolution which just happened. Also, a lot more progress will have been made in the area of genetics and medicine ... exciting times!

russell 15y ago

I marvel how the world changed during my mother's lifetime, 1910-1999. Her family was the first to get electricity in the town and her uncle was the first to get a car. It died after a couple of thousand miles. No one had told him to change the oil. Airplanes were in their infancy. If you wanted to go to Europe, you took a steamer, but of course no one she knew ever did anything like that. In her lifetime she saw transcontinental telephones, radio, antibiotics (she was a nurse), nuclear weapons, airliners, television, the interstate highway system, 4 states added to the union, a man on the moon, computers, and the internet, although she never did try that. I started reading science fiction in the 1960s and the authors didnt come close to reality. Heinlein wrote a novel that featured an automatic drafting machine, but it was a robot, not autodesk. The societies were often quite dystopian, American dictatorships or theocracies. An the flying cars, automated households, and colonies on mars never came to pass.

candeira 15y ago
I tell a similar story for my grandfather, who lived pretty much the same years as your mother. When my grandfather was born, his father's business was a horse changing station for the Madrid-Bilbao stagecoach. Eventually my great-grandfather sent his older kid (my grandfather's brother) to France to study cars at Renault, so he could turn the business into an automobile repair shop and service station. In the 70s my grandfather would fly to the US on a Jumbo jet. From stagecoach to trasatlantic flight in one generation. Heinlein's novel: I think you are talking of Door Into Summer. It also contained a precursor to the Roomba. It was called something like the Mechanical Maid, but the description is of a vacuum-cleaning creeper.

te_chris 15y ago

One of the things that really gets me is the fact that we're now disappointed when we go to a place and they don't have a way for me to open up my nicely designed aluminium computer and just browse the internet with nothing more than a password. And then further than that, that we're getting to a point where that is beginning to matter less and less thanks to advances in cellular technology. When I stop to think about what we can do with cell phones and their networks it's just mind boggling - from what the cellphone can do, to the fact that you press a button, and suddenly my laptop and my friends are browsing broadband internet sourced through my cellphone (which has a processor core 3 times more powerful than the machine that my dad paid $5000 NZD for in 1998 - which was super top of the line, PII 300, 3d accelerator, video capture and EVERYTHING!). Proliferation of wireless and cellular technology is just so damn cool.

noonespecial 15y ago
I tap a button on the side of a pendant sized device and say the name of the person I want to talk to and it happens. Not quite Trek, but damn close.

kleiba 15y ago

And I didn't even manage to cram in, "Technology exists that can let anyone, anywhere, listen to any song or watch any movie ever made, instantly and in excellent quality [...] - well, I'm glad you didn't, because it is not true, at least not if you live in Germany. Here, it's more like: "This content is not available in your country." So much about anywhere...

rmc 15y ago
Piracy allows you to do it. I know it's not legal, but you can easily and quickly, and for free get (almost) any TV show, film, or music album (and soon, book) rapidly via P2P networks. In '95 piracy meant buying dodgy low quality VHS tapes from the back of someone's car in a car boot sale. The quality and selection was no where near as good. Now you can pirate the TV show about 1 hour after they are first shown and watch them before they are aired in your country. You can stream loads of sports events as they happen live. You're an american in germany and want to watch the superbowl live? no problem!

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

On one hand the present is so strange as to be beyond sci-fi. On the other hand, most everything he mentions is internally-directed tech: computers get smarter and we are more and more self-absorbed in them. "Big" sic-fi, like jet packs and field propulsion are still nowhere in sight. So yes, if you want to plug a computer into your neocortex in 20 years and become one with the collective, life is looking awesomely like sic-fi. But if you want to visit the moons of Saturn, or have a Mr. Fusion power your time-machine car, it ain't happening.

rubinelli 15y ago
Well, we do have our jet packs http://martinjetpack.com/ http://martinjetpack.com/ and flying cars http://www.moller.com/ http://www.moller.com/ Maybe we just need a successor to concrete to start a new age of huge civil engineering feats -- I'm still hoping for the space elevator.
Murkin 15y ago
The strange thing is how some things took a huge leap (3g Internet on a cigarette pack sized computer with GPS) while others are stagnant (my car is, comparatively, barely changed). The trick is to guess what will stay the same and what will jump eons forward. They have been speaking about nano-tube based building materials, alternative fuel and better batteries for decades now. And then you have Kinect..
- gte910h 15y ago
  My car gets 50-55 MPG and could auto-route me places if I want. It starts when I shove a piece of plastic in in and push a button. It makes no noise below 10mph, later models of this car make no noise below higher speeds. My car has changed loads.
  - robinduckett 15y ago
    I drive an Audi A1 Petrol with no electric hybrid motor and get more than 55 MPG, which begs the question, why do you drive your car like a maniac? P.S. A friend of mine drives a Citroen C1 Petrol and gets 70MPG regularly, sure it's a tiny car, but still, I don't see how 50-55 MPG is so mind blowing.

xradionut 15y ago

I've read a good chunk of science fiction over the years, but the most accurate Cassandra I've talk to in my life was my aunt and her colleges whom were historians, futurists and history profs. Many of the recent big changes in the national and international economies and political environment were discussed/forecast by them over two decades ago. And a few science fiction writers have gotten some of these trends right, while failing on the little details like gadgets. Yesterday's historian is today's prophet. Instead of tracking the evolution of gadgets, tools and tools, it's more important to notice the social and political changes in one's lifetime. Many of those have been impacted by technology, not always a positive way when viewed on a macro-scale. While technology advances, basically civilization/society is still the same bunch of greedy primates that existed by the Tiber over two millennium ago.

v21 15y ago

The difference between things that came true, and things that are still as far off as ever seems to come down to how much energy they take to do, and (which is much the same) whether the advance depends on Moore's law or not. Tiny computers that auto-translate - not much energy, just raw computing power Jetpacks - lots of energy, applied in a big dumb way.