It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be just li

It's quite interesting to look at this from a cultural point of view. Most interesting to me is the assumption that the transportation of today would be just like the centralized system of then, only bigger and better. There's been such a massive movement toward individualization over the past century over the past century that it seems completely natural. We've gone from semaphore towers transmitting a few messages over a single line for the central government, to a few telegraph operators sending and receiving scores of messages for corporations and individuals, to citizens renting standard-model telephones from AT&T, to owning one of a bajillion landline phone models and having cellphones with customized ringtones as a personality item. While anyone who's seen a horse -- heck, anyone who's ever walked -- is familiar the concept of a transportation device that moves according to your whims, it would have taken a great deal of insight to see these racing curiosities called "automobiles" as a potential return to that model in an age where increasing progress in transport was synonymous with expensive machines incorporating more and more advances the only conceivable way to make their use efficient was to make it centralized. (I've heard the first subway line in New York changed a three-hour trip into a 10-minute one.) It's just like how most '50s and '60s sci-fi ('70s, even!) foresaw computers as becoming ever-bigger, ever larger undertakings. I know Isaac Asimov, in his 1958 (?) short story "The Last Question," had computers initially growing to hundreds of square miles for a few centuries before taking a sudden leap down to the size of a family-owned ship, before transitioning again to the centralized-model of having galactic and universal computers, even though miniaturization happened along the way. If he made the connection during that time period that miniaturization would happen continuously rather than discretely and might cause individual-owned computers to be present for a larger chunk of history, he made it in one of his hundreds of short-stories I haven't read. Of course, it is expected that we will, not too long from now, reach a fundamental limit on component miniaturization and revert to building larger, centralized computers, which highlights that we should not conceive of the old model of centralization as wrong, just wrong for the present time period. Naturally, people back then conceived of advances solving the aging problem, but it's interesting electricity was conceived as the vehicle that would deliver it. They foresaw miracle inventions, and assumed it would come from electricity, just as we assume future advancements will come from nanotech, or biotech, or Ajax. It was their buzzword of the day. While it's much more reasonable that de-aging will come from nanotech or biotech since it's easily conceivable how those would create a relatively straightforward mechanism for achieving that, I think we'd do well to remember this example if we start to point to anything well-known today as the solver of more diverse problems.