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We really are living in the future... and it happened so fast. It's like on one of those empire games where you research the space age and get access to crazy t
by Uptrenda 4y ago
We really are living in the future... and it happened so fast. It's like on one of those empire games where you research the space age and get access to crazy tech. We are now capable of so many advanced feats. It feels like only a few years ago were primitive compared to today. What will tomorrow have? Personal space ships? Underwater houses? Houses for sale on other planets? Service robots? It's mind blowing...
- dylan604 4y agoThe 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc. They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them =) Houses underwater was a thing they thought were right around the corner as well. It really reads like you just picked up a Scientific American magazine issue from your doctor's office lobby that's from the 50s.
- ben_w 4y ago> Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, You can buy those, they're just expensive to buy, to run, to insure, and to learn how to operate. But you can buy them.
- snovv_crash 4y agoThe future has arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed yet. - William Gibson
- mholm 4y agoAnd soon, it'll be smeared out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - Neal Stephenson
- jjulius 4y agoThey're also, more often than not, far more limited in scope and capabilities than their imaginative 50's counterparts.
- dylan604 4y agoi want my flying car that collapses and folds up into a briefcase like in the Jetsons. parking should be that easy
- garryindiana 4y agoI want tailor made drugs that convince my brain all this exists while in the real world we live docile, simple lives to extend the viability of human habitation on Earth. The material resources do not exist on Earth to switch to EV cars. The idea we’re going to live on Mars is hallucination. Transfer of consciousness to other substrates is far more interesting than literally living out pop culture from the last half of the 1900s.
- WalterBright 4y agoWatch the Jetsons. You'd be surprised at how many of their futuristic gadgets we have today.
- dylan604 4y agoYeah, and, so? We don’t have the briefcase car and that’s what I want. Don’t come with your whataboutisms and try to make me accept less. Your games are transparent!
- lucideer 4y agoParticularly applicable given we also had spaceflight in the 50s...
- Aperocky 4y agoFuturologist back then must have placed almost no importance on the cost of energy. Might be due to the fact that man made energy was quite a new thing and it's getting cheaper quite fast and seemingly boundless. Like Moores law. It ends eventually.
- HPsquared 4y agoThere are still a couple of orders of magnitude within reach, if we can commercialize molten salt reactors. After that, solar power in space (using asteroid or lunar mining) for gargantuan scale.
- AYBABTME 4y agoThe cost of energy would have been less of a problem without nuclear scare.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoThe price of energy dropped continuously and exponentially from 1873-1973, and ~1973 is the start of the "great stagnation". The price of energy recently resumed its exponential cost reduction, but only for those who have access to solar energy. Hopefully those cost reductions result in price reductions for the rest of us soon.
- phpisthebest 4y agoAnyone remember or watch 90's TV Show Seaquest DSV. its timeline had us living in underwater stations by now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jhpankow 4y agoUnfortunately Sealab 2021 was more accurate in predicting the future.
- Loughla 4y agoI was joking with friends, that it appeared that people saw shows like Star Trek and Star Wars, and thought - hey, we can do that. The problem is that politicians and governments saw shows like Idiocracy and Space Balls, and thought - hey, we can do that.
- WalterBright 4y agoStar Trek convinced me that keyboards spit out sparks and smoke and throw you across the room if you type in illogic.
- codebje 4y agoStar Wars is pretty dystopian in every era shown in the movies. Even at the height of the Galactic Republic large areas of the outer rim have people living in poverty and outright slavery. Coruscant appears nice, but a little below the surface criminal gangs are running the place with most of the planet's population never even seeing sunlight. Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoSometimes I wish I could’ve been around to experience that kind of forward-looking optimism. I got a small taste of it in the mid-late 90s, but from the looks of it, 90s futurism was rather tame in comparison.
- KineticLensman 4y agoI'm just old enough to remember the massive optimism associated with the Apollo program (I was a space-obsessed nerd kid). The mid to late 70s though were depressing by comparison, without the rapid cadence of the moonshots.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago.... and in the next decade, I saw the Challenger blow up in an elementary school gymnasium.
- WalterBright 4y ago> They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them I think that styling trend was due to making them look like jet aircraft. The taillights mimicked jet exhaust pipes closely. Even the front grille was often fashioned to look like a turbine intake. Jet engines were some of the coolest, most visible, and most advanced tech in the 50s.
- dylan604 4y agoAnd what to jets do? They fly. QED.
- oceanplexian 4y ago> The 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc. Maybe they were right but a little off on the timeline. For example there was a lot of crazy tech that people thought would take off in the 90s and flopped, but are now a reality (Online shopping, smartphones, electric vehicles).
- IAmGraydon 4y agoIf we don't kill ourselves in the next 100 years, I think the future will be pretty amazing. We're passing through the end stages of the Great Filter currently. This is the part where we're sufficiently advanced to create technologies that can destroy the planet (like nuclear weapons) but not advanced enough to shed our ancient animal instincts of war, conquest and power. I personally do not think we will make it through unless there is a greater power (civilization) looking out for us. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
- wongarsu 4y agoWithin in the next ~100 years we will advance to a state where nuclear weapons taking out one planet won't kill our civilization outright anymore, and within the next 200-500 years we might reach a point where even war across an entire solar system won't be enough. There's the risk that we will develop stronger weapons to match our increasing resilience, but on the other hand in the last 100 years we've made good progress on either outlawing many weapons of mass destruction or at least making their development much harder, so there's hope.
- sam_goody 4y agoIran is getting closer to nuclear weapons, and they sure seem to be dead set on using them. (OT: I do not understand the U.S. policy in this, but surely they are doing everything in their power to prevent that, since this will affect, like, everything. Right?!) And, the tension between the U.S. / NATO vs. Russia / China / Iran / (Brazil ?) has lessened, but it certainly it isn't gone. How optimistic are you?
- wongarsu 4y agoWe went from 4-5 countries getting nuclear weapons in the first 15 years, and an era of about 60 nuclear tests each year in the 30 years after that, to the current era where it's about one country every 10-20 years gaining nuclear weapons and basically no tests happening. I'd say that's a massive improvement. We've also mostly stopped with firebombing, and have seriously dialed back the chemical and biological weapons that were much more popular in the WWI/WWII era.
- tediousdemise 4y ago[flagged]
- franky47 4y agoIf you're a billionaire, maybe. For everyone else, the current climate trajectory doesn't bode well.
- JohnFen 4y agoIt doesn't feel that way at all to me, honestly. Aside from (maybe -- it's legitimately hard to tell) advances in AI, and cell phones, there hasn't been any earth-shaking advance that makes times in my past seem primitive to me.
- monkaiju 4y agoI hate to say it but yeah, like smartphones are maybe the only thing I feel I've really experienced in my life that made a big impact. And even those came with way more downsides than I would've hoped.
- croes 4y agoWe do still the same in terms of space travel, starts just got cheaper but we are no way nearer to colonize any planets And our newest toy is a machine mimicking human written texts. AR and VR like in books in movies are also not reach, self driving cars aren"t really a thing just like flying taxis. It's more self-deception than future. Climate change and it's consequences like new diseases will be problems we be the real yardstick of human capabilities.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- unixgoddess 4y agoyeah, a future that chokes on pollution, constantly on the brink of annihilation by ever more powerful weapons, with freedom ever more vanishing under growing mass control systems... all so you can have some silly gadgets that you'll get bored with in a day, always chasing for the next shining toy
- monkaiju 4y agoGod if this is the future, I dont want it... Despite so much technology we still have so much precarity and poverty with new massive destabilizations happening every day. What a nightmare
- up2isomorphism 4y agoWhat’s this thing to do with the future except it looks nice? We have people these days focusing too much on the presentation rather than actual development.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]