Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled 499
An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting:
"Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."
Re:The real reason. (Score:3, Informative)
You can bet if our species was as fanatical about science as it is about religious bureaucracy we would be in a better world.
Or we would have wars over the "right" research subjects to focus on. Especially the wars between the Cybernetics and the Bio-Engineered would be fierce.
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:3, Informative)
If you want a flying car, go get your pilots license and buy a nice used Piper Comanche.
Drive to airport, get in plane, fly to destination airport.
It's a lot cheaper than the cost and cost of ownership of the first flying cars will be, and you dont have to wait.
$50,000 will buy you a very VERY nice plane. Another $3500-$4500 for your license and you're in the air and flipping a bird to everyone in the boarding lounge as you take off. You will be in and out of airports faster than anyone on a commercial jet would be
Suggestions for radical political change (Score:2, Informative)
People who are ill should be able to order anyone who is not ill to do anything they please. After all, you cannot put a price on illness, and those who are not ill can never understand what it's like to be so. Having a sex life is also a human right.
Names should not be allowed, because they are a burgeois romanticised concept. Is it anything but egoistical to demand to be called 'PAUL' or 'GREGORY VAN DYKE'? It also sets you apart. The rational and logical way is to have a number corresponding to your area of habitation and a unique identification code. At the same time private housing is abolished in favour of living in large eco-friendly pyramids, and living outside of these is wasteful and hence forbidden.
Because there are too many people in the world, we have a lottery and euthanise fifty percent using nitrogen. A lottery is the most fair way to do this because anything else (riches are sucked from others, talent is genetic which is random) would be inhumane.
When we have brain scanners, we can scan people for thoughts that are wrong. Because it would be inhumane to punish them for having wrong thoughts, you simply send them for reeducation.
Out of concern for the collective you need a permission to breed. If a woman becomes pregnant without permission it's forcibly terminated, because after all, you aren't destroying any life by doing so, only as much life as when you mouthwash, so it's no big deal.
I mean, there's plenty of 'radical political change' that would be doable. Which ones did the writer think of?
Scratch that, we can have radical political change, just in the way that *I* want. What, you thought YOU would be the one to decide?
Re:De-scaling is the future (Score:3, Informative)
There is so much repetition on Slashdot. It's great when I read something that gives me a new viewpoint on something. Thanks for posting this. I think your view might be a useful model of a lot of technological progressions.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, buses are a kludge, and not a very good one... I'm going to quote Judge Doon from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? now:
If you go back, before the rise of the automobile, you'll find trolleys in many major American cities. Check the history of your own town. Did it have trolleys [phillytrolley.org]? If so, where did the go?
Why did the Federal Government decide to commit it's resources to an Interstate Highway System [wikipedia.org] rather than an Interstate Rail System?
Why do passenger trains criss cross Europe [eurail.com] and Japan [japanrail.com], but not the United States?
Re:The real reason. (Score:3, Informative)
I got something for you to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX7lkFpacS4 [youtube.com]
It is from Fox News, too. That's how you know it is Fair and Balanced!
Re:Greed (Score:3, Informative)
We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up.
The cost of owning and operating a Model T Ford was about 1 cent a mile.
The token cost 5 cents.
The transit services were in huge, huge financial trouble before World War One.
The product they were offering was not want people wanted.
If your were black, you could be denied a hotel room, an apartment, forced to the back of the bus. But you could own a decent car.
Convenience. Security. Privacy. Pride.
Don't think those lessons were lost on others.
The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do
The John Deere tractor with the power take-off, the hydraulic lift and the three-point hitch is the iconic image of the American family farm.
Hours are long in farming because of the intractable and contrarian nature of plant and animal. Sun and soil. Wind and weather.
Nothing will bend to your convenience.
The old-time farmer bought his first tractor because his eldest son laid down the law:
we get rid of the horses or I take that job in town - or at least that was the story he tried to peddle to his wife when she asked about the bill.
Re:Pfft, give me a break (Score:3, Informative)
Then why was Galileo executed by the Church?
For starters, Galileo wasn't executed by anyone [wikipedia.org]. His sentence was a house arrest.
Furthermore, he was on trial for his heliocentrical views (as opposed to the geocentricity prevalent at the time). The idea of flat earth never even figured in this.