Most of the stuff in Jules Verne’s books, even Paris in the Twentieth Century.
(Well, the moon gun would need to be a very long railgun, not a gunpowder cannon, if you want crewed capsules, but still.)
Sex robots!
I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
I don’t think auto pilot works how you seem to think it does…
Obviously I know how they work, I saw it in a documentary about Airplanes. The Otto pilot inflates at the press of a button (or is inflated manually) and they fly the plane.
Exoskeletons like Ripley’s in Alien. We’ve got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.
Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.
I’ve seen prototypes of these that were very impressive since like a decade ago, so I’m fully expecting those to be here soon. Power supply usually is the biggest issue
A lot of black mirror stuff.
Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.
living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met
Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
I thought we already had rail guns on ships?
No. Well kinda.
The Ford class uses what is basically a rail gun to launch planes but big navy decided against continuing development on railguns as a weapon.
Asteroid mining. We’ve had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
Okay I’ve had this astroid mining concept dining around my empty skull for a while now. The way I see it is that going up to space and mining an astroid for minerals and then bringing them back down to earth will never be a worthwhile endeavour. If you’re mining them in space and using the material manufacturing in space then that seems more plausible. The only way I can think of planetary based astroid mining being worthwhile is if instead of mining the rock and sending it down in crafts, you just bump the astroid so it’s on a collision course with earth and then mine whatever is left from impact. In anycase, I’d say we are far off being able to mine asteroids since imo, the only worthwhile way to do it is by having the entire process in space. And we’re not even close to that level of infrastructure existing in space.
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
That’d be pretty expensive to run if you think anout it. And who’d do the cleanup?
The cleanup is part of it.
Blend them up and flush them into the sewage system.
I read that as Sucide Marines and was confused for a bit
The military mental health epidemic. That’s the future I want.
They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.
Yeah but they make such a mess.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
They exist as monitors. In videos they kind of look like really early crappy LCD screens.
I’d just sit in the shade.
Look up Daylight DC-1 might be what you are looking for
Oooohhh, thank you
I remember we could use the game boy advance SP outside. Is this screen technology used for PC?
Underwater cities
With climate change and coastal flooding, it’s coming, just not in the form you’re thinking of.
You’re implying venice ?
Where I grew up, there was a town that had been intentionally flooded to make a reservoir, or so my parents told me; they claimed that when the reservoir was low, you could see the top of the church steeple. At the time, I drove past the area nearly daily and would often survey the waters, but never found anything that was likely to be more than shadows or a trick of the eye. At the time, I had barely learned of climate change and so wasn’t worried about it; I just liked the idea of a structurally intact, intentionally flooded city.
I just looked it up to make sure I was remembering the details correctly. It turns out that either I misremembered or my parents exaggerated. The town apparently existed and was flooded, but at the time of flooding consisted of foundations and one very tall flagpole. Apparently it’s a common pastime of kayakers and the like to look for the top of the flagpole. This is probably what my parents were referring to.
Still pretty cool, though.
Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
There’s been something else new?
