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What's Always Next?
bettiwettiwoo writes "In its 'What's Next' issue, Time has a charmingly silly piece called What's Always Next? , in which is provided '[a] sampling of the future that wasn't': things that have been predicted since day dot, but have somehow never materialized. The examples they give are: videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks.
... There are, after all, so many and varied things -- ranging from the very serious to the down-right silly -- that are predicted time and again, yet seem curiously absent in our daily lives. Examples: global catastrophies of the Armageddon kind (be they population overload, total environmental disasters, plagues, asteroids, or nuclear wars); a secure and bug-free Windows; the end of Madonna's singing career (her 'acting' career was, I believe, still-born)." So what are you waiting for?
Remember Y2K? Me neither. Guess I'm still waiting for those missiles to accidentally launch.
It might be popular to dis Madonna, but she has more singing and dancing talent than 99.999% of the people out there.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
When you can roam from Europe into the US and have your 3G video cell phone work, then it can be struck off my list.
An economy not entirely dependent on oil? Depending on who you ask - and, oh boy, does it depend - we've already passed the global midpoint where we're using it up faster than we can possibly find it.
No, I'm not screaming that we're going to run dry in ten years, I'm saying that oil prices are only going one way, and that it's a risky strategy to rely on a supply of new oil from Arab countries.
How about just for once we plan further ahead than the next election and begin the wholesale switch to renewable energy sources now? We put man on the moon in under eight years from declaring it. If we had eight years warning, could we we build and drive a vehicle through every mainland US state without using a drop of oil, directly or indirectly? Oh, sure we could, we'd just use solar. And, uh, no plastics. And, um, build it in a plant powered by wind turbines. And ship the parts by, uh, yuh, we'll come back to that one. And our factory workers will use geothermal power to heat their homes, and they'll, erm, cycle to work. You see how it goes? Sure, in theory we could do it, and sooner or later, we'll have to. Are we going to wait until the last possible moment to put that theory to the test?
Oil is a one off bonanza in human history. We should be investing that wealth in our childrens' future, not blowing it on wide screen TVs and leaving them to clean up the mess.
While I'm ranting, sooner or later China is going to get rich enough to support an unhealthy population of lawyers, and then we can forget shipping our toxic garbage there to be melted down. Again, we can keep building the tire mountains and circuit board cities higher and higher and leave our kids to work out what to do with them. I just hope they're not such selfish short sighted bastards when it comes to looking after us in our collective old age.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I agree. That's the biggest problem with so called "innovations"... they don't help you do anything better. How does seeing someone increase the effiency of using a telephone? Now, it makes sense if your loved one is being needlessly deployed in some third world country because your current president is a nitwit. Then it makes sense that you want to see the person. However, if your just calling your wife to ask her if she needs you to pick anything up from the store, there's no point in a video phone. As for the flying car, they'll happen eventually, just not in the US. This is the reason why. Currently, if I went out and bought a single engine piper cub and popped open the engine cowling, do you know what I'd find... dynamos. Now, there are companies that make electroic ignition systems for airplanes, but because of the current rules, you can only use them if you declare your plane an experimental. However, after thousands and thousands of hours of people flying on electronic ignition, the FAA still isn't convinced it's safe. Now just imagine what some poor bastard would have to go through to even get the FAA to look at a flying car. For it to be even practical to the general public, it would have to have an obsurdly computer controlled, fly by computer control system that would prevent the thousands of possible knuckleheaded things a person could do in a flying car, otherwise, it wouldn't be flying car, it would be a flying plane. Your average person can just barely sort out drivers ed. Just imagine your crazy cubemate behind the stick of a flying car. Yeah, that would be frightening.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Very prescient comments about China. I think the dark horse in terms of countries unexpectedly upsetting our western fat cat society has got to be India, however. China will get there sooner than most people expect, but India is within a few years of seriously kicking our rumps. Just look at those software jobs flying off to the subcontinent...
Basically, we are in very big trouble, because the mathematics of having a billion Indians and a billion Chinese means that they need a much lower percentage of educated people in their countries to have a vastly larger actual number of educated people. If China or India can achieve a 10% university education rate, that's 200 million well educated Chinese and Indians - the equivalent of every person in the US having such a degree. There is a lot of complacence, because we look at those countries and see a high poverty rate, unemployment, lots of people living in poor conditions... but they are both nations on the rise and because of their immense sizes they will be hugely powerful before we know it.
Right now we can see this with IT jobs going to India... but how soon until there are hordes of Chinese accountants? Indian engineers? One only has to look at the speed with which the high-tech industry took off in SE Asia, where most of the manufacturing is still done, to see how quickly such sectors could be taken overseas with great speed. We won't just be wearing shirts made in China, our knowledge work will be done there too. Unfortunately we won't be able to afford any of it because we will all be unemployed.
IMHO you are absolutely correct in your assertion that we should be moving now, with great rapidity, to build a new set of ideals for our societies. We need to really migrate from the industrial, oil-swilling, third-world-will-pick-up-the-pieces mentality to an information age, high-tech, renewable, sustainable future. We have all the technology, we just need to put it into practice. If we don't, the west will become a hideous, decayed place full of social problems and memories of the era when we ruled the world.
Read Pynchon.
> Well, I'll stick to my point. We can do this now. So, why aren't we? Why are we going to suck oil until we go blue in the face and leave nothing in reserve?
The obvious answer is that it's cheaper than the alternatives. It's not really rational to expect that we'll stop using a resource that's available now, with an already-exisiting distribution infrastructure, for no reason other than that we need to stretch it out over some indeterminate length of time in the future.
> I'm thinking of my kids, but longer term, we're due another ice age real soon now. Failing that, god will drop a rock on us sooner or later. Our descendants are going to have to bootstrap themselves from wood burning stoves to nuclear power. Good luck to them.
What? Why would you think that they'd have to do this? By the time that next ice age rolls around, or the big rock falls, how can you know what we'll use for energy? Besides, why would they progress from wood to nuclear power at all? I can personally think of several options better than that, and I can't predict the future any better than you. You seem to think that we need to move away from fossil fuels right away, and I don't see anything in your argument to explain why. Yes, they're running out, but what's the point to having a huge world reserve of oil by moving away from oil entirely? Doesn't that defeat the use of having the reserves, if nothing you do requires that reserve? As the supply gets harder to provide, the price will rise, and when it rises high enough, we'll move to a different source of energy. Expecting the human race to do anything else is irrationally Utopian.
Virg
It'll be flamebait when the US has a healthcare system like every civilized first-world country.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak