Slashdot Mirror
Tales of the Future Past
atlacatl writes "One of the coolest sites I've been to: Tales of the Future Past -
It tells the story (In pictures) of the predictions of the new millenium, early in the 20th century. I had forgotten the web was actually fun and interesting - use at your own risk."
This is one of the great things about digging through old stacks of National Geo. Especially issues from the '50s and earlier. My Grandmother had tons of them and I would sit for hours looking at the diagrams of the moon base that was going to have been built by the '80s.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...David Sarnoff, RCA President, Predicts "Television will Carry the Mail".
Actually he wasn't too far off, eh?
Lets see what don't we have. Flying cars? Yup got those just need some obscene amount of cash + piolts lisecense to get one. http://www.moller.com/skycar/ Hover boards? Got those too,although their more surf board than skate board sized, and with a large engine hanging on the back. Still not cheap. http://www.futurehorizons.net/hoverboard.htm Thos cool screens that take up the whole wall. Got those too, provided you can afford it. http://www.superscreen.com/ Video phones. Got those, not too expensive but most people just don't care about them. Won't bother posting a link every knows about these. OK so where still missing our space elevator, can't have everything I guess.
The 1936 movie of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come is good for this sort of thing. Captures that 30s "futuristic" look perfectly.
Da Blog
Your post hit it right on the head. We have so many theories, beliefs, etc. that we cling to for dear life that people in the future will just laugh at. Phrenology, ether, and many others at which we scoff; makes me wonder which ideas we hold near and dear that will be considered just so much crap later.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
While working with digital collections a university library, I unearthed a of turn of the century(19th to 20th) copy of The Emblamer's Gazette. One of the articles I found was a speculative look forward in the new century. The article devoted a lot of space to a discussion of an emerging technology, the automobile. Not only did the gazette predict the demise of the horse and carriage, but they predicted urban sprawl and the development of the modern city.
Slashdot has totally changed my browsing habits since I started reading it a few years ago. I find that I don't "get out" as much as I used to and just surf around. When in doubt, reload the Slashdot main page and see if there's a new story. Nothing? Hmmm... Maybe there's a new comment in a story I've already read. Or maybe I'll read the comment thread under that boring story that I don't care about after all...
Lately I've been browsing around at Wikipedia more. Just find an interesting page and open up a few internal links into new tabs as you go. It's easy to read half a dozen or more pages in one sitting, and you always learn something cool and interesting.
Of course, I learned about Wikipedia from a Slashdot article...
This really begs the question...
What would you do for a Flying Car?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Around the turn of the century there were fantastic advances in our understanding of physics, which led to us mastering electricity and atomic physics.
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
In the late 19th century we developed the internal combustion engine. We developed airplanes at the beginning of the century. In the 1930s we developed chemical rockets. Since then what have we developed as far as propulsion or transportation technologies go?
Not much. It's easy to imagine how much optimism there was after these initial advancements. Lately basic physics has branched out into such technologically unproductive pursuits as String theory. They are interesting to mathematicians but the technological fruits aren't there. In my opinion we have entered a technological slump that may last for quite a while.
Googie is the architecture of the future, dammit!
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Good point.
If you look back at history, you notice something about technologies. In most cases, there are five distinct stages:
1) Conception - a person first comes up with the idea for a brand new category of technology. A wave of interest sweeps over it. (Weeks to years)
2) Initial development - slow, tedious developent toward this field, with great sweeping prophecying of its capability (years to decades)
3) Later development - slow, tedious development toward this field, with the many people disillusioned (decades to centuries)
4) Realization - A critical threshold of technology is passed, and all of the sudden, the tech takes off and revolutionizes the world, combining with all sorts of other fields and giving them new life. The public again gives great sweeping prophecies of its capabilities for the future. (decades to centuries)
5) Stagnation - While the technologies continue to advance, their rate falls off asymptoticly, and the most additional gains are only from new, unrelated fields combining with it. (ad infinitum)
Apply this to every field that we've seen in recent history, from chemisty to antibiotics to munitions to steel framed construction to electric power, etc.
Then apply it to techs which are still developing to get an idea of what to expect - AI, nanotechnology, computers, etc.
Part of the problem is that when people see an idea first proposed, and when they see an idea first realized, they forget that revolutionary ideas can only go so far without either a lot of development time to resolve problems in the fomer case, and that there is a limit to how far you can take a tech without recombintion with new technologies in the latter case.
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.
The original or what got changed for syndication. IIRC the original last line was bart cutting in with "Quote the raven; Eat my shorts!", that line wasn't there last time i saw it on tv. They edit futurama on Adult Swim sometimes too, which is maddening... They cut the professors line "Sweet zombie Jesus!"...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You have likely hit the nail on the head - we are likely to see more and better applications of network theory (along with attendent refinement of the theory). It is becoming clear that just about every robust and fault-tolerant (note I did not say "faultless") system involves or is a network (or a network of networks, such as the human body). These discoveries and others are likely to shape a lot of the coming century.
If you (or anyone else) are interested in this trend, you cannot go wrong by reading "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (ISBN 0-452-28439-2).
Of course, this, like every other prediction, could be wrong. We are seeing the application of network theory in a number of areas currently (social networking tools like orkut and friendster are the ones in the spotlight) - whether it is simply a fad or whether it will truely yield new insights, though, is anyone's guess...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Some wild'n'crazy older scifi books that look several million years into the future:
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men
Sun dying in Red Giant phase, humans try to evolve a group mind.
William Hope Hodgson's The Nightland
Sun and all stars dead. Last humans living in nuclear-powered cities... their nuclear fuel is dwindling. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth now controlled by monsters of the dark.
Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand
Deliberate "Stapeldonian" style. All stars dying. Naive galactic travellers explore a weird Galaxy, last humans meet their posthuman successors.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
Sun dying. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth.
These books span a century of science fiction but all share a common theme: thermodynamic inevitability. It's been a common theme for far-futurists since the mid-19th century. Here's what the ever-cheery Wells had to say about the ultimate fate of mankind after the Sun's extinction in the Time Machine:
Da Blog
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
I actually had the opportunity to do just this a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with some in-laws (a brother and a sister) who were in their late 90s and still totally alert. They were old enough to tell me of their travails of having to "score" liquor from dealers in dodgy neighbourhoods in the US during prohibition.
Anyway, being young and naive of course I asked the "what was the greatest invention or discovery or change" in the 20th century? I was expecting, of course, something different from their unanimous answer: Radio. I responded with "What about TV?" Their answer? One of them said, moe or less, "TV was nothing special, just radio with pictures. We'd already got used to broadcasting". Sadly, both of these great people are now dead.
Radio was magic stuff - binding together huge communities cheaply and effectively and "magically" without visible wires. People would huddle together and listen to words and music, exercising their imagination to create pictures within their heads that corresponded to the active narrative coming out of the little magic box.
Remember in the 1920s that the science fiction genre got started within the pages of radio electronics magazines!
Radio was the zeitgeist of the times. Just look through any magazine of the time and you see endless classifieds for radio operator/engineer classes, certifications, and so on. Radio in the 1920s was like the Internet in the 1990s - everyone wanted a piece of it, it was the new frontier of communications. In fact, without radio it's doubtful that the Nazis would so effectively have seized control and indoctrinated so many millions of people in Germany.
I note in passing that radio continues to be a huge agent of social change, for good or ill. The genocide in Rwanda was orchestrated and performed using "talk radio" hosts to coordinate the decentralized death squads. In a country with little infrastructure or reputation for efficiency, the Tutsi butchers in Rwanda killed over a million people at a rate more than five times faster than the best extermination efforts of the stereotupically efficient Nazis during World War 2.
Da Blog