h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Lots of clever SF ideas have come true. Not the geostationary comms sattelite, obviously - that was described in an article in a wireless hobbyists' mag - but other stuff. Such as in the 1930s my Grandma came out of the cinema having seen 'The Shape of Things To Come'. 'It was ridiculous! They had this thing that let you see people miles away and talk to them!'

What are your favourite things to come?

Or what has been predicted but missed the mark? Like hovercars? Or meaningful staffed space stations by 2012?

A nifty reverse one: In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars series, the standard model small-scale nuclear reactor is called a 'Rickover'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover

I'd quite like to see William Gibson's 'Radio Zion' come true.

Robert Heinlein's 1949 predictions for 2000. No. 11 is *nearly* right.

http://www.listsofnote.com/2011/12/heinleins-predictions.html

15 looks pretty spot-on.

Oh. Fair enough.

In my head there's an SF novel featuring a Scottish-backed industrial espionage team trying to destroy the newly-working fusion reactor in Switzerland, cos it'll destroy our renewables-based economy. Set in about 2060.

Heinlein:

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.

What are your favourite things to come?

One of them is the 'production trees' or whatever they're called in Alistair Gray's book (A History Tree?). They manufacture stuff, using their enormous roots to get materials and photosynthesis to get energy. As they change the means of production, they change society. I can see that kind of thing happening.

I was thinking about those in the replicator thread.

That's the book where they tell you that Economics is women's work.

'A History Maker', btw.

http://www.alasdairgray.co.uk/bookshop/maker.htm

>> seen 'The Shape of Things To Come'. 'It was ridiculous! <<

A very strange film indeed. One of the earliest scifi flicks.

Blew me away when Raymond Massey (Canadian) talks about
a man named Armstrong being the first man on the moon.

Made me wonder if NASA borrowed all their ideas from
H(uge) G(ravity) Wells.


~jwf~

>>Robert Heinlein's 1949 predictions for 2000.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered;

We've gone a long way toward the third objective; it used to be far more common for people to have sets of false teeth not too long ago.


My favourite has to be "The Ruum", because the spelling is so memorable.

"what has been predicted but missed the mark? Like hovercars? Or meaningful staffed space stations by 2012?"[Edward the Bonobo]

In "Back to the Future," commuters travelled to and from work in flying cars. Not even remotely accurate. Our cars are still firmly attached to terra firma.

Jules Verne is said to have had some pretty good predictions about the 1950s. I wonder if the recent rash of films based on his novels ["Journey to the Center of the Earth;" "Journey to the Mysterious island"] is based on hopefulness that more of his predictions will come true. Not that those were good movies. I watched them because they didn't have car chases and violence.

I would love to see trees evolve [with or without human "help"]. My favorite scenario is one in which the ones nearest the ocean [mangroves?] absorb the water minus the salinity, and send it to their neighbors, who transport it further and further inland. Desalinization is an expensive process, as is trucking fresh water uphill to the arid places further from the shore. If trees were doing this work for us, they would benefit by expanding their range, and we could maybe tap the water for our own use.

Well, I'm pretty happy they were wrong about that August 29th 1997 thing in Terminator...

Well, so far every prediction of the end of the world has failed to pan out. Every. single. one. The Mayan doomsday scenario is also likely to be a nonevent.

I remember when They said that in the future, we wouldn't buy records any more. We would dial up to get music. And that is sort of what's happened. I certainly don't have any records now

My dear daddy worked on a mad project in the 80s. It was this crackpot idea that every single working person in the office would have - get this - a computer on their desk. And their own phone! And they would be able to send messages electronically to their colleagues! As if.

But then, once computers had moved on from using mini cassettes (yes, that's how early in the computer world he was working on it), this actually happened.

There was also talk, when I first started work, that one day in the future there would just be one word processing software package*. Shame it turned out to be Microsoft Word.

Mol


*I used nine different word processing packages in my first seven months of temping.

Very few people play phonograph records, but music CDs are sold. I own a lot of them. I'd rather have a good sound system to play them in than a set of crummy computer speakers. But that's just me.

>>The Mayan doomsday scenario is also likely to be a nonevent

Unless we plan a really wild party that day.

>>I own a lot of them. I'd rather have a good sound system to play them in than a set of crummy computer speakers. But that's just me.

Did you know that you could easily connect your computer (or media player) to your hi-fi?

Heinlein's list:

2. seems to be true. The position of women in civilised society is unrecognisable compared to 1949, and contraception is a large part of why.

3. is an interesting one. It was the most important fact until about 1990. Then the prospect of a war fought with MIRV nukes receded. The most important military fact of the 21st century was demonstrated very early to be that there's no way to repel an attack by a tiny force of sufficiently motivated Muslims.

4. is almost funny, as is 6 - Americans may well be getting a little hungry, but it's not because they've not already stuck away about 10,000 calories today.

9's interesting because it treats "cancer" and "the common cold" in the terms of a layman, i.e. as a single thing. They're not, which is why they're not licked yet. Tooth decay, on the other hand, we do seem to have got a grip of.

10. is interesting - it's mostly true, apart from our lack of a deliberately interstellar ship in construction, which is quite sad. We COULD build one. We choose not to.

11 probably sounded ridiculous at the time, but was bang on. The only thing he didn't foresee is that even when the tech is light, reliable, high quality and cheap, NOBODY wants video phones.

12. Well, no. Shame.

13. Not even close.

14. We don't properly understand gravity yet. Control comes later.

15. Communism will vanish... hmm. Soviet communism, yes. China, on the other hand, seems to be doing pretty well...

16 doesn't really make any sense that I can discern.

17 is the standard layman's massive underestimate of the difficulty of piloting an aircraft.

What's most interesting to me is his list of what we WON'T get, soon or possibly ever.

Mostly, he's on the money - Trek-style transporters are never going to happen for all sorts of reasons, just to pick one thing.

But right in the middle of his list he writes off the possibility of ever creating life in a laboratory. Arguably, we're there already. Unarguably, we'll get there soon.

Good list...

From the same site as Heinlein's list, this makes me proud to be British:

http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/02/wartime-golf-rules.html