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It's 2010. Where the hell are my flying cars and stuff?

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
I remember back in the 80's everybody saying "By 2010... we'll have this and that." Everything all SciFi like, of course. Utopian societies and world governments would be the norm. However, here we are, in 2010, and all we have to show for it are these tiny little "pseudo-laptops" and the iPhone App Store.

Is it just me or has technological invention (not innovation) slowed down and now we're busy just refining what we already have?

RIP Mr. Fusion. 🙁
 
Inventions are happening constantly. The problem is, the tech behind some of the latest ideas is just too prohibitively expensive to turn into something of real use.

Look at flexible displays and transparent displays. Something sci-fi has promised us, and researchers are constantly looking into. But having practical devices that are affordable is the biggest drive before a product reaches market.

They've been working on flying cars, for instance. They have demoed working vehicles, and a few companies actually have a product *kind of* available in the market. Practicality and expense have kept the idea at the "wow, cool... what do I do with it? stage. Flying cars are great, but how do we regulate the skies? Flight vectors are a very important thing to keep things that are up in the air away from each other.

As for utopian societies - we're too focused on killing each other to ever play nice together. It will never happen as long as we are genetically human. Never. Only possibility is if a world government, a planet itself, is merely one location of humanity. We would have to be elsewhere for there to ever be peace on Earth. Humans will never know peace.
 
Well we have to wait for the flux capacitor to be invented then hoverboards and flying cards will be everywhere!
 
Too much money being invested in developing new weapons to kill each other rather than on R&D related to things that could actually benefit humanity.
 
Well if we going with Back to the Future model. It is actually 2015 when flying cars, hoverboards, Mr. Fusion will be available.

Also by going with the model, Japan is the dominant world leader in business.
 
2Xtreme21 said:
Too much money being invested in developing new weapons to kill each other rather than on R&D related to things that could actually benefit humanity.
Click to expand...

I'll have you know, a large majority of the most beneficial technologies and inventions have been born out of military R&D, or have been proven in the military or during war.
 
destrekor said:
I'll have you know, a large majority of the most beneficial technologies and inventions have been born out of military R&D, or have been proven in the military or during war.
Click to expand...

That's true and no one will deny that.

But what if the R&D were focused on the betterment of mankind from the start? No oil dependence, a lot less disease, maybe even a real space station could all be possibilities right now.
 
DanDaManJC said:
That's true and no one will deny that.

But what if the R&D were focused on the betterment of mankind from the start? No oil dependence, a lot less disease, maybe even a real space station could all be possibilities right now.
Click to expand...

Like I said above... humans will never understand peace. As long as there is war, a lot of money is going to go into it.

Oh, and then there's the fact that governments don't like to invest in things that only advance scientific knowledge for the immediate future. Look at NASA. They have a terribly tiny budget. Imagine what they could do if they were given some real money.

Sometime in the not so distant future, we will see entire nations working together on massive projects simply to further our knowledge, trying to discover some answers to important scientific propositions, and in doing so we'll discover some very useful technologies. Takes a lot to do
 
destrekor said:
I'll have you know, a large majority of the most beneficial technologies and inventions have been born out of military R&D, or have been proven in the military or during war.
Click to expand...

True. But does that mean it is or should be the exclusive way for us to go about executing our R & D? If we put money and effort into any direction there will be progress and advancement.
 
Funny. The articles I read in the 80's were of futuristic pocket cell phones, one inch thick tv's that hang on the wall, and computers that fit in a purse. Also, black presidents and men marrying men. We can't have flying cars. That would put the freeway maint and construction crews out of business. And you know what that would lead to... no more matching federal Highways and Infrastructure funding. U a silly person...
 
DanDaManJC said:
But what if the R&D were focused on the betterment of mankind from the start?
Click to expand...
It is. The betterment of one particular nation's mankind over another's apparently. 🙁

As in "Mankind would be better off without <insert race/nationality/creed/religion/etc here>."
 
destrekor said:
Oh, and then there's the fact that governments don't like to invest in things that only advance scientific knowledge for the immediate future. Look at NASA. They have a terribly tiny budget. Imagine what they could do if they were given some real money.
Click to expand...

Yep, and the only reason we made it to the moon and had massive advancements in space technology in the 60's-80's, was because the government basically gave NASA a blank check to show up the Soviets.

All it takes is a government to massively get behind an idea that gives their country the upper hand on the world map and we'll get it in no time. Look at the atom bomb... developed in a whopping 3 years. That's almost unheard of for 1940's science.
 
2Xtreme21 said:
Yep, and the only reason we made it to the moon and had massive advancements in space technology in the 60's-80's, was because the government basically gave NASA a blank check to show up the Soviets.

All it takes is a government to massively get behind an idea that gives their country the upper hand on the world map and we'll get it in no time. Look at the atom bomb... developed in a whopping 3 years. That's almost unheard of for 1940's science.
Click to expand...

precisely.
And that is the reason behind my arguments for capitalism.

The best advancements come in times of heated competition.

It's one reason I'm getting antsy for Russia to just get ridiculously retarded again and start another Race of some type. The world needs it, because when two countries are vying to be the best in one particular area, that particular area gets advanced in a way nobody could ever imagine.

We need another space race, we'll have it one day. China is probably going to be our competitor in that regard. Hopefully we can get back to the moon before China gets there. Just so we can say we beat them to the moon twice, with a large period of time where we dropped all the technology that made it possible to reach the moon and it needed to be re-invented to be made possible once again.
 
destrekor said:
Flying cars are great, but how do we regulate the skies? Flight vectors are a very important thing to keep things that are up in the air away from each other.
Click to expand...

Most people can't drive competently with only two dimensions to be concerned about, and with fixed boundaries of where to drive (i.e. the road).
 
MotF Bane said:
Most people can't drive competently with only two dimensions to be concerned about, and with fixed boundaries of where to drive (i.e. the road).
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Seriously; we'll need fully automated driving systems before flying cars will be anything resembling feasible.
 
I think we have reached a certain plateau as far as advancements go. We are only improving what we have or reinventing stuff differently (ex: cell phones now are basically hand held laptops that can make a phone call).

Lot of stuff is also not feasible due to political or other issues. For example we have the technology for very efficient electric cars, but due to patents and other politics it's not happening.
 
sportage said:
Funny. The articles I read in the 80's were of futuristic pocket cell phones, one inch thick tv's that hang on the wall, and computers that fit in a purse. Also, black presidents and men marrying men. We can't have flying cars. That would put the freeway maint and construction crews out of business. And you know what that would lead to... no more matching federal Highways and Infrastructure funding. U a silly person...
Click to expand...

Exactly. Pretty much the only thing we don't have is flying cars.

'Hey, where's my navigation device to tell me, real time, how to reach my destination?'

Oh wait, we have that.

'Hey, where's my personal music player that can hold thousands of albums worth of music, but is smaller than a wallet?'

Oh wait, we have that too.

We have carbon fiber hockey sticks that are light as a feather but can drive a slapshot 100+ MPH, we have effective treatments for HIV, and we have people paying for rides into outer space.

We are tantalizingly close to effective treatments for Parkinsons, Alzheimers, and Cancer. Some have even predicted that people being born today could live forever.

If anything, innovation has only accelerated in recent years.
 
We have lots of things that would have been considered pretty "scifi" in the 80's. Smart phones are a typical example - it would have taken a whole building's worth of computer hardware to match your iPhone, and even then, connectivity and media features would not be as good. Current phones beat the communication devices they were using in scifi series in the 80's...
Massively multiplayer games, communities like Facbook, and even reading the newspaper online from your phone or computer are other examples. Simply making a an international call was a pretty expensive and complex affair not long ago. Things like hard drive capacity and CPU speeds are other examples. People used to be amazed at how many pages of text you could store on a single 3.5" floppy disk... 🙂 Go back to 1982 and tell them you bought a 1TB drive for less than $100 - they'll either think you're lying or that you're from another planet.

Then there are some things that just turned out to be unpractical or pointless. A flying car will always be more complex and expensive to manufacture and will require more fuel (energy) than one that travels on roads. More difficult to operate too. Talking computers and voice recognition were very popular in 80's scifi. We can easily do that today, but I would go crazy if everyone at the office constantly shouted at their computers and their computers responded in the same way.
 
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