Progress.City
Well-Known Member
That was an interesting read, but nothing ever quite happens the way we predict. Try as we might, the future is always unpredictable. According to Arthur C. Clark, we would have had airplanes that flew to orbital space stations that spun to create artificial gravity that would have supported hundreds of people, a moon colony, talking computers with artificial intelligence, and video phone by 2001. He was way off.
In 2015, we have an international space station that cost $100 billion to build and two decades to complete that does not support artificial gravity, transport to the moon or beyond low earth orbit, and a maximum permanent residence of just seven astronauts. It was built in part by NASA's space shuttle that cost billions to fly and operate, was anything but routine, not very safe to fly, did not take off vertically (as 1960's futurists predicted), and has been since retired. Today, we use the Russian Soyuz to send three astronauts at a time to the ISS, which is technology essentially that hasn't changed since the Apollo days. The new U.S. Orion spacecraft that is planned to take astronauts to deep space has a design which is evolved from the 1960's Apollo capsul, but modified to for greater human capacity and endurance. It will land with a parachute splash in the water like Apollo did.
In real life 2001, people's computers running Windows Millenium kept crashing. In sharp contrast, 1960's futurists predicted computer robots would replace the maid and do your windows. In 2015, we still don't have HAL but we do have SIRI.
No one could have predicted the Internet. However, in one moderately successful film of the 1980's, the vision of the Internet was crystal clear. That movie was Robocop.
No one could have predicted cell phone, but Gene Roddenberry practically invented the flip phone! Do you know what else Roddenberry predicted and no one ever give him credit for? The tablet PC! Yup, in the original Star Trek series, they had a thin touchscreen computer they carried around. Do you remember what they called it? P.A.D.
One last bit. Finally, today in 2015, we have the technology for video calls in every phone. Problem is there was no single standard and all devices could not make video calls to all other devices hooked up on to different carriers. This year, all new cell phone models come with a new standard that all carriers are adapting that allows video, HD voice, and other data services to connect indiscriminately between different hardware manufacturers and carriers. The standard is called VOLTE (Voice Over LTE). The roll-out is slow. Not all carriers are using it yet and not all features work yet between hardware brands. My carrier (Verizon) has it but they have it turned off as a default and the video function defaults to FaceTime for the time being on iPhones.
