"It's 2016, I can't believe we don't have....." Topic

It is 2016, and we don't have certain things promised in science fiction, Popular Mechanics (etc.). What is it that you can't believe we haven't got yet, or haven't done yet. It could be related to wargames and miniatures or not.

Probably the most "popular" of the "things we haven't gotten yet" is the flying car.

But truthfully, given the limited ability most drivers have in handling two dimensional travel would you REALLY want them trying to handle three?

It won't matter if they can handle them or not. Soon none of us will be driving cars, flying or otherwise.

"I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then, after you camped at night, you could eat him.

How about it, science?"

From "Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handey

Screw the flying cars. It's bad enough with the idiots on flat land.

We were supposed to have tourist trips to the moon in 2001. I saw the movie.

> But truthfully, given the limited ability most drivers have in handling two dimensional travel would you REALLY want them trying to handle three?

That really is the only reason we don't have flying cars, family helicopters have been possible for a long time.

How about cities under the oceans. Weren't there supposed to be underwater cities?

Sadly NYC, Miami and Baltimore – just to name a few – will be under the ocean. I know, I know. Booo HAH! Hope you are right and I am not. H

In a sixties magazine, I read about the device that was projecting the book page, magnified, onto the ceiling or a wall. The illustration had a man laying in his bed and reading the text on the ceiling above. His wife, I remember, was next to him asleep. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Jetpacks

Robot housekeepers.

World peace

Yea:

- jetpacks (need one in my closet, that is affordable, fast, and has good endurance, e.g. at least a 200 mile range);
- flying cars (again, affordable, sleek, and fast);
- a base on the moon;
- a base on Mars, or at least a spaceship to get there, and a firm date for the mission;
- supersonic, and/or hypersonic commercial jets;
- inexpensive, one or two person, recreational submarines;
- a robot attendant to do mundane chores around the house, and yard work outside;
- FTL travel; and, I suspect a few other things I've forgotten.

Paperless office.

I recently attended a semi regular clinic, the Doctor wanted an Ultra sound done so he pulls out a form and writes ( in Doctor scrawl ) what he wants done, gives me the form, I give it to someone else who faxes it to where it has to go.

I had to wonder why can't this all be done electronically. faster, more efficient and the poor sob at the other end won't have to decypher hand written gibberish!

Free gasoline. We kicked ass on Iraq over 10 years ago and didn't just plunder their resources to pay for the war? I don't get it.

Flying cars don't fly with me till they can fly themselves. Some idiot will get drunk and fly into my car. If they fly themselves at least we can blame crashes on hardware failure :>

We have driverless cars that seem to work okay.
We have drones that fly 5,000 miles drop a bomb on some guy and then fly home.

It seems to me the automatic flying car should be here any day now. I am very disappointed it is not.

We need a real space station, one that looks like a big ring and run by America like all the science fiction shows said we would have.

We need a Moon base and a Mars base. Project Horizon said we would have a Moon base by about 1960.

Two man submarines for me and MRS Bunkermeister to go exploring in.

Travel from LA to Paris in a hour. Now have to arrive at the airport more than an hour before takeoff. We seem to be going backwards on fast air travel.

Jet packs that are safe and have at least a 100 mile range.

3D color printing of army men and tanks and such at home, on demand, and cheap, and easy.

Robots. Lots of happy, hard working robots, in every home.

I am very disappointed in the future.

Sure the Internet is cool and all, but it's not a flying car.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

Reliable internet

Barbarella.

Moon Base.
Space tourism.
Jet packs.

We have driverless cars that seem to work okay.

They work to a standard that most people wouldn't accept for their daily commute (leaving out the reality of people being late and thinking everyone should get out of their way) under controlled conditions.

Those are still a long way off.

Reliable internet

You will never have that. As Arpanet, the Internet was designed from the ground up not to be reliable. That's one of the reasons it has been able to become ubiquitous without centralized funding and ownership.

A reliable global information network is possible, but it would be fundamentally different that the Internet and behave in ways that you would not recognize as the Internet.

a robot attendant to do mundane chores around the house, and yard work outside;

------

GMO staple crops that can be watered with seawater. They have been working on that for a couple decades now, and I am surprised it hasn't come to fruition yet. Maybe that one's harder than I think it should be (not being a squishy science guy).

Sexbots. Don't want one, just surprised we don't have them.

Nanoservo driven wargaming miniatures that can march across a table and take position for us.

Shuttle flights every month to Mars.

More leisure time

Simple: throughout my 1970s schooling we were told one of the challenges of 'the future' was going to be how best people would be able to use all the extra leisure time technology was going to bring us.

Well, OK – after working too hard for too long I have been able to (semi) retire in my 50s. But I seem to be the rarity and most of my heritage and military enthusiast friends are still having to work for a living (and expecting to do so well into their 60s and for longer than our parents generation) – so let's have a big up for the future!!

Phil

Judy Jetson.

JRR Martin's next Game of Thrones Book

Those little bots are cute, but I need ones that can do more difficult chores. I especially want one that can identify and pull the weeds.

They've got self-flying commercial jets, and now driverless ground vehicles, so the self-flying aircars are only a matter of time, AND lots and lots of money…….

We were supposed to have tourist trips to the moon in 2001. I saw the movie.

+1

World peace

That's not science, that's fantasy.

We have driverless cars that seem to work okay.

Would you undergo surgery from computer-controlled surgical machines "that seem to work okay"?

We have drones that fly 5,000 miles drop a bomb on some guy and then fly home.

And are controlled by pilot 5000 miles away.

GMO staple crops that can be watered with seawater.

The two main problems seem to be:

1) The anti-GMO crowd.

2) Since the plants tolerate the salts and not metabolize them repeated watering with seawater leads to a build of salts that exceed the tolerance of the plants.

A crash and reboot of civilization.

A crash and reboot of civilization.

Patience citizen, it's coming.

> They work to a standard that most people wouldn't accept for their daily commute (leaving out the reality of people being late and thinking everyone should get out of their way) under controlled conditions.

They have been working in populated areas for over a year now and have a better track record than cars with human drivers.

I still want my flying car and other sayings t shirts.
link

A job that pays enough to be able to afford any of those wonderful things that we don't have yet…

They have been working in populated areas for over a year now and have a better track record than cars with human drivers.

The original quote was "driverless cars". There are currently none of those on the road today; there are a number of vehicles with autonomous capabilities. Within a few years, you may be able to get insurance for a fully trip autonomous driver operated vehicle. There are currently no plans for making driverless vehicles legal.

As far as their performance, under controlled circumstances you can select a set of criteria that do not represent the entire spectrum of needs for a daily commute for which their average performance is greater than the average performance of all other vehicles, not subject to those controlled circumstances.

> The original quote was "driverless cars". There are currently none of those on the road today;

There is a big difference between what is legal and what is. The "drivers" in those care are only there due to the law requiring it – they do not drive the car at any time and so are technically passengers.

Travel from LA to Paris in a hour. Now have to arrive at the airport more than an hour before takeoff. We seem to be going backwards on fast air travel.
Yes, but you will have arrive at the airport 4 hrs. before your flight.

The "drivers" in those care are only there due to the law requiring it – they do not drive the car at any time and so are technically passengers.

Can you provide a reference to a study on a driverless car conducting a typical workday commute where the driver did not drive at any time?

A decent baconbutty and private airship-homes using solar power that can travel around the world following the good weather all year round if need be. Well that's my sci-fi fantasy at any rate. We be modern sailors of the airseas matey.

Dear Twilight Samurai

It' can't. It's all a fraud.

I've been in industrial management and planning all my life. in 1980 there was the big push to computerize this phase of industry and move the computer out of Accounting where it had always resided into the shop floor and distribution management.

When the wonks showed up at our factor we heard the Pearls of wisdom vomit from the salesmen's mouths as to how, once we had a computer in our plant we would have paperless offices. Last year 25 years later when I retired I had more paper in my office at one time than I had in the whole previous 12 years of my job before 1980. We were assaulted by reams of data, but no information.

Other points to ponder.

In the 1938 Worlds Fair (which a friend told me about) we were going to have transatlantic tunnels, and cities under the sea, automated farms in the rain forest, bases on the moon etc. However, the most astounding prediction was that by the first decades of the twentyfirst century (ie, NOW) the biggest industry in the world would be the leisure industry because we all would be working only 16 hours a week and having nothing to do and this would keep us busy. of course it also assumed that we would be wildly overpaid for the 16 hours a week with huge amounts of cash yearning to be spent.

But… do not be unduly alarmed! This has been going on for a long while.

In Fritz Lang's mammoth silent film from the 20's "Metrpolois" they envisioned all sorts of the same folderol (trains in tubes) vast mega-cities etc., and the fact that everything would be run by machines, including a huge controlling machine which was clearly a computer with long lists of figures racing up and down indicators and dials and various tube electronics and so forth, but these machines were colossal, about the size of a skyscraper, and there were scenes of people flooding around it (all in business suits and morning coats) and they were flailing about and throwing up their arms in wild excitement over what was happening, but they all carried enormous tomes and files three feet thick and the size of coffee tables, paging through them to find data, and so forth. No one thought of a printer or a monitor.

> Can you provide a reference to a study on a driverless car conducting a typical workday commute where the driver did not drive at any time?

Five seconds with google.

PDF link

> We're currently averaging 10,000-15,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets

Since one of them did cause an accident by not yielding to a bus, (first time I remember reading that the self driving car is responsible for an accident – all the others were found to be caused by a human driver in another car) they are certainly driving with other cars on the road.

Somehow I have the feeling even this will not be acceptable to you.

Here are the other reports from other months.

link

Only two reasons we do not yet have a paperless society.

1 – People do not trust computers.
2 – People do not trust computers.

Perhaps at your office the amount of paper has gotten worse but where I am the amount is finally going down. Health care signups are now done electronically as is most personnel actions, most technical documentation is now done electronically as well. The only things left on paper is when someone does a presentation and feels the need to hand out the document they are showing on screen to everyone.

– People do not trust computers.

X2

Which is why I hate the entire idea of voting on the Internet.

Well, given the frequency with which hard-drives and/or computers crash, that is not too surprising.

Zephyr1 for the win.

A 3 day workweek seems "civilized" to me, affording one day for chores a week, and then an equal number of days off to pursue other interests.

I also want the following, as standard in my new home:

- convection oven;
- countertop deep fryer;
- wood or charcoal fired pizza oven;
- wood grill;
- wood smoker;
- warming drawers for bread and other foods;
- and, finally, a blast chiller too, just because life is too short to wait.

Seems like standard kit for any well-equipped home.

Yesthatphil is correct. Now that we have computers, cell phones and other "labor saving" devices people expect us to produce more than what we have gained in efficiency. Sometimes it makes me wish that someone would pull the plug (that is, as long as the air conditioning would stay on).

Kevin

Five seconds with google.

Five minutes reading the article would have found you things like this …

Before our cars drive autonomously in a new location, we first manually drive the area to create a map that allows the car to know what to expect from a street environment -- lane lines, how high traffic signals are from the ground, curb heights, bridges.

… discussion of them operating under controlled conditions.

Somehow I have the feeling even this will not be acceptable to you.

Possibly because I have read most these, as well as many others and discussed some of the points with the scientists in conducting the research. My point the whole time has been that automated behaviours in cars are very specific things, not the generalized achievements that were being made about them.

You know, when these self-driving cars start committing acts of road rage all on their own, nobody will believe it… ;-)

All of you that have never seen a "flying car" must not have been around my teenage daughter on her way to her friend's house.

Soylent green (I believe it's people)

"GMO staple crops that can be watered with seawater. They have been working on that for a couple decades now, and I am surprised it hasn't come to fruition yet. Maybe that one's harder than I think it should be (not being a squishy science guy)."

Turns out not to be necessary – many of our *current* varieties of staple crops can grow in land irrigated with salty water. Dutch researchers have been doing work on it for places that get flooded by the ocean regularly or been hit by tsunamis – link – in very basic "Suck it and see" work.

I should think that if you went back through all the old episodes of Tomorrows World (BBC science programme showing the latest inventions) from the 70s you'll loads of things that are only just now beginning to appear. One that springs to mind is car headlights that turn in the direction you are steering, and head up displays using holograms, both of which have finally arrived in the last 5 years on production models.
Personally I'm still waiting for the transporter beam to arrive, a la Star Trek.
As for GM crops growing in saltwater, by 2030 we are promised synthetically produced turkey for our Christmas festivities.
link

And for the word turkey you can also substitute chicken, beef etc.