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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Some of these are actually pretty prescient. Particularly this one

"Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence."

Rest is pretty hilarious. E.g.

"Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014."

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10/22/2013 NASA Laser Communication System Sets Record with Data Transmissions to and from Moon

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/october/nasa-laser-communicat...

Thanks for finding this link.

This has been a technology under development for a long time. The typical technology for deep space communications is radio. There are a few missions coming up that will require this bandwidth.

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what does go on, dude. Apart from the living on the moon bit, obviously.

I was specifically talking about the communication with moon. I find it funny how back in the day, futurologists were obsessed with it.

Indeed. While there was the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment apparently most space communication happens via the usual parabolic/phased array antennae: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub1/bapna_deepak_1996_1/bap...

KISS is doubly important in space I suppose.

EDIT: reading that wiki article it seems the first lunar laser experiments happened in 1962, so we may have found Asimov's inspiration.

EDIT2: nope, apparently he was spot on after all ;)

>I was specifically talking about the communication with moon. I find it funny how back in the day, futurologists were obsessed with it.

What's funny about it?

The President himself (JFK) had promised that the US will send "a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth" by the end of the sixties.

If the same amount of money and determination was continued post-1969, moon colonies (colonies of scientists, like in Alaska, not some kind of new state on the moon), would have been a very real possibility.

I think it's funny in a way that's symptomatic of us nerds' future predictions: much more focus on what's possible than on what's useful/enjoyable. We focus on extrapolating technological advances, at the expense of a basic marketing/human interest mindset.

In considering ceilings and walls that "glow softly, and in a variety of colors" the right observation is not that it will be feasible by 2014, but that nobody older than seven would genuinely want this in their home :)

Funny because fiber optic cable have been in use for more than a decade?

We have laser connection to the moon now, actually. And he was right about fiber optic cables, too.

Hilarious? Sad, rather.

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