Let's put the future behind us
antipope.org
antipope.org
They weren't. In the last 50 years, there have been no new power sources. We're still mostly on oil, coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Even solar cells and atomic power are now more than 50 years old. The existing technologies have improved, but there are no new ones.
That's why we don't have heated streets for snow melting, as seen in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958). We don't have much space travel because chemical rockets hit the power limits of chemistry around 45 years ago.
If controlled fusion is ever cracked, and it's not too expensive, we may see some of the older futuristic ideas back.
Look at Philae - because it didn't contain a fission source, it's stuck without the capability to replenish it's power source. What would have happened if we weren't scared to death of nuclear power?
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-bittersweet-taste-...
I've had this argument many times with my left-leaning friends. People who are worried about pollution or climate change should be demanding that we switch over to nuclear power as quickly as possible.
Sometimes I wonder if technical advances have outstripped our collective ability to deal with them. Specialization is required to make progress, but it means that nobody really understands the choices we have when it comes to technology. And although it's possible for specialists to design, build and operate something like a nuclear power plant, actually doing that requires the broader public to understand and support it.
So embracing nuclear power is a bit harder than it may seem from a technological point of view. Also, since we can currently only use fission, shielding will always lead to nuclear power being almost exclusively used for heavy stationary projects or at best something that floats such as a very large nuclear powered boat. In those cases the weight isn't a huge factor.
This in the sense that rather than opting for a different fuel and matching reactor for the civilian use, the civilian plants were in essence scaled up military submarine reactors running on the very same stuff that went boom.
Basically the idea seemed to be to use civilian uses to amplify military capacity. End result was a mixing of roles that one is hard pressed to untangle.
Incredible little movie, well worth watching.
Quite neat to see how many of these features we already have today and which ones we definitely do not and probably never will.
Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised...
Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly
the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore.
Technology stopped.
Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?
Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip
and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the
Moon?I'm trapped in a world before later on I'm trapped in a world before later on
Where's my hovercraft? Where's my jet pack?
Where's the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now?
We're trapped in a world before later on We're trapped in a world before later on
Where's our telray? Where's our space face? Where are all the complications we won't see around?
(Daniel Amos - "(It's The 80s So Where's Our) Rocket Packs")
And we're making pretty good progress on the holodeck. Sure, we're still waiting for warp drive and the transporter, but still we're batting over 500. That's not too shabby.
I'm not convinced that such extensive surveillance will be necessary for safety purposes. Detectors for explosives, and security around critical points like airlocks, is likely to be sufficient.
Ultimately, when we can build them out of carbon nanotubes instead of steel, we'll be able to make them much larger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder
With extensive surveillance and AI good enough to interpret body-language with a high-degree of accuracy, you could have a very general detector; as long as the person knows they are being malicious, I bet it'll generally show up in his/her body-language.
Which of course opens up the possibility of having patsy's who don't know they are carrying a bomb or what-not and so have normal body language, so specific and general detection mechanisms are probably going to be needed...
We're used to living in a (relatively) fault-tolerant environment, where if I damage my home's plumbing it will, at worst, damage my neighbours apartments -- it won't kill them instantly by letting all the air out!
All it takes is for the gas to be temporarily shut down or for the owners to be gone long enough not to notice before a sizable amount of gas has pooled and a few days later boom.
In Romania they make this extra easy by exporting the interface to shut down the gas to just outside of the apartment door. (This is not the fire-crew shut-off valve, simply one that the gas company can seal off if you don't pay your bills without opening the door to your apartment.)
Fortunately most gas gear has a shut-off for that scenario but stoves do not and a couple of explosions per year due to gas leaks and left open gas taps result.
But then I remind myself to look at:
- wikipedia
- the Khan Academy (though they've started spamming!)
- Google search (you can keep the rest)
- Open Access journals
- Linux
But we're also increasing the power of the individual to rise above all sorts of problems with pervasive learning and commerce opportunities. You help a billion people live ten years longer and receive a decent education? You've done probably more good than allowing some western countries to become police states.
It's all relative. As an artist, I find it much more important to keep finding flaws in my work and improving, but I can't do that to the extent of missing out on smelling the roses.
Or -- yeah bud, but things still suck! :)
We love it, the discordance between what might have been and the plastic shittiness of what is, and we hate that Hollywood happy ending bollocks where everyone is going to live for even and ever and everything will be quite super.
https://medium.com/message/a-desirable-future-haiku-ff01d63c...
(Although I have a soft spot for Elon Musk's projects: both Tesla and SpaceX seem poised to go the distance, and they're both potentially huge game-changers in their respective fields.)
I attribute this to a very simple thing: We had these youthful dreams and we realize that we are probably not going to be around to see them realized.
(and yep, egg on my face for not looking at the link poster)
It's his own personal blog, and a fan echo chamber. So that's fair enough. But it's tiresome.
(I realize these stereotypes are just stereotypes... I mention them here because they seem to fit well.)
If you're aware that your stereotypes are just stereotypes could you try a little harder next time? Nothing worse than being aware of the failings of your arguments but using them anyway.
I believe its about 742 million for Europe as a whole and about 507 million for the EU.
Or was there some Eurostat poll I missed and we really do have 300 million cynical people here.... :-)
And of course, we're all super optimistic :-)
Of course, what we call Reaganism in the US, they would call Thatcherism in the UK/Scotland. So much for progress, hail stupidity and greed forever!
Your comment is not only wrong, it's rude. I'm disappointed and a bit alarmed.
I'm getting tired of this hateful bashing here on HN. I'm really sorry to see it from the old guard. You've been here a long time, so have I.
I am still waiting for this experience, where I realize that humans must be tagged and tracked like animals. So far it hasn't come.
We've taken combat-trained soliders -- many times with live weapons -- and put them on airplanes and flown them around the world. Nobody needed tagging. We've had random groups of strangers thrown into lifeboats after various maritime disasters. Nobody needed tagging. We have all kinds of examples where one bad individual might cause great harm to others, yet taqgging was not an answer.
The only reason we're talking about tagging now is because the tech is here. It's convenient -- and much easier than trying to figure out how to have a civil society. Screw getting governments more responsive: just treat all of the citizens as potential criminals.
The Panopticon is not the answer, for ludicrously simple reasons that any half-educated person should be able to ascertain.
</rant>
What is it?