🚀 go-pugleaf

John Higdon <no-spam@RadioMonopoly.com> writes:
>in article 3A7D4B1E.3C22FBB8@quiotix.com, Jeffrey Siegal  wrote:
>> No, it isn't.  My comment specifically said 50 years.  I don't see any
>> chance of it happening in the next 25 years.
>
>Why is everything fifty years away? Do you have any idea what my teachers
>were telling us would be happening in fifty years...fifty years ago? Do you
>have any idea how much of it turned out to be laughable nonsense?
>
>Predict away!

Oh, this could be fun...

To quote an IBM commercial from last year, "It's the year 2000.  I was
promised flying cars.  Where are the flying cars?!"  If you want to fly
today, you still have to get a pilot license.  A drivers license just
won't cut it.

According to the 1950's futurism (an academic version of it since I wasn't
around yet to hear this in person), a major mode of transportation in the
Year 2000 should have been civilian rockets taking us to space.

I dunno.  I participate in projects to build amateur rockets as a hobby.
We have to drive out to the Nevada desert with wads of federal permits to
attempt a launch.  While we can get them up where the instrument packages
send down video of the curvature of the Earth, they're not quite getting
to space yet.  And they're definitely not carrying people.

(When one group from Sacramento was ready to go for a space launch in late
2000, an FAA bureaucrat arbitrarily denied the permit.  CNN put on their
brand of pressure to straighten that out.  So they'll try again this Spring
or Summer.)

In the 1950's no one was picturing the computer would dominate our society.
No one pictured a global network connecting all those computers available
to all of the public.  For that matter, not very many people were picturing
such a network in 1990, even those of us who were on the Internet at the
time.  We knew the exponential growth of the Internet would require the
general public's participation in order to sustain its growth but most of
us thought that growth might end for lack of applicability to the public.

And this wasn't for lack of predictions about the Year 2000.  It was sort of
a magent for predictions.  According to 1970's predictions, the world would
have run out of oil by 2000.  And lots of other calamities too.  But 2000
was a relatively slow news year - a 36-day impasse in the US presidential
election was the only thing that saved 2000 from being basically devoid of
major historical events.

So, with the 1950's picture of 2000 being so far off, I won't hazard a
guess of where things will be in 2050.  Things we see as increasing trends
today could fizzle, or suddenly take off at an exponential rate.  But it's
a near certainty that 2050 will be dominated by technologies that have
not yet been invented today, much like 2000 was compared with 1950's
visions of the future.