What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?
Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
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Public transportation.
RELIABLE public transport. I guess that's too sci-fi
[ WWWWWWW sounds in the distance ]
Do you hear that? It's the Japanese laughing at your comment.
Slow down there. Keep it reasonable
Wow this hits the feels so hard… Like it’s impressive how hard we have worked against this goal…
Oh look, another 'Murican "only the US exists" type comment.
Public transportation is common worldwide.
UBI. Not only is it viable but it works in improving everyone's lives, not just the people receiving it.
Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won't someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It's literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don't change a system by feeding it.
I won't say it's a bad thing... but it's not a solution. It's a stop gap.
It's probably a necessary step towards dismantling the monetary system entirely, though.
In the Star Trek future, they couldn't accomplish that until they perfected Replicator technology.
Is there a specific mention of that, or just something people assume? I googled a single reddit thread, which clearly makes me an expert (/s), and it seemed as though money was really just kind of a fuzzy concept up until they declared they didn't use money sometime around Star Trek 4.
I do remember them specifically saying that their economic system was completely changed by Replicator technology, although I don't remember who said it, or in what context. I don't even remember which show. I'm pretty sure I heard it correctly, because I remember it being a massive revelation to me. That was the single event that completely shifted all humanity away from a capitalist society.
There were no replicators in TOS
TOS was just the dress rehearsal for the real Star Trek universe.
UBI will be necessary when the combination of AI and robotics creates a permanent 35+% unemployment rate. We will have to institute UBI, or reduce the population by that much. Which objective will each party choose to support, and how will they accomplish it?
One leading party often seems willing to accept war as a means to ends they care about.
In a total lack of contrast, the other leading party seems roughly equally willing to accept war as a means to ends they care about.
The bigger question that bothers me is how much war exactly will they feel is needed for any population reduction they feel is necessary?
And will it be more war than the amount of war I would have otherwise participated in, in my lifetime?
War is a useful tool to reduce populations, but fairly inefficient until they start throwing bombs around. It can't be the only strategy.
Another good strategy is to restrict access to medical care. Make it incredibly expensive, so costly that many people will choose to die, rather then burden their families with the cost.
Another good one is to end childhood vaccines. A good pandemic can wipe out millions. Of course, this is only happening in America, so the wealthy will be able to afford vaccines from foreign countries, and survive any strategic pandemics. I wouldn't be surprised if Stephen "PeeWee Himmler" Miller released a deadly virus on purpose, something like Ebola, just to speed the process along.
Then there is Climate Change, which is wreaking havoc on our environment, and causing far worst storms and floods. Restrict or even end FEMA, and our annual natural disasters can claim victims with much more efficiency.
Criminalize EVERYTHING, and throw more people in prison, where the mortality rate is much higher. Allow the military/ law enforcement to fire on protesters. Allow police to kill without consequences.
Prohibit Birthright Citizenship, allowing the deportation of millions of American citizens. Don Jr, Ivanka, and Eric are all Birthright Citizens, so they should be deported as well, but we all know that Aristocrats won't be included.
And if doing all this, and more, doesn't reduce the population fast enough, we can always go down the proven path of Death Camps.
Exactly, what are those useless sociopaths supposed to be doing now? Actual labor? Come on....!
Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won't need money
Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it's just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won't. They'll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
I mean... yeah... that's what UBI is.
I was criticizing UBI as a concept, not how it's implemented.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn't enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can't fix it with more demand (cash).
Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won't, not can't, fix these problems.
A large institution may be risk averse. But a smaller firm trying to gain ground in the market would likely be more than happy to take on the risk and slimmer margins. After all, if capitalism wasn't okay with slim margins, then restaurants and grocery stores wouldn't exist.
Yes, and then that smaller firm fails because they take too many risks that have little chance of success. They end up being bought up by the larger firms, and all their assets put towards those higher value investments.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, "won't" is the wrong word.
Along with UBI, there also needs to be UBH, and other basic needs.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don't incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you'll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe... but I have yet to see that evidence.
That's not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there's no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food's famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can't grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won't be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said "you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here", then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
You don't need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn't say it had to be distributed equally just because there's no money.
Chicken and vegetarian was just an example, also the chicken was implicitly dead in my example so it was no longer sentient, also also there might be non moral reasons, which paint color do we give people for their walls? How often? Etc etc etc.
In the request system you propose there needs to be some sort of pointing or valuation, requesting a car should not be equivalent to requesting an apple. Whatever form of valuation you use for that, there's your currency. Not to mention that for the requesting system to be able to work the government would need to own all products so it can redistribute them according to requests, and what would it do if 100 people requested something that only 50 were made? It's a nice idea but it becomes very complicated very fast, whereas using currency takes away all of that complication and gives you something tangible that could be implemented tomorrow instead of in 20 years being very generous.
Just because something is easier to implement doesn't mean it will work better.
Honestly, that's the biggest hurdle our current economic systems are facing. People go for the easy option that seems like it should work instead of the longer term plan that has more flexibility and chance for success.
The problem with your suggestion is that it still hinges on the capitalist system to provide for people. And thus is far easier to exploit.
Yeah sure, but you have got to be realistic, you're talking about a 20/50 year plan even if you get everyone to agree with it. Yes, Capitalism is bad, yes there are problems with UBI, but the thing you're proposing is impossible, whereas UBI is something that could be implemented tomorrow, and would set a good foundation to move things in the right direction. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.
Oh, is that all
There's a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they'll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn't have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That's why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone's resource needs are different. You can't just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we're not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn't require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
As I said to the other person, there can be a donation and request system to make sure everyone gets what they need, without tying money into it and having this weird limit of the amount of stuff people can get, and tying the idea of value to it all.
What if you make a request and no one wants to donate what you need? Would you not then want a way to incentivize someone to make the donation, or incentivize someone else to make more of what you need?
UBI would be amazing for the economy. It's basically Trickle UP economics. The money will still eventually end up in the pocket of some rich guy, but at least it will grease the gears of the economy on the way up.
Citation needed
Challenge accepted, but I'm not going to cite some media story. Instead, I'll use a real-life example that we ALL lived through:
During the Covid quarantine, Americans were issued checks to help offset financial issues caused by not working, essentially UBI. While everyone thought the quarantine would cause an economic slump, the government-issued checks had the opposite effect - the economy boomed.
When all those Americans got extra money, they didn't do what wealthy people do, and hoard it, they spent it. They caught up on bills, they bought new vehicles, appliances, furniture, etc. All that government money poured into the economy, and it boomed. Delivery services like Uber Eats and Door Dash finally got their feet under them, and became viable businesses for the first time. Huge online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc. all reported record sales, and record profits, and record stock prices.
It was thought that if everyone stayed home from work, the economy would crash, but as long as they had money to spend, the economy actually increased significantly. Economically, it was the best part of Trump's first term.
That wasn't a theory, or a study, or even a small test case in a city or even a state. That was a nationwide experiment, using multiple payments over a fairly long time period, and it proved that giving money to the lower economic strata produces huge economic gains, far more than giving tax incentives to the wealthy.
And it didn't hurt the wealthy at all. They still got even richer, but everyone else got to benefit too. Trickle UP Economics works, and the only reason not to do it is if the Ruling Class simply doesn't want us to have it, for their own selfish reasons, which is primarily because it is easier to maintain control of poor people who rely on you for what little money they are allowed to have.
If the Sociopathic Oligarchs and Corporations won't come to their senses, and cooperate with a new economic paradigm that works for all citizens, then sooner or later we will spontaneously switch to Robin Hood Economics, and that usually comes accompanied with things like guillotines, nooses, and firing squads. They won't like that at all. It will be far better for them if we shift to Trickle UP Economics before we get to that point.
Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.
A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.
Madness!!
The moon base (and/or moon orbit base) isn't just cool, it would facilitate building ships in space that don't have to escape the gravity well. That and asteroid mining (to get materials for ship building) would be such a huge step to having a real presence off-planet.
Mine materials on asteroids, send them to the moon refinery and manufacturing facility, send parts up to lunar orbital ship building facility, send ships to Europa, Ganymede, etc.
THAT'S COMMUNISM
Socialism technically, but I get your sarcasm. I hope it is sarcasm.
Well they did say Sci-Fi and we all know how likely that stuff is. So I think we're "safe" with Late Stage Capitalism.
The technology has never been what is holding us back.
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
OP says, "with our current current level of technology."
We have the technology to overcome any logistics issue pertaining to eliminating scarcity (and by extension, poverty). What we lack is the societal structure.
This is what frustrates me because in theory yes, you're right. But in reality those shareholders are not who you think they are. Many of them are your relatives through 401k and RRSP managed funds.
What I'm getting at is it would be great to Luigi a bunch of billionaires but the reality is the problem is systemic and no amount of murder is going to solve that.
We go back to the Levellers and the Diggers. My gut tells me we are going to everyone screaming for change ultimately get what they want which is someone will be beheaded but then in the aftermath you all have no fucking plan and guess what? In a few years we are going to be right back here again.
I hope I'm wrong, but history has a way of repeating the same beats over and over again.
Technically, you don't know that. /s
Not just capitalism, but all forms of corrupt, greedy governments.
The whole "we have plenty of housing if only the greedy capitalists would give it to us" claim is very much false. Empty homes are typically empty for a reason. They are being remodelled, or are searching for new renters, or have been condemned, or are in a legal limbo of some sort, etc. The idea that rich people are buying homes en masse and then keeping them empty makes no sense, since they would make more money by buying those homes and then renting them - then they get appreciated home values and rent money to warm their cold, capitalist hearts.
What is actually happening is far more mundane: people are moving to more desireable areas, and are choosing to live in smaller households. A two bedroom home that used to house mom and dad and Jack and Jill in their bunk beds now houses only Jill, plus her home office. And you can't force Jill to take in a homeless man as a roommate, at least not in a democratic society.
They said scifi, not fantasy :p
We could be solarpunk. Like, right now. With everything using clean energy and plants everywhere.
That would be so nice.
Arcologies.
Dense housing with good soundproofing, atop commercial space, in a walkable neighborhood.
Wouldn't need rent control if there was more houses.
This. This is the solar punk dream.
Add a rooftop patio or gardening setup and I might cream my jeans
Walkable cities are sOcIaLiSm!
Except the arcologies part, that's not even sci-fi, it exists across east asia.
Telemetry free consumer products would be nice
I'm on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
If my data was used to refine and improve the products and services I interact with I'd be fine with it but as it stands it's just used to help make my life hell and exploit my existence for cash.
100% this. Telemetry and market research are fine. Hell Some opt in, totally 100% disableable targeted ads are fine as long as they're not excessive and in the way. Flagrant selling of info however, does not spark joy.
Fair point. Ethical opt-in seems alright
Mech suits.
We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
I'm an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don't have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn't demand them much, at least with our current technology.
There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side--the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less "mech suit" and more "assistive arm" type of things.
So you want wanzers.
Seriously though, realize that if we ger Mecha, it's going to be more like Armored Core. Or a game set in an AC4 AU, Metal Wolf Chaos.
Do you want the US President (especially the current one, to have something like that, and be told to believe in his own justice?
We already know what a president with a robot body is like.
IDK why they would need to be that big. I don't even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.
Reasons I can think of for the size:
That's all I can immediately justify, but basically, it would have to be huge.
This is the sole reason we can't have mechs until we develop high energy portable nuclear power, or discover something equally as capable.
A rocket launching satellites is like 90% fuel, the structure is remarkably similar to the thickness of a tin can, and it only carriers a few thousand pounds of payload, all while only running for a minute or so before being empty. We simply don't have the power capability for anything approaching a large mech without it having to be wired to a power grid.
It's why in the Robotics;Notes visual novel, they have to invent some meteorite that gives a lot of power and is small, just so their story about realistic mechas being everywhere work.
Roof-top gardens everywhere! Like the launch arcologies in SimCity 2000. They looked cool as fuck.
Plants on buildings bring some architectural and safety challenges, depending on how large they are. You need to somehow get dirt and water up, and the dirt can be pretty heavy. If something falls down into the ground it could hit someone and injured them. And also, with time, roots could lessen the structural integrity of a building.
No doubt, but I love the aesthetic
If you love underground, the world is your rooftop garden!
I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.
I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.
Why think small?
The asteroids are just sitting there.
We could move all of Earth's heavy industries off planet.
We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can't really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we'd need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we'd have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there's very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.
Something tells me you've not worked much in said heavy industries. That is scifi hopium.
Just so I don't waste my time, why don't you list all the degrees you hold in chemistry, astrophysics, and mining engineering? Then show the research you did that shows why it would be impossible. Please cite as many references as you can.
nah, ill save us both the effort and block you. bye
We could have been doing this since the 70s. Nothing sci-fi about it. The plans to do it are outlined in:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
When humanity turned it's back on this project, we sealed our fate as a failed planet.
Vegas can make money from tourusm in a desert, a hotel on the moon (with a casino) will do just fine.
According to this article, a tourist space flight is/will cost $450,000. That's just to break earth's atmosphere. Tack on the additional cost of several days of space flight to reach and return from the moon, plus breaking the Moon's gravity to return, plus the cost of building, maintaining, and staffing a moon base. Costs would be unbelievably prohibitive.
Vegas, meanwhile, is built on draining gambling-addicted grandmas' pension funds. You can't target that demo on the moon.
You haven't been to vegas lately. Grandma is not the target. Rich people who want to flaunt it is. Sounds like a match made in... heaven. Lol.
And since the gap between the haves and have nots is growing, it a perfect way for the haves to separate themsleves. Think back to the first commercial airliners. It was only for the rich. And it made a lot of money that way.
Free food.
How exactly is free food (or free anything) achievable within our current technological level?
If 6.6 Billion could end starvation in 43 countries than I don't see what is stopping us from making food free other than greed.
The Golden Temple in India has fed >50,000 people for free (Langar) every single day for fucking centuries.
We throw out massive amounts of food every year, often because it sits too long and rots.
We have the technology to fix this. Corporations just don't.
If we have the technology to fix this, why arent the corporations using it to make more money on the food they made instead of throwing it away?
First explain to me what technological limits are creating the food scarcity we're experiencing.
Sounds to me like you don't understand the question.
The food scarcity is certainly not due to technological limitations, but we very much can't create food for free. The food you eat is produced by the very hard work of many people, most (probably all) of them severely underpaid. In a fair world it will be these people the ones receiving the fruit of their labor instead of some rich bastards, but I don't think food will be cheaper, maybe even the opposite.
I understand the question, maybe you don't understand how the world works.
We easily produce enough food to feed everyone with our current technology level. Making it free and available to everyone is mostly a logistics and economic problem.
Fusion energy. Man, we are so close!
Yeah, you know what they say: only thirty more years.
With adequate funding. That's the part that always gets omitted. We haven't been funding the research to make it happen.
Abolishing the concept of money. Probably won't happen but it would be pretty cool.
Money is a useful idea, and useful ideas are notoriously hard to kill.
I can see replacing cash with transfers but not removing currency entirely, but that's my POV. What would you replace it with instead?
Nothing. Humanity as a whole would have to evolve past the carrot and stick mentality for this to work. That's why I said it probably won't happen 😅
Hemp as a replacement for plastics and synthetic materials. Food packaging shouldn't have a longer shelf life than it's contents.
Sunchips was using PLA, which is a step in the right direction.
Ah yes ... The Thunderbags™... You were not sneaking any snacks around those things.
How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?
We're so close. My dryer turns all my stuff inside out. I feel like if it can do that, it can fold the stuff too...
Damn, never heard that machines could do that already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C76osXtpLeM
someone was working on one years ago and it seems to never have come to market
Wikipedia says they closed down in 2021, but I'm also seeing this with updates as recent as this year: [link removed]
Edit: I removed the link. There are a bunch of really legit looking Foldimate websites and they are all scams.
such a bummer. this would have been a huge win for those with dexterity/mobility issues. i bet some laundromats would have purchased some also, which could have potentially decreased the price of wash & fold service (or they may have even made some available to be rented by customers to use themselves inside the laundromat)
That's really cool, thanks. I always wondered what such a contraption would look like. Too bad it didn't make it to market.
The real sci-fi dream is to have a machine that can take a bin of totally unsorted laundry (everything from socks to bedsheets), then wash, dry, and fold it all into a basket. I don't know if that could be done without some very human-like arms and better AI than we have today.
for complex tasks like laundry I wonder if material recycling and on-demand manufacturing will advance far enough first that we end up "3d printing" (or Star Trek replicating) clothes and then just tossing dirty ones into a material recycling system, well before we have the tech to make a robot wash them haha
Socialism
Alarm clock that reads my brain activity and only wakes me up at the point in my REM cycle, where i'll feel refreshed waking up.
These exist in smartwatches. Not reading your brain activity but tracking your micro movements (or macro) and vibrating on your wrist when you are in a lighter stage of sleep around your alarm time.
I believe this does actually exist but the most reliable one is from a company that went out of business, so you have to buy second hand
Edit: Its the Zeo Sleep Manager
Along somewhat similar lines, I wouldn't mind a fan that monitored my temperature while sleeping and adjusts its speed accordingly.
Totally possible with homeassistant. They also make temperature controlled "smart" beds.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/adaptive-fan-speed-control-based-on-temperature-and-speed-range/678152
Similarly I want something that I can set to put me to sleep for X hours guaranteed. Insomnia is a bitch and ambien is awful. I just want to get ready for bed, set my alarm, and wake up exactly when I need to.
Sounds like a fun Hack a Day-esque project for someone out there. If you can secure it well enough to stay in place while you sleep, can probably make something with a repurposed Star Wars Force Trainer headset, an Arduino, and some means of triggering an alarm (the fact that we're just out there selling EEG tech as a kids toy is nuts to me).
I just wake up a few minutes before my alarm due to my internal clock. Doesn't matter what time I go to bed.
Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
I've got good news for you! We've been terraforming the planet to be more like Arrakis for a couple decades already!
Ah, the chapterhouse: Dune strategy
I don't know why I haven't thought about terraforming earth until I read it in a sci Fi book and it seemed like the simplest and best thing to do, over terraforming mars or Venus. We have the tech for bioengineering, cloud seeding (I think), chemicals to help stimulate growth of natural plants (at least for the ocean).
Oceans don't need seeding, they just need us to stop fucking bottom trawling for, like, 5 minutes
A moonbase.
The viewscreen from Star Trek. It's actually real but nobody really wants to use it.
Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.
I've explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually "okay why TF would I wanna do that?" So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other "big family holiday" thing where you have that one person who won't participate because it's their partner's family's turn to see the kids or whatever... so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they're 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you're broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it's like Thanksgiving and it's based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you're looking into that other room.
I feel like the end result here would be saying hi like a normal phone call, and then kind of awkwardly ignoring and avoiding the tv for the rest of the night. All the problems with video conferencing, but multiplied.
It gets used a lot in a business setting, we've multiple rooms at work set up for this.
Right, business, and using tech most consumers don’t have. So that is definitely a thing. What I’m saying is, most families have access to it with consumer grade stuff.
I mean, they habe. I have been applying to tech jobs, and so far all of them had a first interview via video call.
I've thought the same thing, Trying to hold a video call between families using a phone or even a laptop is such an awkward experience, especially if you want to just hang out virtually for an extended time like you said.
But it wouldn't even have to involve a separate box or docked phone. Everyone's got a smart TV that can run apps, so all it should take is a USB webcam with a decent far-field mic.
But yeah, in general I'm surprised this isn't more of a common use case.
In theory that should work if the app can access a USB port on the TV and use the webcam. I haven’t heard of it being done though. The Apple solution works and it’s intended to be used like that.
But really, a lot of smart TVs run Android and Android has a surprising amount of supported devices (I suppose due to it basically being Linux). I bet you could hook a DVD burner up to an Android phone, and I’m sure a third party file manager could read files off a disc. Burning though? Should be possible but you’d need an app to talk to the DVD writer. And that, I’ve never heard of. You’d think a webcam would be easier but I think the software stack in an Android phone would only use its internal cameras without an app. The camera app for example is only going to look at the installed ones. It doesn’t know to look at the USB interface for more. But a third party camera app might.
I have a USB C hub and I do have an old Android phone (Galaxy S10, 2019). I do not have a webcam or DVD writer though.
That said, now that I think about it, if you hook a Samsung phone — not sure about others — up to a TV with USB C to HDMI, it kinda becomes a little desktop computer with the TV as monitor. I wonder, if you initiated a video chat, if you could do it with just a Samsung phone. Or really any phone that will display mirror to a TV.
I have a TV from 2014 that has Skype support with a USB webcam. Just saying.
The problem it that sound is limited in physical space, so you can move around a room, talking to one person and then another.
Your proposal is like getting two groups of people to stand on opposite sides of a room and then communicate by shouting at each other.
Think of it like two groups of people in separate rooms with a large open window between them. Not everyone is trying to talk one on one to the other group all the time. And sometimes just feeling like you're in the same physical space can be nice.
It's not perfect, but in many circumstances it's worlds better than having tiny portable windows that mostly facilitate one on one conversation.
A one on one conversation sounds far preferrable to what you are describing. There would be far too much crosstalk.
Could also just get two laptops with webcams doing a zoom call, and HDMI the display over to your TVs
Augmented reality overlaying historical photos and 3d models so you can literally see history as your walking.
Imagine being able to visit The White City that was built for the World's Fair in Chicago. Or seeing New York before sky scrapers dominated the landscape.
While you're admiring a building which was there in 1925, you get run over by a car which is there in 2025.
Or "blink twice to unlock a 2 hour view of this building for
59,9958,99! Limit time offer only."I think your idea is beautiful.
I think your idea is beautiful.
Nuclear rocket engines. A bit less ambitious than most of the responses, but most things here seem to either refer to technologies we don't have yet but seem within a century or so of developing, which doesn't fit the question, or vague consequences that one wants that tech to have without it being clear how our current technology gets there. But nuclear rockets definitely fit the question, because we have built and ground tested them before, decades ago even, we just haven't bothered to actually use the things. And they should theoretically make developing things like space industry or manned space exploration beyond the moon more viable, by being more efficient than chemical rockets while giving better thrust than ion engines do. They don't work well for launching from the ground, but since our launch abilities have increased a fair bit in the past decade or so, actually getting the things to space in order to use them should be easier than ever.
Last time I checked on that one, the opposition to the idea was focused on the risks of nuclear fallout from a failed launch.
It's a valid concern, but considering that quite a few rockets, to include some currently in use, can contain quite large amounts of some truly nasty chemicals already, and apparently can be made acceptably safe despite this, I'd bet that it's probably possible to manage that risk or find flight paths that minimize exposure in the case of an accident. For that matter, we've launched radioactive materials into space before, some space probes use decay heat for a power source.
I remember the hand-wringing about Cassini prior to its launch. The probe survived launch from Earth fine, but Saturn got the materials in the end (I also remember people stating that we polluted Saturn without the Saturnian's consent).
I believe several RTGs have been recovered from failed launches intact and without leakage, so I agree it can be done.
Terraform a planet.
Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.
If we can't even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they're gonna bring dead space rocks to life?
At the current rate, wherever humans go, we'll just bring our trashy ways with us...
Terraforming Earth. Making Earth Earthlike.
That sounds like socialism!
It sounds much clever than venusforming Earth
That's called geoengineering generally
And it’s a very bad idea to experiment geoengineering with Earth. You don’t develop in production.
I would just like complete control of my various web things. be able to restrict banking activity by source (so like lock my savings to only move between my checking and no where else), be able to make temporary credit card numbers that I can not only limit the amount of a single charge but max total that can be charged and daily charge and monthly charge and also be able to limit it to one payer. So like I make it and use it to pay for something than can go back and click on the the vendor payed and say lock it to only that vendor. Have an investment account where I can setup a variety of investments by percentage and have it keep those percentages as markets move. oh and have a local location for all my things where you can get any help including for their website although thats not exactly technology.
For the credit card thing, there used to be an app called Private that you could set up temporary numbers with. I think you could do some level of recurring payments with it too. Not sure it's it's been enshittified yet though
oh I guess I have to add all without apps. Some of this stuff even then exists to some degree but its kinda sad its not implemented just generally. There is so much computers could do but there just is no incentive to maximize customer capability. If anything they tend to look to monetize any feature or limit it in a way to make it shitty or make money for the company outside of their normal streams. Like schwab has this robo adviser but its way limited and forces you to keep a lot in cash yet at the same time is very slow to rebalance (the reasoning they give for the cash is to deal with rebalancing which should allow it to do it relatively quickly.)
By the way, app is called privacy. Biggest problem with it is that it uses plaid to connect to your bank so you have to trust them with your bank password.
I use it though and love it. Every card can have its own limits like per transaction, per month, per year, or total ever.
Here is something we don't have that I think we could: Automated vegetable farming.
I've seen these watering gantries that are fixed at the center of a circular field and then rotate radially around that point to water the field. Could you use that as a rail with an effector arm on it that can plant, weed, tend, fertilize and harvest the field, such that in goes seeds and out comes vegetables? Without the liability of free roaming robotic tractors and combine harvesters. Surely the issue here would be software.
Those are called pivots, and what you are saying seems plausible: there are vision algorithms to recognize and selectively spray weeds (see Bilberry ), recent prototypes with light-pressure grabbers to gather fruits and soft vegetables.
Even for harvesters, there are projects to automate harvesting and swapping the grain trucks (see Outrun ). GPS-guided (or assisted) tractors are already a thing.
Agriculture has some interesting innovations, but it often gets bogged down in corporate acquisitions and monetization.
I've seen a project for adapting Reprap 3D printer technology to a raised bed garden, with a multi-function tool head that can individually plant seeds, it weeds by poking weeds deep into the soil, it waters individual plants according to that plant's need...so I thought why not scale that up to multiple acres in size?
I'm into hydroponics as a hobby grower and there are certain techniques for veggie growing that are set and forget. You plant and harvest only, no weeding, no watering. As far as I understand, traditional techniques are still cheaper though
I'm into vegetable gardening as a hobby, my land is essentially beach sand, the only thing that grows in the local dirt is tetanus, so I grow in raised beds and import or make all of my soil. What kind of hardware and rigging does a hydroponic garden take?
I never stopped dreaming about flying cars, I just think it's not gonna happen because a crash would easily kill people just sitting in their homes.
I am grateful everyday that cars cannot fly.
Helicopters exist, they are expensive, loud, require pilot training and skill, and still crash sometimes.
Compared to aviation, road vehicles have virtually no structured regulations.
Even road rules are considered optional by many drivers. Lots of people drive without a licence.
I think a moon colony was possible at minimum the mid 90's. I only think bureaucracy got in the way along with a very stunted space shuttle.
There is also the cost.
The American program to go to the Moon cost several percentage points of American GDP over several years to get there. The USA could have physically had a moon base up there, but it would have been wildly expensive.
I will agree there. But the mining and manufacturing potential is rather insane. We could make money back rather quickly.
Agreed, a lot of sci-fi infastructure is technically feasable its just the logistics and our lack of organisation as a species that gets in the way. We could also technically start on a dyson swarm and a lunar space elevator (not an earth one though) with modern technology and materials.
I'm glad to see that we are moving forward with it, I just would rather it not be by Elon. But he has the tools to get it done.
Finding a way to use organic matter in 3d printing so I can say "Computer...one strawberry milkshake", similar to Picard.
Earl Gray, hot.
*strips naked* I'm ready for you, babe *flexes*
I've seen someone convert a 3d printer to use chocolate. Not quite the same thing, but custom chocolate bunnies are possible at least.
A caring society
Library economy.
The torment nexus
Just a few more billions and it'll be complete.
Flying cars.
Asteroid mining.
Maybe a Moon or Mars colony.
End poverty.
Universal basic income/ post scarcity society.
Least to most fictional I think.
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. And the limits to us having post scarcity are all societal/political, not technological.
The limit is skill and discipline.
Most people can’t even drive a car that is held on the ground by gravity. You want them to…fly?
Its kinda harder to crash when you add an extra dimention (more space to freely maneuver around)
Helicopters aren't exactly convenient personal transport. We could definitely make smaller maybe autopiloted transports.
Regarding post scarcity, that was the point, we could do it now with enough motivation.
Yeah I wouldn't want them with people driving then, I'd definitely want some sort of automation to be in charge especially if there were similar amounts to road traffic.
Post capitalism.
We have automation for so much manufacturing. We have solar energy which is basically free after manufacture. We could spend a fairly small amount of time really working towards automating most resource extraction and processing.
We could have a really good standard of living not just in the west but globally and we could in the process resolve the threats of climate change but instead we have billionaires.
I think if we had the tech to make replicators (Trek), we would easily be able to go full on post-cap, as that would essentially end hunger, our over extraction of earth’s resources, landfills, recycling, people not being able to afford basics like groceries, etc. I think we have the capability to do that now without that tech, but as a species, lack the will and compassion.
From what I have read there is no physical reason that we could not all have a reasonable standard of living right now with no extra technology. The reason for poverty is not a scarcity if resources, it is a distribution problem. Some people take too much and use systems like law and governance to enforce their relative position. Ditching individual wealth would solve most of the issues which prevent a good life for everyone. Being as most wars are ultimately about wealth and the same for borders it would be revolutionary.
Cybernetics
Downloadable internet. You stick a pendrive in your PC with internet connection, fill it with internet and then go wherever you want, you have a usb router with data available to use and surf the net.
It is funny because that defeats the principle of the Internet as a shared, live, always on always available data space :-D
Medical Biofoam from halo, we have prototypes already
Drone deliveries, food or mail. Its being trialed small scale but I want it everywhere.
::: spoiler Rosey! :::
Constructing an Orbital ring and then using that to get a form of space elevator built.
Totally possible to build with our current technology but the cost if we do it pre space elevator or similar is pretty insane.
Building a ring let's us basically have a stable space side anchor at low earth orbit instead of geo sync ish like you need for a normal space elevator to match ground speed.
Even more fun is cost for additional rings drops massively and you can build them in different orientations you can get space elevators to rings without having to be on the equator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
Last and my favorite part is the possibility of having literally trains that go up to a ring cross an ocean and go back down. Wouldn't be faster than planes but massively better cargo capacity and efficiency as well as comfortable for passengers.
From what I've seen about a space elevator, is that the we don't have the means to do it without creating a massive material shortage in the world.
The most plausible idea I've seen is using the centrifugal force of the earth spinning to keep a mass at LEO. But without a futuristic material like long carbon nanotubes, we would have essentially a ten mile thick metal cord tapering to something a few feet thick, and you would be limited in payload to like a few hundred pounds.
Just curious, why do you think a ring would predate the elevator?
(Not OP) Because simply from a construction-point-of-view it's achievable now. Unlike a space elevator, a ring could actually be built and used with today's materials.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see us launching enough space raw material from ground level to build it. Not trying to sound rude, I've just been in the logistics game(even helped put a small satellite into orbit) and I just don't see the millions of tons of material needed being launched from the ground. Again, not trying to sound rude, this is just my observation from being "in the game".
Mine the moon and build the elevator and/or ring from the top down.
As AAA said in a comment beside me it isn't so much that I expect it would predate a space elevator. Simply that it is possible with current tech rather than still waiting on additional moderately likely breakthroughs like long chain carbon nanotube tether.
Also there are plenty of options to have the vast majority of the material be from space and not the surface since the core idea is a metal like copper being spun above orbital speed after being made into a full loop then used for the mag lev to keep at ground speed. There are absolutely a lot of astroids that might allow for that.
skyhook!
Free, unlimited energy.
I don't forking understand why in 2025, taking pills is still the only way for me to get better for some illness. As someone who gets pretty bad anxiety about taking pills and who sometimes almost chokes on them, I seriously can't understand how we have pocket PCs but we don't have a way to just treat things without pills. Hell, I'll drink something that tastes horrible if it means I don't gotta test my gag reflex.
Future.
AR. Being able to just pop into someone's AR world and walk around as if I was in tge same physical location.
Bikes/Ebikes/motorcycles replacing cars for single-person transport in cities.
VR chat.
AR is more complicated.
Yes, I want to pop into a live recreation of the world around somebody (as a sparkly wolf dragon with a 3million polygon ass obviously). We have the technology, just not the hardware and software.
Only the things scifi wanted to warn us about.
We already live in dystopia timelie.
Not yet, but I think we might see age reversal drugs in the not so far future.
Brain operated electronics.
Eeg headbands detect brainwaves and are used in diagnosing mental illnesses. There is also expensive portable ones for yoga people that track your sleep cycle and give statistics.
You can VERY easily have it change the TV channel or move player in a VR game. In fact there is an old starwars toy where you lift some ball by powering a hairdryer with your brainwaves for like $40.
This whole thread is just Americans saying things that they don't have that is common elsewhere. And that isn't answering the question at all. It's the ever present thing of 'Murican idiocy thinking only about the US and acting like anything else doesn't exist.
I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
The problem is capitalism and corporations. We don't need fiction to see those two don't work, they don't work in real life.
Corporations are predictable - they try to make money. If their profit motive aligns with my own interests, then what they do will be good for me. Amazon, for example, sells me all sorts of things for low prices and with great customer support. My interests and corporate interests won't necessarily align and that's why exit rights are so important, but at least I will still be dealing with an entity acting more-or-less rationally.
Plenty of other people's interests don't align with mine either - these days, it seems like most people's interests don't. What makes a corporation less reliable than my fellow Americans?
You'll get more interest in an anarcho-syndicalist zone.
yeah, being blacklisted and exiled from modern society all because I called great leader "Fuckerberg" in 2010.
so fucking cool /s
Found Peter Thiel's account
Gonna be hard to move to Amazonia if all you've got in terms of money are Zuckbucks.
Anarcho capitalists freecities are a horrible idea. Wont take long before you can buy people in there, because the only rule is the golden rule.