Futurism

[unixronin]

It's 2007.  Where's my flying car, dammit?

No, Möller's ground-effect Jetsons personal flying saucer does not count.  Even if the control system would let you get it above ten feet altitude, it'd probably be almost uncontrollable out of ground effect, and I'll bet it's noisy as hell.

Comments

[danjite.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, in his pursuit of the flying car, he had to design better mufflers to make his earlier attempts city friendly.

The design he created spun into the Supertrapp company, which he sold for millions.

He made two other tangential fortunes as a result of creating things for his flying car dream.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Interesting ... I didn't know that Möller was behind Supertrapp.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I'd be pleased with clean electrical power too cheap to meter, and nanoassembly/replication technology.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

My recollection of the timescale of The Diamond Age is that it takes place some 40 to 60 years after Snow Crash, which is itself at least about 20-30 years in our future. So it looks like on the Stephenson timeline at least, we have about another hundred years to wait for our nanoassembly/replication technology. If the bugs can be worked out, though, geothermal might give us that "clean electrical power too cheap to meter", if anything ever does.
(Which is not to say it'll be unmetered. When does any US industry ever give anything away for free except as a sample to hook you?)

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Geothermal generation would probably have to work as a co-op rather than as a pay-for-performance enterprise, because geothermal resources are extensive geographically and there is the risk of subsidence. The co-op can then sell power to the grid if they so choose.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm aware, the risk of subsidence is confined to systems that take the quick-and-dirty approach of extracting hot groundwater. The geothermal generation systems I was talking about involve drilling a deep borehole into hot rock, injecting water and capturing the resulting steam (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070804/ap_on_sc/drilling_for_heat), and should have, at worst, no greater likelihood of causing surface ground subsidence than an oil well. (And I'm not aware of any reports of ground subsidence associated with oil wells.)

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info.

Obviously, nanoassembly/replication and limitless cheap/free energy would make a huge dent into material scarcity.

Until then, there's DMT (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grcqs9cDuN8). :P

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't have Flash configured in this browser, for reasons of stability, and I'm already afraid. Is this anything like the Time Cube (http://www.timecube.com/)?

[smandal.livejournal.com]

No :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine) ()

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

DVDs, GM food, mp3 players, and blackberries are what you got instead. :-)

Julie

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

I admit my ignorance. Stephenson's timeline is smack in the middle of one of my blank spots. Got a URL?

Anyway, most future predictions I've seen from the past (what a mouthful!) have overestimated physics improvements and underestimated infotech and biotech improvements.

Except that they expected a magic bullet cure for cancer, instead of the piecemeal treatments we have now that, for many people and many cancers, together amount to cures.

Geez, and what about Frederik Pohl's Heechee books and organ markets. Yikes!

The problem with writing this shit is that unless a technology is taken for granted in passing and has little to do with the plot, you have to make it have a humongous scorpion sting in its tail. In real life, new technologies frequently have very limited "catches" to them--unless you have a Luddite perspective and just hate change.

Weber is right. Technology is the cure to technology's by-blow environmental (and other) problems.

But unless there's a huge downside, you rarely have a story. If you don't want a downside, a scientific or technological leap usually has to be purely ancillary to the story.

Which is why I like crossovers like spy stories or military stories set in a possible future. You can be more realistic with technological advances' up-sides and down-sides.

Julie

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, Stephenson never stated a specific timeline or specific dates. But my best recollection is that there are references in the text of Snow Crash that place it no earlier than about 2030, and likely in the region of 20 to 30 years later than that. (I'd have to look up the text and find the specific passages referring to the origins of the burbclaves to be able to say more definitely than that.) There are also correlations and side-references between characters in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age that appear to indicate The Diamond Age takes place about 40-60 years after the events of Snow Crash. That gives us a likely estimated window of somewhere around 2070 - 2110 for the events of The Diamond Age.

Of course, someone with connections in the industry could always simply ask Neal Stephenson. :)

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

In the article I read they said it did not use ground effect and that was why it could maneuver so well over bad terrain. But that is wrong. Bad news article no cookie.

http://www.moller.com/videom200x.htm