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

[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) ()