The Future, She is here! – by Sanford Begley

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Yes, I am better, but teaching really beat the tar out of me, this weekend.  I will post tomorrow, before I return to the springs, but today, I want to be alive enough to teach the final day and well enough not to get EXHAUSTED flying back to the springs (and not to have another relapse), and Sanford kindly offered to do this.  He’s a gracious gentleman and y’all treat him well, y’hear.  His lovely (truly, in every possible way) lady Cedar Sanderson joined us in our line up at Mad Genius Club yesterday. Go over there and tell her she’s welcome there too.*

The Future, She is here! – by Sanford Begley

This is a nonfiction article so bear with me and read the first bit as an homage to the SF stories of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The relevance will be made clear afterwards.

I Reported to dispatch and was assigned a new vessel. She was in slip 23 and all I had to do was make a simple delivery run. As I walked up to her she recognized me and popped her locks to allow me entrance. Settling into the pilots seat I brought the controls live and examined my options. I pulled some music from my youth from the entertainment center. And began my pre trip checklist. The sensors reported no faults in the system and while the tanks weren’t topped off there was plenty of fuel for a short run like I was scheduled to make. I checked the latest navigation hazard reports and entered my destination into the nav-comp. I started to bring the engines live and she balked. She wanted a better look at my credentials before she would authorize ignition. I presented my authorization to her sensors and her engines roared to life. I knew this would be a pleasant trip by the way her engines settled down and hummed.

What does that have to do with reality? It is a reasonably accurate summation of my first work activity yesterday morning. Don’t believe me? Try this description.

I went to the office where I work my secondary job and was assigned to deliver a new Cadillac to a customer. I went to parking spot 23 and the fob unlocked the door form my pocket as I approached. I sat in the drivers seat and hit the power button . I had a quarter tank of gas and was only going 20 miles so I was good. The tire pressure readings etc. were all fine so I cranked the radio and got a traffic report. Turned the oldies station and hit the start button. I then realized that this was one of those where you had to touch the fob to the start button to get it to crank, so I did. The motor sounded fine so I put the address into the gps and hit the road.

Sure sounds a lot fancier when I used the language of the old SF stories but, it illustrates a point. We often ask “Dude! They promised me a flying car and space yachts by the twenty-first century! Where are they?” No, for all practical intents and purpose we didn’t get those. We did get a lot of toys we weren’t promised. Cell phones and computers, and memory wire. There are real robots doing real work out there. No they aren’t semi-sentient devices doing everything a man can. They are purpose built machines that do a limited number of tasks very well. In short, we got the stuff of SF even if not quite how we imagined. I think we came out ahead.

I know most of you don’t think the things we got were as good as the things we didn’t get but I believe you are wrong. A simple example. When I was a lad they had a comic strip called Dick Tracy. Actually I think it is still being written but back then everyone knew it, it was one of the biggest comic strips around. The bit of SF tech they had in the strip that everyone wanted were Tracy’s two-way wrist radios. We never got them. Instead we got smart phones! No, they don’t go on the wrist but they do so much more. Think about how most of our society would feel about cell phones that only talked to a few people and did nothing else. I do believe we got the better deal. Side note, I do know one man who has a leather wrist bracer that he uses as a phone case, and yes he makes calls on it very like the way Tracy did.

Think about the modern marvels we have, not the things we didn’t get. I still want my space yacht so I can fight pirates off Sirius but, I don’t think we can complain.

THE FUTURE, SHE IS HERE!!

224 thoughts on “The Future, She is here! – by Sanford Begley”

  1. Somehow that first version reminded me of this
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkwuluqUSMs

    More seriously I think there is much truth in the idea that we don’t recognize the advances we have now as SF even though they wuld have seemed that way to people 40 or more years ago. Heck even 30 years ago the idea of a GPS, a cell phone, gene sequencing or half a dozen other things we take for granted these days as being used by/available to pretty much everyone would have been something that only a James Bond villain (or Bond himself) could afford

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      1. I have no idea how you made the connection between that video and my post but, it is cute..

        Probably too many beers

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    2. Here’s a useful exercise:

      Imagine yourself the “Jordan” (or Masgramondou, or whoever) of 1950 or 1900 or 1800, and look at the modern world from that perspective. You would see a wonderland of universal wealth and fantastic technology. (Yes, even from 1950, if you looked at it from the viewpoint of the real 1950 instead of the movie and TV comedy version, in which everyone is upper-middle-class to filthy rich).

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      2. I remember the ’50s quite well. I started school in 1952. The polio vaccine came to Louisiana (where polio was epidemic, and everyone feared it) in 1953. Then you had to have a series of three injections, then a booster every year. I started high school in 1960. The closest I came to a computer back then was a slide rule — even calculators were mostly manual, and were called “adding machines”.

        My mother, my brother and I came to Colorado to visit my mom’s sister, and stayed six weeks. We made the trip both ways by train. The trip took two days, each way. That was in 1957. Plane trips were expensive, and not all that much faster. The Boeing 707 was introduced later that year.

        I was accepted as a cadet to the Air Force Academy in 1964, after I graduated from high school. We were the NINTH class to start. I washed out from a boxing accident I suffered just before Thanksgiving, and left the day before Christmas. My brother had a serious, life-threatening emergency the end of October, and I flew for the first time (that was the trip I shared with RAH and his lovely wife).

        I rejoined the Air Force in 1965, as an enlisted man (after the headaches from the boxing accident finally eased enough I could pass the physical). One of my first jobs after tech training was keeping a punched card file up to date (keypunch, verification, sorting, filing, etc – 1966.). I became very tech-proficient over the next five years, but gladly returned to the light table in 1970. I was in Omaha, Nebraska in 1976 when I was once more working with computers — this time keeping a data base up-to-date for my exploitation section. I devised a method for running database queries that was pretty much used to the mid-1980s when it became obsolete. That was using dumb remote terminals connected to a central computer and database. I bought my first computer in 1985 – a Commodore 64 with a 5 1/4″ disk drive.

        By the time I retired in 1991, we were doing everything on desktops, but those were pretty big, with monstrous green-screen monitors. Most of the software was user-specific, and all the systems fed data to a central processor. They could work in stand-alone mode — a HUGE advance!

        I started working for a computer chip/program manufacturer in 1994, using stand-alone PCs. A 50MB hard drive was a major advance, and most programs still came on floppy disk. Most of the computer world had advanced to 3 1/2″ drives. I bought my first PC in 1996. It had a 120MB hard drive, a 3 1/2″ floppy disk drive, a 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive, and a HUGE (!!) 14″ black screen, running Windows 3.2 (I’m not that much advanced today — I’ve got an HP with 3Gb of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a CDRW, and a DVD drive, a 20″ flatscreen monitor, and I’m running Windows Vista — at least two product improvements behind!).

        I got on the Internet in 1996. Today, things like this blog, Facebook, Twitter, and so much more is common, everyday, and you can even access it from your phone. In the early days, bulletin boards were the thing, and the most common program people accessed was usenet — now more or less defunct.

        These are just things that had a direct impact on ME. They don’t include things like working the first SR-71 mission over Southeast Asia, and over the Middle East during the 1973 Yom Kippur war (now I can get much the same thing, with almost the same resolution, on Google Earth), flying in the back seat of a T-38 breaking Mach 1, operating the cameras aboard a RF-4C from the back seat on an actual mission over North Vietnam, going from an automobile that got 10 mpg to a mini-van that can haul a large couch and still gets 20 mpg, or routinely (when I was in the military) flying from the US to Europe, South America, or Southeast Asia. I’ve seen computers grow from huge behemoths that took up a 30-foot square room to something that fits in your pocket and has more memory, calculating ability, and versatility than that huge thing that was a high-end SCIENTIFIC computer in 1968 that took punch-cards, and ran programs from 1 1/2″ mylar tape.

        This IS the future. It isn’t exactly the one we were promised, but it’s the one that’s here. Enjoy it! I do — it’s far better than a two-room cabin with well water and an outhouse that I lived in when 1950 arrived.

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          1. No need to be embarrassed, Sanford. I lived the changes, every day. They’re personal with me. I grew up poor and rural. Now I’m staunchly middle-class and fairly tech-savvy. BIG jump! There’s a big difference between knowing people used to be crippled by polio and going to school for twelve years with someone who wore a leg brace because he had polio as a very young child. I doubt there are ten Americans on this blog who have ever known someone who had smallpox. I had it when I was 14 months old. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy your article — I did, very much, because I DID live it. In fact, my childhood was very much like the 1920s and ’30s, because we WERE rural and poor, and just growing up was filled with new and shiny things. I never drank pasteurized milk before I was 18. We used to have a wringer washer until I was 16. When I was six or seven, my dad talked one of the engineers to allow us to ride in the engine of a train from Alexandria to Monroe (LA), about 100 miles. It was a STEAM locomotive! What kid today wouldn’t LOVE to do that, yet we jet across the country in hours without thinking about it. The difference between what you said and what I said is that you talked in generalities; I talked about what I’ve experienced. I’ve lived a long and fun life, and thanks to modern medicine (which is getting better every day), I expect to be around another 40-50 years.

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              1. Appalachia, Louisiana — not a lot of difference. The key is “rural and poor”, which we were until my mom started working. I was 12 then, and it took a few years for the extra dollars to trickle down. 8^)

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    3. 30+ years ago I was using GPS receivers in the AF. They were the size of a footlocker (for the JMR-1) to a small suitcase (The Magnavox MX-1502), had antennas the size of a Christmas tree, ate car batteries like vitamins – 1 A Day! – and took 4+ days to give you a location.

      But it was STILL way better than standard geodetic surveying techniques.

      We live in an amazing time, and people simply don’t realize it.

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      1. Jerry – I don’t know how big the receivers were, but LORAN-C came into operation the month before I arrived in SEA. It was supposed to improve the accuracy of the bombing missions. It might have for the BUFFS, but for the Hot-Shots it still took four to eight bombs to hit a sitting truck.

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        1. BTW, nowadays with smart bombs, it’s one bomb, one target destroyed. With some of the missiles we have, we can hit the room we want to wipe out, without doing more than modest damage to the rest. That’s a part of the future, too — finding safer and better ways of killing our enemies. The problem nowadays is to decide who’s an enemy. That’s especially true of our current POTUS.

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        2. BUFFs are kind of an area attack weapon anyways. I mean using a plane with that big of a payload to take out one room in a building is almost asinine.

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  2. There was a denizen on one of the forums I used to frequent who had a signature line that included a quote to this effect:
    “I’ve seen people complaining that they didn’t get the future with personal jetpacks. I’m making this post using a chunk of metal and plastic about the size of a pack of cigarettes. I just finished watching a movie on that same device while I ride the bus home from work. I’ll watch another before I arrive. This future is way better than the jetpack future.”

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        2. I saw a video of the test landing using the BRS chute. That was definitely not a safe landing. The pilot would have been crushed by the thing landing on him, so they have a little work do do on that. Still, the design seems to be working a heck of a lot better than Hydrogen Peroxide powered rocket packs.

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        1. *I* want a flying car. I also want all the other idiots on this planet to stay out of my ^*(&^ airspace.

          It’s good to want things, keeps you sharp.

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            1. Hey, we got wingsuits with gopro cameras on the helmets, sharing the thrills on youtube. Who saw That coming?

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              1. A GAU-8 takes up too much room and the ammo is expensive. Give me a pair of 50-cal, one mounted under each headlight, focused to converge at 100 yards, each with a 1400-round drum.

                Jeff, I hope you know that a GAU-8 weighs in at something like 3800 pounds, empty, and each round weighs something like eleven pounds. What are you going to mount it in? The Army’s already tried several different chassis configurations. Nothing can withstand the vibration. The Air Force is being stupid (again) and is shutting the A-10 program down. The Army is screaming — they want it. The idea of a flying anti-tank weapon appeals to them.

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                1. No, at least one of the .50’s needs to be swiveling, that way you can take out obliquely approaching vehicles before they are directly in your path. Gives a whole new meaning to wing shooting. :)

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  3. Indeed. I used to see devices that operated a lot like GPS and modern smartphones on cartoons — and now we have them. There’s also the wonders of the internet.

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        1. Well, back in the 80’s I figured I’d get a personal computer when I would be able to do the same with it as Heinlein’s Friday did – search for all kinds of fun information instantly instead of having to go to a library. And then possibly wait until some book containing the information I wanted got back because somebody else had already borrowed it, or was send from some other library if the one closest to me didn’t have it. And there was no guarantee any of the libraries in the country would have what I wanted if it happened to be something a bit more esoteric, from local point of view. In which case I might try to buy a book through the nearest book shop. More waiting. Lots of waiting.

          And now I can always find at least something in a few minutes. I love this. :) (Okay, if given the chance I might still change this to a world with space colonies and no internet. Maybe. Would have to think about it deeply though.)

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          1. As easy as it is to find information, we still have to vet that information, and that hasn’t gotten any easier. Still, it’s a welcome change from only being limited to bookstores and libraries within driving distance. I’d say we’re a little spoiled in this respect.

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            1. Yeah, and also, marketers (The lowest form of humanity next to Lawyers) have been working hard on subverting the sources of information to divert you to their advertising. Either overtly through things like sponsored links on Google to covertly and illegally by spamming and IP Hijacking.

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              1. Space colonies– sorry more interesting– and I would want a space ship to travel around. Of course I don’t think you could have one w/o the other… you do need good communications.

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                2. No. At interplanetary distances (interstellar with FTL), you quickly revert to the 1800s in terms of communications lags. That’s one reason Weber’s Honor Harrington translates Hornblower to the future as well as it does. Starship captains are faced with exactly the same necessity of operating without detailed instructions being available as Hornblower did while sailing to the Pacific.

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                  1. Anywhere inside the orbit of Saturn, the time lag for a one-way message is under 3 hours. While no one is going to do teleconferencing at that rate, it’s hardly 1800s-level.

                    Travel, on the other hand, will be of the same order of magnitude, time-wise, or else it won’t happen on a regular basis.

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                  2. ummm– well I have been in communications for my Navy career (and sometime afterwards-electronics repair actually) and unless communications keeps up with our movement, then we will lose people (much like the 1800s?). I am of the opinion that there is someone somewhere who will have the answer to FTL and FTL communication.

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  4. Good article. [Smile]

    Oh, my “crazy” mind added “and she’s a b*tch” to your title. Just blame not enough coffee. [Wink]

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  6. In my current WIP, a contemporary fantasy, an otherworld fae teenager gets his first look at a human corrugated cardboard box sealed with clear tape.

    It’s not just the shiny high-tech that is innovative, it’s also all the mundane things that make our commercial world go ’round. We shop ar Amazon “because it’s convenient”, but think what it takes, down in the nuts and bolts of ecommerce and shipping, to make that happen.

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    1. Yes, indeed SF is usually about the big shiny toys but, the background stuff was the real difference between worlds. Think how different our lives would be without today’s data storage for example. The computers of the 60s couldn’t do much and took entire buildings

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        2. I’m glad they’re gone! At one time, I had to maintain a database of 43,000 punch cards, when anywhere from 20 to 200 would change daily. On a particularly bad weekend, I’d come in on Monday morning with 500-1000 changes. That meant punching the cards, verifying them, sorting them, and then FILING them by hand. A good week was measured by the card sorter not chewing anything up. 8^)

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          1. Yes I was being nostalgically sarcastic … I was in college in the 70’s and carrying around a 4″ thick rubber-band-secured pack of cards was a nerd status symbol … by the time I graduated, it was all minis and the beginning of the spread of PCs.

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            1. I’ve often thought it would be fun to go to WorldCon in the past/an alternate realty where it’s the past, with a laptop, a stack of DVDs, and a projector. Have “Movies of the Future” night and see the attendees boggle:-). The background props alone (not to mention the laptop) would freak them all out. Of course telling them that _The Matrix_ is a documentary might get some interesting reactions…

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          3. And if you wanted to see a programmer cry, all you had to do was knock his unnumbered deck of punch cards out of his hands…..

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        4. My Father told me about an argument between a Punch-card user and a paper tape user. The punch card user talked about his superiority when it came to being able to edit his program. The Paper tape user won by standing on his desk and dropping the tape on the floor, and challenged the punch-card user to do the same with his program.

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          1. Proper punch cards begin with a card identifying number and end with a GO TO number.

            Punch cards are NOT superior to paper tape when it comes to editing programs because paper tape cannot be edited. It is akin to discussing the comparative abilities of boys and girls to write their names in the snow by urinating.

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      2. I still vividly recall the day Beloved Spouse & I were walking through the supermarket (itself a marvel when you compare it to what grocery stores were as recently as the 1950s) and noticed an endcap display selling 2G thumbdrives for (IIRC) $20. It wasn’t ten years since we had eagerly paid $200 for a 200M hard drive, and now the grocery store was selling memory at a penny a Meg!!!

        And back in ’75 a basic 4 function pocket calculator was $100 — equivalent to about 300 gallons of gas at then current prices.

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          1. “What in the world are you going to do with a full GIG of memory?!” I once asked a co-worker who had just bought an upgrade for his 486.

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            1. Why do you even “need” a hard drive? Any program that can’t load off of a 1.4K floppy is so badly coded you wouldn’t want to run it anyway.

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              1. I understand and mostly agree. I still remember a word processor called Samna. Did everything word does and was much more intuitive. Ran on a 286 machine. I wish it was still available

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                1. That is what I need. A folding keyboard (sized for my meathooks and not for barbie and ken’s) that plugs into my ebook with enough onboard programing so I can compose without dragging around a laptop or a yellow legal pad. This would be better than a flying car (except for the fact that it wouldn’t be a flying car and I would have no place to hang the fuzzy dice.)!

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                2. I remember Samna! And the woe in the office when we were forced to upgrade to WordPerfect. I hadn’t thought about that in … oh 25 years … gosh, I’m so much older than I feel …

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                    1. Yes. Yes I did. And COBOL, oh I intentionally failed to learn that. Didn’t want to get stuck in administrative programming. C++ was the wave of the future, ya know … now I know next to nothing lol

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                    2. In my Comp Sci undergrad degree, you had to either take a Fortran course and a COBOL course or pass them via exam. I took the COBOL exam after reading a COBOL language text the night before.

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                  2. Usually there’s an emulator for everything, but apparently this Samna doesn’t have a shadowy fandom making contemporary versions of the old program. Bah. I wanted to cheer you up.

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              2. I’m sitting here at my 12-YO computer, with a drawer that contains two 2GB SD cards and a pair of 8GB flash drives, remembering the HUGE array of 18 14-inch disk packs we had at my last AF assignment — that held 8GB of information. The company I used to work for, LSI Logic, is coming out this year with a new RAID package that includes 20 1-Terabyte disk drives. They plan to upgrade to a 20-pack of 20TB disk drives sometime next year, once the drives are available.

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                1. 1982 – High school field trip to Bell Labs in Columbus. They showed us their computing center, where they had floor-standing, non-hermetically-sealed hard drive units, which, we were told, contained a total of, IIRC, 10 gigabytes between them. I believe there were 40 of them.

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                    2. Peta- is next, then Exa- if I remember correctly. There is (or was, don’t know if they’re still around) named Exabyte.

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      3. It’s like all the little maintenance that keeps a modern city’s lights and water on — you don’t see it, but it’s vitally necessary.

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              1. They are not as common as they used to be, but I still get some stuff packed in them. And sometimes I get stuff packed with those new green plastic strips with air pockets an inch or two thick and about the size of a small envelope, step on those and some are as loud as a 22.

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    3. Containerized shipping is right up there with hybridized crops as the invention most critical to the modern world that nobody’s ever heard of.

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        1. I don’t need to look him up. I make it a habit of remembering the names of people who save billions of lives.

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      2. Shipping! There were no container-ships, roll-on//roll-off ships, and oil tankers were MAYBE 400 feet long. Now they’re almost as big as a carrier (and a few are larger). Aircraft carriers were smaller, too. It’s not just a few things that have changed, but MOST things. It just happened slowly, and we didn’t think much about it at the time it happened. Now it’s commonplace.

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  7. But we weren’t promised the little, background stuff. That was a given. I want the space ships. I want the interstellar drives taking mankind to strange and wonderful worlds, dangerous and full or possibilities. I want the future promised, not the consolation prize.

    Gerard O’Neill’s High Frontier showed how it was possible back in the ’70’s, in reach in the ’80’s, then snatched away by chicken-livered, spineless, no chest poltroons in positions of power.

    I don’t care about solving poverty on this planet – it’ll never happen with the resources we possess. We can only have it by stretching our hands and hearts beyond our skies into other realms.

    I want my DREAM!!

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    3. I want the space ships. I want the interstellar drives taking mankind to strange and wonderful worlds, dangerous and full or possibilities. I want the future promised, not the consolation prize.

      That will happen, in due time. It’s actually starting, right now — the current Space Race involves a dozen nations and dozens of corporations, rather than two nations and a handful of corporations as it did in the 1960’s to 1980’s.

      Remember that technology is a ratchet process — it only goes up, in the long run.

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      1. It has been claimed that we went to the Moon too soon. We did an expensive tour de force decades before the likelihood of medium-term economic sustainability could be considered as more than infinitesimal.

        Things look more hopeful now that an infrastructure is taking shape in Earth orbit.

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        2. Infrastructure? There’s no infrastructure there. All that is there, besides communications satellites of various flavors, is another example of one-upmanship, with no industrial usefulness. It’s too small and too spindly (ie, not enough internal room).

          When and if they assemble a coherent structure, which is intended for something other than sponsored research, then there will be the beginning of infrastructure.

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            1. Yes, I read that. What do you mean by, “is taking shape”? What is? Where? Who’s building it? Because if you’re talking about the ISS, please see my previous comment.

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              1. Richard Branson, for example, is talking about building orbiting spacecraft after his suborbital flights get going:

                And Branson has plans for the future of the company: far longer trips into space, potentially lasting for days or even longer.

                “We’ll be building orbital spaceships after that,” Branson said, “so that people who want to go for a week or two can.”

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    4. There aare private companies building spaceships these days in TX and NM. Now that the private sector is involved, if the gov’t doesn’t manage to completely kill our economy, we’ll be out there asap! Where is DD Harriman when you need him?

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    5. We’ve already solved poverty in this country. There is no such thing as a poor American, just varying degrees of wealthy.

      Of course, since there are significant power blocs that rely on dividing people, they move heaven and earth to define “poor” as having a smaller high-definition TV and a slightly older car as someone else.

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  8. I grew up on the Chestley Bonstelle illustrations and Werner von Braun himself on the Disney channel. I think we really got short-changed big time. 20 people on the moon 40 years ago instead of thousands living there and in orbit but hey, we’ve got smartphones and Obamacare instead. WTF!

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  10. I am currently pushing buttons on a magic box, which in a few minutes will cause my words to be read halfway around the world. Then after doing that, I will cause my magic box to show me a play written by a man four hundred years dead, acted out by some of the best actors in the world — oh, and the performance I’m about to watch was done twenty years ago. And nobody finds anything strange or unusual about any of this!

    (It’s Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing, if you were wondering.)

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    1. The gee-whiz technologies don’t seem so unusual because they come off as perfectly ordinary once everyone’s using them.

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      1. Do you consider it wondrous that you can get into motor vehicles and travel at over 50 miles per hour, or talk to people on the other side of the planet, or purchase food almost as wholesome as fresh-grown from every farm on Earth? This would have been almost-inconceivable luxury from the point of view of 1813, or 1863, and the fact that most people can do this today pretty impressive even from a 1913 perspective. As for 1963, almost within my lifetime, compare the kind of electronics, food and medicine available to you today compared to what existed then.

        Heck, for that matter, compare our spacefaring capability in 1963 to that which we have today. And it’s only been 50 years!

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        1. Quite an achievement indeed. Everything is so much easier to come by, and you can have it delivered right to your door.

          As for communication, you can call anyone, anytime, anywhere. Wondrous even in the 1990s.

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      2. The gee-whiz technologies don’t seem so unusual because they snuck up on us slowly and incrementally. It’s only by looking back over the past 60+ years that you can truly marvel at them. The injury I suffered in 1964 couldn’t be diagnosed. A similar injury to Timmy, my 8yo, was diagnosed almost immediately — when he was only 22 months old (6 years ago). Today very few children have the “childhood diseases” that were prevalent with I went to school — whooping cough, chicken pox, rubella, measles, tonsillitis, even polio and smallpox. All that happened slowly, over time, and became “ordinary” for the next generation, and not even worth commenting about.

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      1. Branagh accomplished something I thought impossible – he managed to portray Hamlet in a mature and sympathetic way. Every other rendition I’ve seen, including just reading the script, the protagonist came across as infuriatingly whiny and indecisive, and I spent the whole time wanting to backhand some sense into him. Branagh’s rendition was fantastic, and it let me enjoy the story for the first time. Using both Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in one movie was interesting; I heard rumor they were never allowed on set at the same time for fear of halting production altogether with their combined antics, and I find that claim easy to believe.

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  11. Libertycon had a panel entitled “Dude, where’s my flying car?” and the concensus was that the limitation wasn’t the cars it was air traffic control. We know how to build flying cars, have for years now. You just cannot allow the sort of volume of traffic common to say any mid size city rush hour to enter the three dimensional air space without horrible consequences. What is needed for flying cars to be practical is safe reliable air traffic control run by artificial intelligence with sufficient failsafes and backups that people will trust it literally with their lives.
    As for space travel, we have maxed out the capabilities of chemical rockets, and lifting useful payloads out of Earth’s gravity well is just too damn expensive for anything but highly specialized purposes, primarily at this point telecom, observation, and intelligence satellites. To reach the future we all read about in those golden age stories we need a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion technology. There are any number of possibilities, but t’aint there yet.

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    2. Chemical fuels are just fine, it’s throwing away the machinery that costs the money. Kerosene and liquid oxygen are dirt cheap, airframes and engines not so much. DCX was a start. When Musk manages to get his boosters back intact, the game will change radically – I just hope I’m around to see it.

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      2. He’s already testing it. Search YouTube for SpaceX and Grasshopper and you’ll see he’s got a rocket taking off and landing on its tail, just as God and Robert Heinlein intended.

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    3. I was explaining that to my son last week. He’s 9 (almost 10) and still thinks it would be SO COOL! if we could have a flying car and thinks automated cars will help. I couldn’t help but think he might be on to something.However, I’m not sure I’d want to give up that level of control to be able to fly…

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      1. I was thinking that very thing: driverless cars will be a necessary precursor to flying cars.

        Multiple technologies must mature and come together to create flying cars. Traffic control is one of them.

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      2. In some ways driverless and flying cars will be different from how we imagine them today.

        A driverless car will be like owning your own taxi with a robot driver. I can imagine that anyone will be able to buy and use one, but a driver’s license will be required to override the controlling AI. Similarly for flying cars.

        These vehicles should be built with minimum intrusion on liberty and privacy. No doubt the usual suspects will concoct pretexts for maximum intrusion instead.

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        1. It’s the maximum intrusion I worry about. That nifty AI? Why don’t we just have it report anything potentially “suspect” to the local authorities? In the interest of public safety, of course.

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          1. That’s why we have to generate a (buzzword alert!) paradigm shift in the minds of enough of the populace to not only elect a different breed of legislator (NOT politician!), but to keep them in fear of the public.

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        2. Issues of privacy and liberty aside, mainframing traffic control is as wise as mainfraiming computing. Sensors and routing and anti-collision should be done at each vehicle. It spreads the cost, it spreads the liability and it means if a computer goes bink! only one car goes down instead of the entire county.
          Also, a centralized control only knows what it is told, and if your link is wonky or the reporting is slow you could be someplace different than where the central traffic control thinks you are when it tries to route you through a traffic jam.

          Some things could be seen as a blessing, though. If we had flying cars on 9/11 traffic cops today might be issued Stinger missiles.

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        3. Nissan is claiming it is going to have a ‘driverless’ car out by 2020 http://singularityhub.com/2013/09/09/robot-car-wars-nissan-jumps-into-the-fray-with-driverless-car-by-2020/

          On the other hand I will not buy a GM product because I am unwilling to give the government (or whoever else manages to hack or wrest control of the system) the kind of control that OnStar gives them. The idea of a central Traffic Control to control everyone’s personal vehicle like some of you are advocating for flying cars, gives me the hives.

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          1. I need to look up the reference, but I heard of a technology that is based on the brains of grasshoppers to be used for driverless cars. It’s not a central air traffic control system, (which is already at it’s complexity limitations with airports) but EVERY car has a simple program that organizes throughput trajectories along swarm algorithms, the way actual grasshoppers (and birds) do. That means, an overarching system MIGHT be there to call in help in the event of a problem (say, mayday calls from individual vessels) but would not have to track traffic propper. This approach would be easier to do, and would make privacy easier to protect in this event. It’s this worship of top down thinking that makes the complexity problem harder than it needs to be. YOu simply can’t track a large volume of traffic– you can throw all the computrons at it you want, but sorting it runs into complexity limitations.

            But, if each ship worries about it’s own trajectories and negotiates it’s throughlines internally, just like anything that travels in large numbers–well that’s a solvable problem. Further, it means that the driver is still responsible for dictating final location, you just let the onboard computer decide how best to get there with prevailing local traffic conditions. You might even have settings for behavior– say, out for a drive vs. going to the hospital.

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            1. Solvable perhaps, but challenging. Traffic configurations should be avoided in which the probability of collision rises to an unacceptable level.

              Is vehicle guidance best done with onboard processing, cloud-based processing, processing at a central location, or some combination thereof? I don’t know.

              And that’s just the technical issue, not the political, economic, ethical, legal, cultural, etc ones..

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              1. Presumably we would improve the code and implementation. Besides, I am not confident that human beings would tolerate a driverless car that they could not control– whose destination could be entirely arbitrary. We are so fond of trains in theory, but hardly ever ride them.

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                1. Trains are fine, if they are maintained properly. I took a train to D.C. once, and the 8 hour trip turned into 24 hours, while they worked on the air conditioning, which never did get fixed on that trip.

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                  1. No, I didn’t say there was anything *wrong* with trains. But when given a choice, most people won’t use them save under specific circumstances– that is, in dense human habitation or between two dense areas of human habitation separated by a gap. People would rather do anything– even fly– than use a train. The only train corporation that independently sustains itself with minimal subsidies is the NICTD, and they get their financial assistance from freight contracts on track that they own– which is in high demand, being one of the most efficient ways to get freight into Chicago proper– and to and from the docks in two logistics heavy states.

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                    1. Well, I was just saying that part of the reason people don’t use trains is not as much about the fixed destination (which I gathered was what you meant in your response to my comment about crashing grasshoppers), as because the trip is likely to suck because of the level of maintenance on the only major passenger carrier.

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                    2. Trains were shunned even before maintenance issues cropped up. I maintain that shoddy maintenance is a result of trains being shunned, and not the cause.

                      I grant that trains were used quite enthusiastically, but that was before the invention of the automobile.

                      The thing about grasshoppers– birds use a variation on the same concept, and they only really crash into glass which is an evasion of monitoring rather than an intrinsic flaws. Also, I was referring specifically to swarm behavior, — while grasshoppers crash into other things a great deal (presumably the engineers working on this aren’t stupid) they rarely crash into each other, in environments they evolved for. Presumably our tech, will be designed and tested for real world situations. But your commentary actually supports my point. I’m not sure people would trust the tech even if it did work, and I think we can make it work… but that few would trust it.

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                    3. I’m one of those Odds who’d rather take a train than fly commercial (unless I’m in the left front seat). But I’ve never taken a train in the US, only in Europe, where the shorter distances make trains and buses a lot more realistic. And even there, you do have to plan your route somewhat carefully if you are not going from major hub to major hub. (Which sounds exactly like trying to fly commercial in the States, now that I think about it.)

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  12. We often ask “Dude! They promised me a flying car and space yachts by the twenty-first century! Where are they?” No, for all practical intents and purpose we didn’t get those. We did get a lot of toys we weren’t promised. Cell phones and computers, and memory wire. There are real robots doing real work out there. No they aren’t semi-sentient devices doing everything a man can. They are purpose built machines that do a limited number of tasks very well. In short, we got the stuff of SF even if not quite how we imagined. I think we came out ahead.

    Not only that, but the fact that we got better electronics than we thought hardly means that we won’t ever get flying cars and space yachts and so forth. It’s not an either-or proposition: if anything, the better electronics makes it more likely that we will also get the flying cars. If we’d gotten the flying cars without improved avionics and traffic control, the price would have been a lot of really serious accidents.

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      1. Unfortunately, the most efficient way to do THAT is to ignore the supports that make civilization worth bothering with– such as human dignity. Because the solutions for your issues involve evils like eugenics, which sound great on paper, but cause horrors on implementation.

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        1. The problem isn’t inherent in [eugenics], it’s simply never been done properly, by the proper people.
          All-Purpose Meaningless Defense #2

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          1. Yeah. It never occurs to them that there are some things for which there is no such thing as “the right people”. It’s the same reason why communism doesn’t work. I know people who are now convinced that computers make this stuff possible for “the right people”. Sigh…

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            1. Well, it looks like Putin has managed to administer a bolus to Obama. Not sure if it will take, Barry seems to have elevated resistance.

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            1. Given our political opponents, they may draw the wrong historical reference from that. That’s why I replace tree with lamp-post.

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          4. Jeff, they used to use a mercury ointment for those sorts of inflammations, but I think the EPA and the FDA frown on that sort of thing now. ;)

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              1. Obedience to their diktats. Increasing the scope of their responsibilities and authority. Bureaucrats are the piles of government.

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            2. IIRC, the proper treatment, the only effective treatment, requires an enema but I don’t know the optimum solution for the procedure.
              http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLkIo7c8YwY

              Note the treatment is recommended for when the turds have become “very hard and dried and been there for a while.”

              Obviously the best approach is to make sure you get plenty of fiber to encourage regular clearing of the bowels of Congress so that you avoid this problem ever developing.

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              1. “Note the treatment is recommended for when the turds have become “very hard and dried and been there for a while.”

                E.g., John McCain.

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  14. There’s another base technology that we take for granted (understandably, since we are writers and readers). Literacy. I get happily becroggled when I consider even in our extremely litigious society a written warning is considered sufficient. Think about it. It means our law, our society, takes for granted EVERYONE CAN READ. Contrast this with the story of the learned Thomas Aquinas (13th century) who was admired for the ability to read without moving his lips. Or Charlemagne, only learning to read and write late in life despite being an *emperor*.

    Yes, there are people now who are *functionally* illiterate, meaning they don’t read *well*. But they still can read, and better than Charlemagne. Boggleboggleboggle….

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    1. Yes. And indoor plumbing with modern sewage processing. Utterly world-changing. My mother didn’t have indoor plumbing in her childhood home. She made sure we grew up with a great appreciation for it, bless her.

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      1. Birthday girl — true story. My parents added indoor plumbing in 1966, after I married a “city girl”. Yep, I grew up with outhouses. I’ve used ’em, I’ve helped dig ’em, and I’ve helped lime and bury ’em. Let’s hear it for indoor plumbing.

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        1. Hooray for indoor plumbing. When I left home in the early 80s, my parents still had an outhouse. We did have indoor plumbing, but it would freeze every year– ;-)

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        2. Most people nowadays don’t know what that can of white powder sitting beside the seat is for. And in a humid climate the TP should be kept in a sealed coffee can so it doesn’t collect moisture.

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    2. Are you sure you’re not thinking St. Augustine pointing that out about St. Ambrose?

      It wasn’t that people _couldn’t_ read without moving their lips. It was that it was suboptimal for enjoyment of the sound patterns built into classical literature. It was even weird and antisocial. If you read out loud, other people could listen and profit, and then ask questions. But St. Ambrose was a busy bishop with little time for his own study, so he read silently so that other people wouldn’t stop him and ask him about stuff, or know that he was in his office. St. Aug felt for the man and didn’t bug him while he was reading silently.

      In the Middle Ages, it was still the sound that had precedent. Reading poetry or oratory silently was missing the point. One of the subsidiary meanings of “read” when applied to Scripture was “chant.” It was also part of the process of organizing the information for memorization and easy retrieval; many of the margin illustrations in medieval books are pictures of memorization images, often phonetic puns in the local vernacular.

      So it wouldn’t astonish me if Aquinas also read silently when he wanted not to be bugged or needed speed, but as time went on he was dictating most of the time, up to three books at once. (He’d dictate a paragraph, turn to the next guy, dictate a paragraph of that book, turn to the next guy….) He sometimes dictated in his sleep when he dozed off (and it made perfect sense). His superiors insisted on him dictating not just for speed, because his handwriting was horribly illegible chicken scratch. His cousin the King of France sent him a dictation scribe at dinner once, when Aquinas absentmindedly yelled out to himself about how the argument he’d just thought up would stymie the Manichaeans….

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    3. At the same time, Sabrina, literacy was better in the 1880s than it is today. The only people who couldn’t read and write English at that time were immigrants and a very few older people. We have a higher illiteracy rate today (94% then, 79% now). What happened? Teacher’s unions, a society that quit placing a high emphasis on reading, and a culture that decided anything worth learning was on television. THAT’S a Boggle and a half!

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      1. With due respect, not quite. My aunt told me stories of Texas back in the ’30s (she’s 90+), and her teaching the neighbor kids (black sharecroppers) how to read. Then they taught their father. All of them had been illiterate before my aunt got ahold of them. She’s quite the battleaxe, still ;-)

        And I’ve heard both stories of Aquinas. I also heard that because of the regional dialects of the scribes, you *had* to sound out the words to know what they meant to say. Half of the comedic spelling of Chaucer is due to different manuscripts (and different scribes for each). Within a single source the spelling, while strange, is consistent.

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        1. It has been a long time since I read Chaucer, but I remember it and few other old works that I read. If you read them aloud (sounding them out) they made sense, if you just glanced at them written it was almost gibberish. A lot of Scott’s work where he wrote all the dialogue in brogue and the different dialects is the same.

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  15. The other thing the “hard” sci-fi that I read missed was biotech, in the sense of genetic tailoring. Bionics were there, but not being able to create a drug tailored to one specific kind of tumor, or one metabolic disorder. And being able to do it at a cost that, while not cheap, is still within the bounds of reason. Chemotherapy too – look how it’s changed in the last 20-30 years.

    On the other paw, we’re just now starting to understand how little we understand about biochemistry and neurochemistry.

    Neat piece, Sanford.

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    1. That was the sort o9f thing i had in mind. I will probably rework this with the input I’m getting today and try and shop it out somewhere.
      Thank you, I enjoyed writing it and am glad others are enjoying it as well

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  16. How many readers of this blog are aspirant writers? It seems like 50% some days.
    Has anyone seen the Oyster lately?

    Any readers of this blog want to meet up in Portland?

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    1. I’m still around. Mostly lurking these last few weeks – assorted personal issues (health, family, work) fell on me all at once after WorldCon, and I’m still trying to get my feet back under me. Still alive and reading though; it helps keep my spirits up when the black dog comes calling.

      Portland is a little outside my easy travel range, but I would love to get together with any of the Horde when I’m nearby. So far everyone I’ve met in meatspace has been awesome! If I’m ever going to be up in the Northwest again, I’ll give a holler.

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            1. Will you be at Fencon next year Sarah? Steve is sad to have missed to have missed you.
              Will anyone who’s going to Fencon tell the highlights of Ringo’s appearance please.

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        1. I understand that the one in Maine is named after the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England, and the one in Oregon was named after a type of cement.

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      1. I’m in Portland until the end of October. I’m surprised that you guys don’t have webbed feet, it’s so wet out here. I’ll be happy to go home where it’s warm and dry.

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          1. I grew up there, (and it has felt like I was back home it has rained so much here the last week) I have found if I live in area with enough moisture to grow real trees (not junipers) and shower daily, my gills don’t dry out too badly. :)

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        2. Portland’s an easy day trip for me, and thanks to Harry Reid it looks like I’ll have a few days off in the near future.

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        3. Don’t take this weekend’s rain as typical, we only get these about once a decade. The high winds are unusual too. Normally it just rains a warmish, steady rain. Until it turns into a cold, steady rain.

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  17. The main problem with the tech which is being developed is: It’s all about “Smaller” — about *not* having to go places (why leave the house when one has “online” museums, chat rooms, etc.?), about navel-gazing (seven billion people; seven billion opinions; how many of them actually *can* Do Something About It?). So far, no one’s done anything about *expanding* the amount of territory humans can visit, or getting to the places we’ve only seen in telescopes any faster (I never thought I’d say this, but: Where’s Rex Mason when we need him?). That’s why, for all the “advancements” I see around me, I’m still not impressed — we’re going in the wrong direction. (As usual.)

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  18. Another data point for progress. Kids today will have no understanding of the concepts “Channel surfing” or “There’s nothing on.”

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  19. Great Article! Don’t be too disappointed about the lack of Dick Tracy-style wrist phones. Just wait a few more years. For several years now, the cell phone industry has been working on them. I know that Apple, Sony, Samsung, and Google are all working on their own version of a wrist phone. The hardware capable of a smart wrist phone has been around for several years now. The biggest bottleneck that’s keeping these things from the market is the difficulty of the user interface. The durn things are just too small to use your fingers to input stuff, which means it will need to rely mostly on voice recognition.

    Apple introduced Siri not because it’s ‘cool’ but because they are trying to develop an operating system that can be 100% voice operated, but they need more real world experience and data. Most cell phone developers are doing the same, because whoever can get a reliable VR operating system going will be the first to roll out what is generally accepted and the next ‘big advancement’ in mobile communication devices. If you want to become an instant millionaire, patent an improved voice recognition algorithm and sell it to the highest bidder.

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  21. Another thing that only a few SF writers ever really thought about: Materials science. Take a racing bicycle back 100 years. After people get over the weird shape, they’ll still marvel at the weight. We won’t be building skyscrapers out of carbon fiber composites any time soon, but they may happen.

    Then you have Plastics, which come in so many forms that it would take a couple of paragraphs to just list them, filters so fine they can stop large molecules; materials that can be implanted into the body to either reinforce an arterial wall or serve as a scaffold for new tissue to grow on; pads that can, using less than 50 sq. inches of total surface area, stop a 4,000lb vehicle from a speed of 50 miles per hour thousands of times before wearing out (4-wheel disc brakes); armor that can stand up indefinitely against the largest cannon available 100 years ago (Abrams tank armor); aerogel; Carbon nanotubes; Graphene. The list goes on.

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    1. In John Romer’s new history of ancient Egypt (I highly recommend it), he has pictures of the enormous stacks of pottery jars that provided the majority of household food storage along the Nile . . . in the 1970s. Until cheap plastic stuff hit the domestic market in the 1980s, most Egyptians used the same thing their ancestors had, going back three thousand years and more. Talk about a leap of materials tech!

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  22. xtrd: John Romer is awesome. He’s the one who cemented my interest in ancient Egypt with “Ancient Lives” back in the 1980’s. He’s an archeologist, but also an anthropologist who hasn’t lost his mind– or his perspective.

    It is so frustrating when anthro majors devolve into the squishy equivocating of all human achievement and culture. IS that the backfiring of Aldous Huxley? New wave gone horribly wrong?

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    1. It’s a little Huxley and a lot of French deconstructionism, plus a dollop of Rousseau. Savages are noble, the West is bad, and we can’t know anything about anybody because the signifier (statues, inscriptions, pottery) has at best a tenuous connection to the signified (even if it is a temple tithe inventory list from Luxor, where “ten fatted cows” really should mean ten fatted cows), so we’ll make up all kinds of theoretical stuff as we go along.

      Romer is very good about saying, “This is what we found. This is what Victorians thought it meant, and this is what some modern people say it means. Here’s why that’s probably not what it meant back then, although we just can’t tell from the available materials.” And his writing voice is the same as his speaking voice – I heard the entire book as if he were narrating it, down to the hand gestures. :)

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      1. Yes. “Ancient Lives” was brilliant, not only because his graphics team were top notch (and had a skill for getting out of the way when needed–so rare these days) but that– he’s the friendly approchable genius who must be mesmerizing in the classroom. I loved how he re-constructed a political vendetta between two powerful individuals at the Dir El Medina– even going into some of the things that happened during excavation and how that colored the first impressions of the sites– including why the best stuff (for learning about the people who actually lived there– and if we aren’t doing that– why are we here, exactly?) wasn’t unearthed until relatively recently. Further, he doesn’t extrapolate beyond what he has in front of him. Which is why a lot of his research still hasn’t gone out of date, whereas a lot of his contemporaries relied on theories that are sequentially proven false, sometimes parallel to their development. It’s why I don’t pay much attention to the mainstream news about archeology– it’s like listening to the first reports on any disaster–except that the media generally refuses to accept correction unless they are bludgeoned with facts– and often not even then. It’s not just politics– but other topics as well. In fact, I was able to get used to not trusting the media for precisely this reason.

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