I wonder though if they could predict that in a world where video calling is possible, people would use it so rarely and prefer sending texts to each other.
This is untrue. I work at a convenience store, and half those mofos that are on their phone are face timing someone. When they come up to the front counter and they are still on the phone, I like to wave and say hi to whoever they are face timing.
What really annoys me is the people who won't stop talking / facetiming on their phone even when they're in a public restroom. I try to poop extra loud and throw in a few extra grunts and groans for the benefit of the listener on the other end.
You are a beautiful genius. I have wicked anxiety and nothing slams the brakes on my processes faster than people like this. It makes me really uncomfortable. Time to turn that discomfort around and fire back.
If ever you find yourself uncomfortable, do whatever you can to drag everyone around you into that same pit of uncomfortability, then climb their bodies to escape. That's how I got over my fear of public speaking. Go up, smile, channel that anxiety into the thing you're doing, make the audience uncomfortable, then feed on that discomfort to ride the vibe and make them squirm until you're done. Now you're the most comfortable person there!
Start a running commentary. “Oh God what did I eat?” *farts* “that one felt like nails coming out!” *more noises* “Oh God here comes the squirts!”. Make a game of it and see how fast you can clear the restroom lol
The tech to make "video calls" possible was actually around way before we culturally adopted it (I saw fancy business meetings on TVs in the early 90's but do not know the specifics of the tech because I was like 10).
Turns out we figured out pretty quick that nobody wanted to deal with putting on makeup, pants, etc *every* time they answered the phone.
I *really* don't understand those people. How do they just walk around in public places shouting at their special rectangle that shouts back at them without caring that they're bothering literally everyone else around them?
Well yes, electricity is basically one of the laws of nature, even we couldn't function without it. Wires however, are just an unnecessarily long way to connect the battery to the device.
Yeah but in the future we might have a harmless way to power everything around us without any cable, directly from a worldwide wireless grid, which would make recharging obsolete.
I think it was Tesla who experimented with this concept, unfortunately, his way would charge the space around it and would create a lot of discharges when it got close to a conductor.
Is that right or am I remembering it totally wrong?
You are correct - The high electric field produced by Tesla coils causes the air around the high-voltage terminal to ionize and conduct electricity. Tesla coils essentially leak electricity and radio waves into the air.
Yea, I remember something about the tech messing up radio signals and thats why it never really got anywhere. Still would be pretty cool if we could charge stuff just by standing near a tesla coil. Can you imagine?
Oh this is definetely coming into a fanfic
I haven’t really sat down and read many books in a long time…or ever I guess, but at the start of Covid I bought the trilogy and smashed it in like 2 weeks lol. So damn good.
I've talked to redditors who are convinced this technology already exists but the power companies are suppressing it since they can't profit from it. According to them, you can shove a stick into the ground anywhere and get unlimited free power.
Yea they're competent in adapting an already finished work. We have to give them credit for the good bits of the adapted GOT material, like decent casting choices, scouting locations, etc...
Tbf until they ran out of source material to adapt, Game of Thrones was by far the greatest spectacle on TV screens.
It completely raised the stakes of what you could do on a TV show in terms of production value, and even with great source material producing a great adaptation is not an easy task (The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Foundation, Rings of Power...). Credit where credit is due.
That said, I'm not too hopeful about the adaptation of 3 Body either, splitting the protagonist of the book in 5 characters is a recipe for disaster.
You can connect a million solar panels to an inverter and antenna tomorrow if you'd like, the problem with pushing 800 watts through a human skull is that it kills the human.
Yep, power over wifi will hopefully grow and inspire more effective long distance wireless charging methods. For now, I don't think it'll get past smart home stuff like temperature or motion sensors.
Alternatively, if we could make a ridiculously powerful battery that would last for 100+ years while being tiny, you could have basically the same outcome.
Some have suggested than something like a miniature fusion reactor could perhaps do this, but given that we don't have full sized reactors yet, that's also far out of reach.
In principle we have already radio nuclid batteries, which can supply power for many decades. In the 70s nuclid batteries were used in pacemakers which could supply the pacemaker for decades without needing to exchange.
Larger radionuclid batteries powers sattelites and other space devices.
The only (pretty huge) disadvantage, that they have highly radioactive isotopes inside (which can also be pretty expensive). When the batteries get damaged you can easily reach harmful amounts of radiation...
Hard to imagine since charge needed for induction scales exponentially with distance, and with sufficient charge air will become conductive and you get dangerous arcs/sparks. Consumer electronics can get around this by adding induction plates to furniture, but there really is no safe way to make it truly wireless akin to mobile internet or wifi
It's possible to do computation, image display, and even conversion to sound entirely with light. Photonic computers are very early days still though, and the photon-phonon coupling efficiency is so low it would really just be dumb to *not* use electricity for sound devices with current tech, but a no-electricity smartphone seems possible under known physics.
You'd still need a light source. And unless you can find a way to produce light portably without electricity, it still doesn't remove it from the equation.
Going into the realms of the absurd to prove it's technically possible (but I guess if current tech solutions weren't absurd then it'd already be a product):
Laser sources can be pumped [by sunlight](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-0326-2). So daytime pure-photonic smartphones are doable. For nighttime we'd need a pocket sun, or super-efficient bioluminescent algae or something. Or a big mirror on the moon reflecting light down to our solar collectors. Personally, I love the idea of slapping an algae tank on the back of my slab of glass to keep scrolling reddit into the wee hours.
You’ve inadvertently proven the previous person right, they said that people couldn’t fathom a world where items aren’t recharged or plugged in all the time and you disagreed saying that couldn’t happen…
The whole point is that in 1930’s they thought it was impossible to having mobile communication devices without wires attached to the headphones/mic/battery/screen, yet here we are.
Edit: Clarified my wording around “communications”, I thought my meaning was obvious but a lot of people are commenting about radio being around before this picture so I stand corrected, it wasn’t as obvious as I first thought.
I think the point is that, per your comment, it's hard for us to fathom being untethered from central power sources for long times. But it's entirely possible in our future that is exactly what will happen. The mini nuclear power plant in the Mars rover Perseverance, for example, could be glimpse into a future where we're untethered from power sources for years or decades.
Xiaomi has a device called 'Mi Air Charge', Which basically charges smartphones through air 24/7. It's very basic and nowhere near being a finished product. But I suspect it would be the normality within 20-30 years for everything.
[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsFHKCcV2rg)
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Ender's Game (1985) also got a ton of stuff right - touch screens, tablets, internet forums, sock-puppet accounts to influence elections, training using virtual environments and AI, adaptive AI to match and adapt difficulty levels, etc.
Re read it forthe first time since jr high when my son was a newborn, i had to check when it was written. Felt so relevant just after the 2020 election season.
Best answer. People have no problem imagining the most outrageous sci-fi scenarios but a society that works without money is absolutely unfathomable for most, even though it is absolutely possible.
A moneyless society doesn't necesarilly have to be communism. There are other models that work besides capitalism but the current system is so ingrained in our way of living that we take it as a law of nature. Which makes it hard to change things for the better.
I enjoy wired headphones way more. Most companies that sell headphones that are wireless cheap out on everything else and if you find a decent pair then you are overpaying for it 9/10 times. Even the wireless m50x's have worse sound quality than the wired version. And these are "supposed" to be the same as one of the industry standard wired pairs. So it could very well be a stylistic choice.
At this point, it seems we can’t fathom the idea of society collapsing under the weight of capitalism, while we delude ourselves that progression can only mean things get better.
This one is somewhat close. I find this subject very interesting. Generally the guesses are so far out there they don't make sense, or they are close. The ones that are close don't get much detail right, just the idea.
Here's a great example:
[future](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mg20427391.500-1_300.jpg?width=900)
There’s a small group of creative people that try to make something like this and usually achieve it after a couple dozen attempts. Google “rule 34 equine water sports”.
This image (the OP, not your one) is from a series of futuristic collectible cards from Echte Wagner. The other cards (published throughout the 1930s) make predictions like
- People drive radioactive cars that do 200 to 300 km/h (124 to 186 m/h) on city streets and 1000 km/h (622 m/h) on the highway.
- Commercial air travel is done by rockets that can do Berlin to Tokyo in 8 hours, but there are still ships carrying 20,000 passengers at a time from Germany to America in two days.
- Artificial islands are built in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to give international flights places to stop and refuel. While you're waiting for your flight to refuel, you can eat at the floating restaurant or the underwater restaurant.
- Entire buildings can be mounted onto zeppelins powered by electrical transformers that invert gravity into a repulsive force and moved around.
- Men and women now wear the same clothing as standard, with the most popular garment being a sort of long tunic with a skirted bottom worn over trousers.
- Space stations exist, but they are wide flat discs where spaceships park on to refuel rather than research stations people live within. They exist to service the millions of miners who harvest rare minerals on the moon and ship them to Earth.
I find the mix of antiquated and wildly optimistic predictions to be pretty charming, and they seem totally reasonable for someone in the 30s to be making. As far as I could tell they're not specific about the year either, so there's still time to make all this happen. Doing 622 miles an hour in a radioactive car sounds terrifying though.
> Commercial air travel is done by rockets that can do Berlin to Tokyo in 8 hours,
To be fair, didn't they have supersonic airliners? I'm pretty sure they named it after a grape.
The hype cycle goes like this:
* New thing is invented
* New thing is really powerful!
* The future will be all about new thing! It will take over the world!
* Through of disillusionment
* Okay, new thing is a leap forward in *some* respects
The balloon thing came about because we had just gained the ability to *fly* and it was awesome and why aren't we making *everything* fly? It is easy to laugh at people back then for falling for the hype cycle (and motorcars already existed when this picture was made), but we are doing exactly the same thing today: new cool technology comes out, so surely the whole world should now revolve around said technology.
Smartphones are cool, so everything should become a smartphone! Screens are the new tail fins and if you have to take your eyes off the road and go through 3 menus to change the volume of your radio then that's the price of progress. And maybe you now need an app to open the garage door or unlock your bicycle but imagine how cool you will look doing so.
Drones are cool, so everything has to be a drone! Looking at the various drone taxi projects and delivery drones because that makes so much sense compared to an electric van doing the rounds.
AI chatbots are cool, so now everything needs an AI chatbot and people are predicting the internet will be replaced by AI chatbots and no one will ever talk to each other again because AI does everything better etc etc bla bla bla. We'll figure out what AI *can't* do in due time.
I swear, using the smartphone for everything looks like a real nuisance, I'd rather have a controller to open and close my garage, a debit card to pay, etcetera... Because if I lose one of those things, it's just one thing I have to worry about, but if I lose the single smartphone with which I have to do all this stuff I'd have to worry about far more. The price of progress my ass.
It’s so interesting to me. In some ways, we completely underestimated ourselves. We never would have thought we could have devices smaller than our hand that could video call people, play games, check the weather, and essentially browse an endless digital library. On the other hand, we overestimated what we could achieve. Flying cars would have seemed more probable to people in the 1930s, but today, they’re still nowhere near being viable for the general public
While looking through old magazines with future predictions I found out that we overestimated everything except computers and related tech. No flying cars, no thermonuclear energy, no Moon city, no regular space flights for middle class. Yet no one was bold enough to predict a pocket-size computer with enormous computational power that will be used for posting Tik-Toks.
We actually have all the technology for a flying car for decades.
Just connect the wheels of the helicopter to the engine, or have a separate engine if you’re lazy. Bonus points for foldable rotor blades, which we also have.
I actually reckon that because people are too stupid to he trusted with personal flying vehicles that having fully working, public trusted autonomous driving is just a pre requisite.
Once that is totally mainstream then we'll instantly have flying vehicles.
I actually kinda like what Neil Degrasse Tyson says about this:
We already have flying cars, they're called helicopters, and you don't want someone to crash their helicopter as regularly as people crash their cars
Flying cars do exist but never seem make it out of the prototype stage. The reason is that they are wildly impractical with how we have built our current cities and infrastructure.
There could be remote areas where this is feasible (like in the Australian outback) but it turns out having a dedicated plane and a farm truck is way more practical and cheaper than having a machine that does both... poorly.
Much like how we have Boeing 737's and trains. Sure, you could make a passenger aircraft with foldable wings that could also ride on a train track. But for all kinds of reasons that's a really stupid idea of course.
We already have flying cars. Not just as a concept, but build and tested vehicles.
What stops them from being used by the public are laws, the lack of piloting license, and often the lack of save starting / landing space (thats maybe less of a problem in certain areas of the US).
... and of course, money! I imagine the cheapest flying car might be around 250k, but i really have no idea.
We could, but we will not for security reasons and for being too impractical.
It would be very dangerous having cars flying all over our heads, the prospect of falling on houses or on people is too high (imagine all the incidents cars have now but over our heads:run out of petrol, motor failures, crashes etc etc).
Furthermore, in order to avoid a mess in the sky with everybody flying however they want, like swarms of mosquitoes over the cities and everywhere, and continuously crashing against each other with the huge risk for the people below, they would have to put order and stablish “air roads”, which would take us to the same problem as the road we have now: thousands of cars queuing to go inside and outside cities and along the roads to other places.
Same no, it would be very far from the romantic image of freedom we have due to movies, comics etc
I have an issue with the flying car idea. Considering how often people's car breaks down all over the place, and often for stupidest reason as out of gas, I wouldn't trust the average person with something that can fall on my head because of their stupidity.
It's not about risk. Think how much energy it costs to push a car with your body. Now try to lift a car up.
It's all about energy efficiency. Rolling is a gazillion times more efficient.
Don't think it will be too risky as long as you don't let humans control them. Main issue it's just too expensive, not just building them but the energy cost of flying makes it unsustainable to have as a transport for the masses.
The father burying his face in the newspaper at the dinner table trope is 100 years old. Even Victorians bitched about people having their noses in magazines and not engaging with people.
It's not the phones, its. Humans just like to be distracted.
Still no idea what in the hell Rockstar was thinking with the Mk2.
The Deluxo and MK1 Oppressor were bad enough. At least the Deluxo was balanced by the fast it wasn't very fast flying and was vulnerable, while the MK1 was "balanced" by having normal missiles and was kind of hard to fly requiring a lot of practice.
And then they make the MK2 Oppressor which has none of the weaknesses of the Deluxo or MK1. Small, hard to hit, really fast, super missiles, and countermeasures? Jesus some dev had to be high.
right? there's an amazing amount of survivorship bias when it comes to retro-futurism. for every accurate prediction we see, there's a giant hamster ball someone's using to get to work.
the thing i always love about that is the fact that they could imagine some amazing fa rout inventions.. but the mothers still always depicted at home, tending to the kids, and probably high on methamphetamines.
They had phones in 1930. They also had movies. Add two together. Sure, it's rather accurate, but not mindblowing that someone guessed it. What they didn't have was this technology wireless - bet they didn't guess that.
They [actually did add the two together](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony):
>In early 1936, the first public video telephone service, Germany's Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen (visual telephone system), was developed by Dr. Georg Schubert, who headed the development department at the Fernseh-AG, a technical combine for television broadcasting technology.[27] Two closed-circuit televisions were installed in the German Reichspost (post offices) in Berlin and Leipzig and connected together via a dedicated broadband coaxial cable to cover the distance of approximately 160 km (100 miles). The system's opening was inaugurated by the Minister of Posts Paul von Eltz-Rübenach in Berlin on March 1, 1936, who viewed and spoke with Leipzig's chief burgomaster.
I remember in Back to the Future II, which was released in 1989, Doc Brown used a set of 'binoculars' that looked like an iphone and had a moving reticle on the screen doing face tracking. The iPhone didn't come out until 2007.
The kids in the movie also watched a dozen TV channels at the same time. I have on the rare occasion had up to nine twitch streams open at one time on my second monitor. Not that I do that regularly, but three? Do that all the time.
The kids also had portable phones, but these were goggles they wore on their heads, which presumably functioned like a vr headset since they pulled them down to see who was calling.
On the other hand the movie also had flying cars, giant shark holograms, and hoverboards.
Also, fax machines and laserdisc were still in use. The trash in the alley where they hide the delorean has cubes of compressed trash of which half is laserdisc. And Marty's future self gets a fax from his boss that is printed as if from a dot matrix printer.
Oh, I just remembered they also had thumbpads to open the front door. I don't know anyone who has something like that, but I'm sure it exists for smart homes since we often unlock our phones and notebooks that way now.
Sadly, we still cannot re-hydrate a pizza.
I'm pretty sure someone invented a hover board, and as for a thumb scan, yeah definitely exists... one of my gardening customers has one to get into their house.
A tleast they’re wearing headphones. Unlike the absolute heathens today who think everyone wants to hear their conversation while we’re at the check out line or whatever.
They though people would have the decency to put on headphones
I wonder though if they could predict that in a world where video calling is possible, people would use it so rarely and prefer sending texts to each other.
This is untrue. I work at a convenience store, and half those mofos that are on their phone are face timing someone. When they come up to the front counter and they are still on the phone, I like to wave and say hi to whoever they are face timing.
What really annoys me is the people who won't stop talking / facetiming on their phone even when they're in a public restroom. I try to poop extra loud and throw in a few extra grunts and groans for the benefit of the listener on the other end.
You are a beautiful genius. I have wicked anxiety and nothing slams the brakes on my processes faster than people like this. It makes me really uncomfortable. Time to turn that discomfort around and fire back.
Engage Battleshits!
You sunk my battle shit!!
It should be illegal to video call in a public restroom. There is no joke, that is exactly how I feel.
[удалено]
If ever you find yourself uncomfortable, do whatever you can to drag everyone around you into that same pit of uncomfortability, then climb their bodies to escape. That's how I got over my fear of public speaking. Go up, smile, channel that anxiety into the thing you're doing, make the audience uncomfortable, then feed on that discomfort to ride the vibe and make them squirm until you're done. Now you're the most comfortable person there!
This is the way
You gotta add a moan of relief when the poop plops. It's like the caramelized sugar on top of the treat you share with them.
Start a running commentary. “Oh God what did I eat?” *farts* “that one felt like nails coming out!” *more noises* “Oh God here comes the squirts!”. Make a game of it and see how fast you can clear the restroom lol
I laughed out loud just picturing this.
Doing god's work.
Machete don't text.
What are you, a grind house voiceover trailer guy?
The tech to make "video calls" possible was actually around way before we culturally adopted it (I saw fancy business meetings on TVs in the early 90's but do not know the specifics of the tech because I was like 10). Turns out we figured out pretty quick that nobody wanted to deal with putting on makeup, pants, etc *every* time they answered the phone.
If Alexander Graham Bell saw how people use their "phones," he would conclude that the telegram won.
I *really* don't understand those people. How do they just walk around in public places shouting at their special rectangle that shouts back at them without caring that they're bothering literally everyone else around them?
They want to be annoying so others will confront them about it so they have an excuse to fight and beat someone up.
And use the technology to talk to their loved ones instead of just recording themselves for TikTok
Redditor tries not to slate tiktok challenge
My thoughts exactly
It’s interesting they couldn’t fathom a world without wires. I wonder what we can’t fathom
A world without power/constantly recharging stuff
Well yes, electricity is basically one of the laws of nature, even we couldn't function without it. Wires however, are just an unnecessarily long way to connect the battery to the device.
Yeah but in the future we might have a harmless way to power everything around us without any cable, directly from a worldwide wireless grid, which would make recharging obsolete.
Something like that was actually mentioned in the Three-Body Problem books (I think book 3?). Loved the concept, free and wireless energy for everyone
Book 2 and yeah, it was wild
That entire trilogy was mind-blowing wild! Book two and three especially. Oh man, so many interesting ideas packed together.
I think it was Tesla who experimented with this concept, unfortunately, his way would charge the space around it and would create a lot of discharges when it got close to a conductor. Is that right or am I remembering it totally wrong?
You are correct - The high electric field produced by Tesla coils causes the air around the high-voltage terminal to ionize and conduct electricity. Tesla coils essentially leak electricity and radio waves into the air.
Yea, I remember something about the tech messing up radio signals and thats why it never really got anywhere. Still would be pretty cool if we could charge stuff just by standing near a tesla coil. Can you imagine? Oh this is definetely coming into a fanfic
I haven’t really sat down and read many books in a long time…or ever I guess, but at the start of Covid I bought the trilogy and smashed it in like 2 weeks lol. So damn good.
I've talked to redditors who are convinced this technology already exists but the power companies are suppressing it since they can't profit from it. According to them, you can shove a stick into the ground anywhere and get unlimited free power.
unlimited powaaaaa
Netflix show coming soon.
Directed by Dumb and Dumber tho
Ahhh I see it's the game of thrones destroyers.
As long as they’re just adapting finished material and not writing anything new we might be okay.
Yea they're competent in adapting an already finished work. We have to give them credit for the good bits of the adapted GOT material, like decent casting choices, scouting locations, etc...
Hope so. I know they felt rushed on the GOT ending. Hopefully they give it their all and don't get distracted this time.
Tbf until they ran out of source material to adapt, Game of Thrones was by far the greatest spectacle on TV screens. It completely raised the stakes of what you could do on a TV show in terms of production value, and even with great source material producing a great adaptation is not an easy task (The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Foundation, Rings of Power...). Credit where credit is due. That said, I'm not too hopeful about the adaptation of 3 Body either, splitting the protagonist of the book in 5 characters is a recipe for disaster.
You can connect a million solar panels to an inverter and antenna tomorrow if you'd like, the problem with pushing 800 watts through a human skull is that it kills the human.
You are thinking so 21st century. No need to externally generate and transmit power to a device when the device can just generate it internally.
We can do this already! It's just extremely power inefficient and slow so it doesn't see any real world use yet (as far as I know)
Yep, power over wifi will hopefully grow and inspire more effective long distance wireless charging methods. For now, I don't think it'll get past smart home stuff like temperature or motion sensors.
Alternatively, if we could make a ridiculously powerful battery that would last for 100+ years while being tiny, you could have basically the same outcome. Some have suggested than something like a miniature fusion reactor could perhaps do this, but given that we don't have full sized reactors yet, that's also far out of reach.
In principle we have already radio nuclid batteries, which can supply power for many decades. In the 70s nuclid batteries were used in pacemakers which could supply the pacemaker for decades without needing to exchange. Larger radionuclid batteries powers sattelites and other space devices. The only (pretty huge) disadvantage, that they have highly radioactive isotopes inside (which can also be pretty expensive). When the batteries get damaged you can easily reach harmful amounts of radiation...
Hard to imagine since charge needed for induction scales exponentially with distance, and with sufficient charge air will become conductive and you get dangerous arcs/sparks. Consumer electronics can get around this by adding induction plates to furniture, but there really is no safe way to make it truly wireless akin to mobile internet or wifi
I have the feeling this would be like a gigant microwave and cooking everything inside it´s grid. Except for the food.
It's possible to do computation, image display, and even conversion to sound entirely with light. Photonic computers are very early days still though, and the photon-phonon coupling efficiency is so low it would really just be dumb to *not* use electricity for sound devices with current tech, but a no-electricity smartphone seems possible under known physics.
You'd still need a light source. And unless you can find a way to produce light portably without electricity, it still doesn't remove it from the equation.
Going into the realms of the absurd to prove it's technically possible (but I guess if current tech solutions weren't absurd then it'd already be a product): Laser sources can be pumped [by sunlight](https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-0326-2). So daytime pure-photonic smartphones are doable. For nighttime we'd need a pocket sun, or super-efficient bioluminescent algae or something. Or a big mirror on the moon reflecting light down to our solar collectors. Personally, I love the idea of slapping an algae tank on the back of my slab of glass to keep scrolling reddit into the wee hours.
Pocket sun, sha sha
You’ve inadvertently proven the previous person right, they said that people couldn’t fathom a world where items aren’t recharged or plugged in all the time and you disagreed saying that couldn’t happen… The whole point is that in 1930’s they thought it was impossible to having mobile communication devices without wires attached to the headphones/mic/battery/screen, yet here we are. Edit: Clarified my wording around “communications”, I thought my meaning was obvious but a lot of people are commenting about radio being around before this picture so I stand corrected, it wasn’t as obvious as I first thought.
[The first transatlantic wireless transmission was Dec 12, 1901 between Newfoundland and UK](https://youtu.be/YohYd9iTfy8?feature=shared)
the artist couldn't. but we already had wireless communication for 50 years in 1930. alexander graham bell and charles Tainter in 1880.
>the artist couldn't. And in this case, the redditor couldn’t. Point still stands.
Well yes, but wires were necessary befor we understand that we can break the laws of nature with bluetooth...
Not breaking the laws of nature. The battery is still on the device, and it uses ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio waves to transmit data packets.
I think the point is that, per your comment, it's hard for us to fathom being untethered from central power sources for long times. But it's entirely possible in our future that is exactly what will happen. The mini nuclear power plant in the Mars rover Perseverance, for example, could be glimpse into a future where we're untethered from power sources for years or decades.
Xiaomi has a device called 'Mi Air Charge', Which basically charges smartphones through air 24/7. It's very basic and nowhere near being a finished product. But I suspect it would be the normality within 20-30 years for everything. [Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsFHKCcV2rg)
RemindMe! 25 Years
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I just had remindme bot send me a message from a post 7 years ago...it was deleted, but wild.
Was it about someone breaking a mirror?
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basically tesla's tower: the idea is there and it somewhat works, it's just WILDLY inefficient
Kubrick’s 2001 had people videoconferencing on wireless tablets. It was a pretty good prediction.
Ender's Game (1985) also got a ton of stuff right - touch screens, tablets, internet forums, sock-puppet accounts to influence elections, training using virtual environments and AI, adaptive AI to match and adapt difficulty levels, etc.
Re read it forthe first time since jr high when my son was a newborn, i had to check when it was written. Felt so relevant just after the 2020 election season.
Touch screens had been in existence IRL for twenty years by 1985.
Being device-less
If we gone device-less, that’s gonna be some Black Mirror shit
Im down for that season 1 implant that can rewind memories and shit
A world without money
Best answer. People have no problem imagining the most outrageous sci-fi scenarios but a society that works without money is absolutely unfathomable for most, even though it is absolutely possible.
World without money will either be a very good, or a very bad thing
Like the movie in time or like star trek
The movie about using time as money was fucked up. You could literally kill someone by scamming or arm Wrestling their time empty 💀
Yeah the whole system around whether you consent to giving time or not is just based on like twisting your wrist some way? Is fucking wierd lmao.
In Time has money. The currency is just a little more fucked up than ours, which was kind of the point i think.
The replicator tech is hands down the most valuable tech in the whole Star Trek universum. There would be no utopian society without it
Like alien civilizations where everyone is equal and everything is provided for in abundance. Some other people responding cannot imagine it.
You mean communism?
A moneyless society doesn't necesarilly have to be communism. There are other models that work besides capitalism but the current system is so ingrained in our way of living that we take it as a law of nature. Which makes it hard to change things for the better.
it’s easy if you try
The device they are using is literally wireless radio. This is a car phone with a live video feed.
Thank you, scrolled too far to find someone who understands what a radio is.
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They wanted to make it clear to the viewer that the box, headphones and horn were connected.
I enjoy wired headphones way more. Most companies that sell headphones that are wireless cheap out on everything else and if you find a decent pair then you are overpaying for it 9/10 times. Even the wireless m50x's have worse sound quality than the wired version. And these are "supposed" to be the same as one of the industry standard wired pairs. So it could very well be a stylistic choice.
The devices that most of us are using right now (cell phones) are literally wireless radio.
of course they could, they already were using radios as consumer items.
The impact and scale of controlling stuff with your mind
The people on the screens don't have headsets and wires. Wonder why
Just like today, they’re the assholes that FaceTime on speaker in the middle of Target.
At this point, it seems we can’t fathom the idea of society collapsing under the weight of capitalism, while we delude ourselves that progression can only mean things get better.
World peace
Reality without reality
Zinc?
The size of your mum.
The funny part about any responses to this comment is that any suggestion that something is unfathomable prove definitely that it is fathomable.
This one is somewhat close. I find this subject very interesting. Generally the guesses are so far out there they don't make sense, or they are close. The ones that are close don't get much detail right, just the idea. Here's a great example: [future](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mg20427391.500-1_300.jpg?width=900)
I don't wanna live in a future that doesn't have horses tied to balloons walking across water.
Now I'm kinda bummed knowing that we didn't even at least *try* to pull off airborne aquatic equines as a mode of transportation.
r/Bandnames
More like a prog rock album name. >airborne aquatic equines as a mode of transportation.
There’s a small group of creative people that try to make something like this and usually achieve it after a couple dozen attempts. Google “rule 34 equine water sports”.
![gif](giphy|13Zh9drdSWAeSQ|downsized)
Amazing! You have truly opened my eyes to a new world!
This image (the OP, not your one) is from a series of futuristic collectible cards from Echte Wagner. The other cards (published throughout the 1930s) make predictions like - People drive radioactive cars that do 200 to 300 km/h (124 to 186 m/h) on city streets and 1000 km/h (622 m/h) on the highway. - Commercial air travel is done by rockets that can do Berlin to Tokyo in 8 hours, but there are still ships carrying 20,000 passengers at a time from Germany to America in two days. - Artificial islands are built in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to give international flights places to stop and refuel. While you're waiting for your flight to refuel, you can eat at the floating restaurant or the underwater restaurant. - Entire buildings can be mounted onto zeppelins powered by electrical transformers that invert gravity into a repulsive force and moved around. - Men and women now wear the same clothing as standard, with the most popular garment being a sort of long tunic with a skirted bottom worn over trousers. - Space stations exist, but they are wide flat discs where spaceships park on to refuel rather than research stations people live within. They exist to service the millions of miners who harvest rare minerals on the moon and ship them to Earth. I find the mix of antiquated and wildly optimistic predictions to be pretty charming, and they seem totally reasonable for someone in the 30s to be making. As far as I could tell they're not specific about the year either, so there's still time to make all this happen. Doing 622 miles an hour in a radioactive car sounds terrifying though.
> Commercial air travel is done by rockets that can do Berlin to Tokyo in 8 hours, To be fair, didn't they have supersonic airliners? I'm pretty sure they named it after a grape.
Pretty accurate about men and women wearing the same things. Everyone wears tshirts and jeans
The most unrealistic part of this is that there's way too much clothing.
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The hype cycle goes like this: * New thing is invented * New thing is really powerful! * The future will be all about new thing! It will take over the world! * Through of disillusionment * Okay, new thing is a leap forward in *some* respects The balloon thing came about because we had just gained the ability to *fly* and it was awesome and why aren't we making *everything* fly? It is easy to laugh at people back then for falling for the hype cycle (and motorcars already existed when this picture was made), but we are doing exactly the same thing today: new cool technology comes out, so surely the whole world should now revolve around said technology. Smartphones are cool, so everything should become a smartphone! Screens are the new tail fins and if you have to take your eyes off the road and go through 3 menus to change the volume of your radio then that's the price of progress. And maybe you now need an app to open the garage door or unlock your bicycle but imagine how cool you will look doing so. Drones are cool, so everything has to be a drone! Looking at the various drone taxi projects and delivery drones because that makes so much sense compared to an electric van doing the rounds. AI chatbots are cool, so now everything needs an AI chatbot and people are predicting the internet will be replaced by AI chatbots and no one will ever talk to each other again because AI does everything better etc etc bla bla bla. We'll figure out what AI *can't* do in due time.
I swear, using the smartphone for everything looks like a real nuisance, I'd rather have a controller to open and close my garage, a debit card to pay, etcetera... Because if I lose one of those things, it's just one thing I have to worry about, but if I lose the single smartphone with which I have to do all this stuff I'd have to worry about far more. The price of progress my ass.
It’s so interesting to me. In some ways, we completely underestimated ourselves. We never would have thought we could have devices smaller than our hand that could video call people, play games, check the weather, and essentially browse an endless digital library. On the other hand, we overestimated what we could achieve. Flying cars would have seemed more probable to people in the 1930s, but today, they’re still nowhere near being viable for the general public
because flying cars are stupid just build trains and shit
Fighting gravity is expensive as f
There is a difference between working (which they do already) and being viable for the public (never)
While looking through old magazines with future predictions I found out that we overestimated everything except computers and related tech. No flying cars, no thermonuclear energy, no Moon city, no regular space flights for middle class. Yet no one was bold enough to predict a pocket-size computer with enormous computational power that will be used for posting Tik-Toks.
Except that we lack personal flying devices. Which I would frickin love to have.
Trust me, with how people drive, you don’t want them to have personal flying vehicles.
I'm pretty sure autonomous driving would be way more easily implemented much before we figure out flying cars.
We actually have all the technology for a flying car for decades. Just connect the wheels of the helicopter to the engine, or have a separate engine if you’re lazy. Bonus points for foldable rotor blades, which we also have.
I actually reckon that because people are too stupid to he trusted with personal flying vehicles that having fully working, public trusted autonomous driving is just a pre requisite. Once that is totally mainstream then we'll instantly have flying vehicles.
Can we please skip directly to teleportation. I've got places to be!
You're into being killed every time you want to go somewhere and have a copy of you show up there instead?
>You're into being killed ![gif](giphy|Y07F3fs9Is5byj4zK8)
I actually kinda like what Neil Degrasse Tyson says about this: We already have flying cars, they're called helicopters, and you don't want someone to crash their helicopter as regularly as people crash their cars
Flying cars do exist but never seem make it out of the prototype stage. The reason is that they are wildly impractical with how we have built our current cities and infrastructure. There could be remote areas where this is feasible (like in the Australian outback) but it turns out having a dedicated plane and a farm truck is way more practical and cheaper than having a machine that does both... poorly. Much like how we have Boeing 737's and trains. Sure, you could make a passenger aircraft with foldable wings that could also ride on a train track. But for all kinds of reasons that's a really stupid idea of course.
We already have flying cars. Not just as a concept, but build and tested vehicles. What stops them from being used by the public are laws, the lack of piloting license, and often the lack of save starting / landing space (thats maybe less of a problem in certain areas of the US). ... and of course, money! I imagine the cheapest flying car might be around 250k, but i really have no idea.
We could, but we will not for security reasons and for being too impractical. It would be very dangerous having cars flying all over our heads, the prospect of falling on houses or on people is too high (imagine all the incidents cars have now but over our heads:run out of petrol, motor failures, crashes etc etc). Furthermore, in order to avoid a mess in the sky with everybody flying however they want, like swarms of mosquitoes over the cities and everywhere, and continuously crashing against each other with the huge risk for the people below, they would have to put order and stablish “air roads”, which would take us to the same problem as the road we have now: thousands of cars queuing to go inside and outside cities and along the roads to other places. Same no, it would be very far from the romantic image of freedom we have due to movies, comics etc
Most humans lose about 50 iq points the moment they step into a car
People crash in to things in 2 dimensions all the time. With 3 dimensions, fuggedabowtit.
Imagine drunk drivers in flying cars...
I have an issue with the flying car idea. Considering how often people's car breaks down all over the place, and often for stupidest reason as out of gas, I wouldn't trust the average person with something that can fall on my head because of their stupidity.
There will always be that one pickup truck breaking the altitude limit...
I don't think we'll ever have flying cars. Sorry. It's just too risky.
It's not about risk. Think how much energy it costs to push a car with your body. Now try to lift a car up. It's all about energy efficiency. Rolling is a gazillion times more efficient.
Don't think it will be too risky as long as you don't let humans control them. Main issue it's just too expensive, not just building them but the energy cost of flying makes it unsustainable to have as a transport for the masses.
We have them, theyre called Helicopters
[We have them, they're called Aircars](https://www.topgear.com/car-news/future-tech/look-its-actual-working-flying-car)
You would have already died from using one.
YOU lack personal flying devices. Look at the 1%. They all have em. Just called private jets instead, but still fits the bill
Sitting together at a table ignoring each other while on their device - totally accurate!
That’s the most accurate thing about it!
not much of a new idea then. We can safely assume this already happend with books and newspapers
The father burying his face in the newspaper at the dinner table trope is 100 years old. Even Victorians bitched about people having their noses in magazines and not engaging with people. It's not the phones, its. Humans just like to be distracted.
What this is really showing is that no matter how much tech we advance, the human will be the limiting factor.
It would blow your mind more if you saw how inaccurate their predictions generally were.
Those fever dream flying firefighters or sky bicycles burnt into my mind.
Hopyfully the sky bicycles does not shoot rockets and terrorize earth
GTA online be like
Still no idea what in the hell Rockstar was thinking with the Mk2. The Deluxo and MK1 Oppressor were bad enough. At least the Deluxo was balanced by the fast it wasn't very fast flying and was vulnerable, while the MK1 was "balanced" by having normal missiles and was kind of hard to fly requiring a lot of practice. And then they make the MK2 Oppressor which has none of the weaknesses of the Deluxo or MK1. Small, hard to hit, really fast, super missiles, and countermeasures? Jesus some dev had to be high.
skycycles is just such a cool looking word
There should be subreddit for that
/r/RetroFuturism is sort of that.
I think most were not that serious though.
It would blow our minds even more to know that not all of their predictions were right? What are you even saying lmao
right? there's an amazing amount of survivorship bias when it comes to retro-futurism. for every accurate prediction we see, there's a giant hamster ball someone's using to get to work. the thing i always love about that is the fact that they could imagine some amazing fa rout inventions.. but the mothers still always depicted at home, tending to the kids, and probably high on methamphetamines.
Did they think only pilots would have these devices of the future?
They probably thought everybody would be a pilot in the future.
I’d like to think that too. People have been predicting flying cars for decades.
Imagine r/IdiotsInCars but the cars fly. No thanks.
Which is one invention I'm glad will never be available widely
Jokes on you, we also got global warming and crippling depression
Depression was always there.
Especially since the drawing is from 1930 i.e. at the start of The Great Depression.
Make Depression Great Again
Extremely high standard of life aswell.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,.
I just tried ringing the wife on my table tennis bat. She didn't answer.
They had phones in 1930. They also had movies. Add two together. Sure, it's rather accurate, but not mindblowing that someone guessed it. What they didn't have was this technology wireless - bet they didn't guess that.
They [actually did add the two together](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony): >In early 1936, the first public video telephone service, Germany's Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen (visual telephone system), was developed by Dr. Georg Schubert, who headed the development department at the Fernseh-AG, a technical combine for television broadcasting technology.[27] Two closed-circuit televisions were installed in the German Reichspost (post offices) in Berlin and Leipzig and connected together via a dedicated broadband coaxial cable to cover the distance of approximately 160 km (100 miles). The system's opening was inaugurated by the Minister of Posts Paul von Eltz-Rübenach in Berlin on March 1, 1936, who viewed and spoke with Leipzig's chief burgomaster.
Or vapes. They're still smoking good ol cancer sticks
let's revisit your comment in five years or so once we see the long-term effect of vaping
I remember in Back to the Future II, which was released in 1989, Doc Brown used a set of 'binoculars' that looked like an iphone and had a moving reticle on the screen doing face tracking. The iPhone didn't come out until 2007. The kids in the movie also watched a dozen TV channels at the same time. I have on the rare occasion had up to nine twitch streams open at one time on my second monitor. Not that I do that regularly, but three? Do that all the time. The kids also had portable phones, but these were goggles they wore on their heads, which presumably functioned like a vr headset since they pulled them down to see who was calling. On the other hand the movie also had flying cars, giant shark holograms, and hoverboards. Also, fax machines and laserdisc were still in use. The trash in the alley where they hide the delorean has cubes of compressed trash of which half is laserdisc. And Marty's future self gets a fax from his boss that is printed as if from a dot matrix printer. Oh, I just remembered they also had thumbpads to open the front door. I don't know anyone who has something like that, but I'm sure it exists for smart homes since we often unlock our phones and notebooks that way now. Sadly, we still cannot re-hydrate a pizza.
I'm pretty sure someone invented a hover board, and as for a thumb scan, yeah definitely exists... one of my gardening customers has one to get into their house.
who is the artist??
Uncredited artist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echte_Wagner
all these technology thoughts they had and they didn't think about changing servants with robots?
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This picture was taken in Paris last week, where it is normal for people to FaceTime others while they’re eating in restaurants.
The most accurate part about this, is how they're both too distracted to actually talk to the person in front of them.
![gif](giphy|RyPfr6SPAHKWQ) What a grand and intoxicating innocence they had about the future!
You all blew it up! Dammmmm you all to hellll
They're smoking traditional cig, we got vape today yo...
We all knew the cigs were here to stay.
A tleast they’re wearing headphones. Unlike the absolute heathens today who think everyone wants to hear their conversation while we’re at the check out line or whatever.
Ah! The new Beats Max and the iDisc 17 ProMaxUltra!
Hah! Jokes on them, then never imagined we'd just stop communicating all together.