I enjoy on occasion pointing out to people how the worlds most popular drink is a rather acidic stimulant infused with CO2 that comes in pressurized aluminium canisters.
How about when Arthur Dent tried to explain tea to the ship's computer, and it was baffled that he wanted the flavor of boiling water poured over leaves and mixed with a fluid squirted out of the bottom of a cow?
I was thinking Coca Cola, but coffee is pretty weird too :)
I don't really have much to back up "most popular beverage", but I recall reading somewhere that the phrase "coca cola" is the most universally recognized fragment of speech in the world. Technically I suppose water would be more "popular", but different languages tend to have their own words for that.
In the US and Canada at least, a popular coffee company named Starbucks sells canned coffee-based beverages (although not in their own shops, I think).
Must admit, the example story did not impress. Today is not exactly science fiction, compared to 1995, more like a better version of it that ran with some stuff. You'd have to go a bit further back, I think, for today to truly appear to be science fiction. Putting myself in my 1995 shoes, on reading this story, I'd probably have sniffed and gone,
"Surely there will be something better in the future than a Psion Series 3 with a colour TFT (like on my dad's old laptop) that runs Dragon Dictate and links up to GPS? This story is so unimaginative.
"The author can't even be bothered to invent new musicians. Trent Reznor! Hahaha. Like he'll still be popular. What next, the Rolling Stones? They should do what they did in Dune - set the story in 20011, then make shit up. Much less embarrassing.
"Besides, it isn't even vaguely realistic. Americans... in hatchbacks?"
To save my post from seeming too sarky, my 1990 self would probably have been impressed. 1992 1/2... maybe. 1995... not really.
In 1995, I had a pocket computer. I had heard of GPS. I had used Dragon Dictate. My dad's OLD laptop was good enough to play Doom on, using the inbuilt screen. My mother had a mobile phone, my father had a mobile phone. (Not as practical as a carphone, but they had them nonetheless.)
From my perspective... 1995-2011 was hardly science fiction, though of course there's always time for (say) 1996-2012 to count ;)
Progress, yes.
"Science fiction"? Well... personally, I set the bar for that rather higher.
Well, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES.
You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical.
—
† Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.
- Few people had computers. It was not reasonable to meet someone and expect that they know how to operate, say, a word processor. All of my homework was done by hand, including essays and long-form writing. All research was done in libraries amongst musty shelves and microfilm viewers.
- Even amongst the few families with computers that I knew about, I was definitely the first to get a CD-ROM drive. Storing mass amounts of data on a disc was brand spanking new. The default storage media for data was 1.44MB 3.5" floppies.
- We had VCRs. Most people did at that point, but they were still expensive beasts, much more so than the $50 DVD players we can purchase today.
- Walkmen were still huge. Mixtapes were still huge.
- Cell phones? What a bigshot you are!
- Game consoles were very popular and not at all rare. It was the SNES vs. the Genesis at that point I think.
- The internet "existed" - but was not at all in a state that we are familiar with today. More people used closed networks like CompuServe and AOL than the open web as we use it today. Even then, it was not at all reasonable to expect someone to have an email address at all. People had sort of heard of this "internet" thing but most people still didn't even know what it really was.
My dad had a Compaq laptop and an Ericsson cellphone in -93, and I got my first cellphone in -96 (I was 22). I've had broadband internet (not dial-up) since -97. Scandinavia was quite ahead of the curve when it came to cellphone adoption and internet stuff.
Well, I live in the UK, so maybe things were different? I was under the impression we were pretty backward round here, though. I was 18 in 1995, so I (think I) remember it fairly well.
It's true that my dad was always a bit of an early adopter. We had a VCR in 1983, and a CD player in 1986, and a home computer in 1982 - now all that WAS unusual.
But that was then. By 1995, all par for the course. Almost everybody I knew had a VCR, pretty much everybody had a CD player, and basically everybody had a computer (and it was always a PC - very different from even 2-3 years previously). I wasn't even the only person I knew to have a computer small enough to fit in my pocket (and I think my Psion was old hat by 1995 anyway).
Mobile phones weren't terribly common in 1995, but nor were they particularly rare, and people were certainly familiar with the notion. (I vaguely remember mobile phones being used in the early series of the X-Files, and that this was noted in the press at the time.) By late 1998 (if I remember correctly?) pretty much everybody had one, so even if 1995 is too early for mobile phones to truly count as common technology it is not a stretch to class them as being common "around that sort of time".
I stand by my statement: you have to start further back than 1995, if 2011 is to seem like science fiction! Even if you're going to call me on my privileged upbringing (I blame the parents...), and perhaps suggest that this was not the case for the majority of the population (you tell me...), the technologies were common enough and well-known enough, that there's not enough difference between 2011 and 1995 to count!
Go back ten more years, maybe.
(But then, maybe not. Perhaps if I had been 18 in 1985, today would seem like a smooth transition? Hard to say. But I'll stand by my statements, from my perspective, which I'm afraid is the only one I've got ;)
Very few people I knew in 1995 had a computer. We got our first one Christmas 1998 and a 56k modem in January 2000. Everyone had a VCR, we were pretty much the exception so that doesn’t really count. But the mobile phones of 1995 really are a far cry from the mobile phones of 2011. It’s ridiculous to even compare. The concept of calling everywhere might have been possible in 1995, the concept of using a smartphone? Our family, by the way, got their first mobile phone in 2001. A cheap Nokia 3410 that could do nothing.
Think of it this way, most college aged kids today barely remember things in 1995. We just have an abstract idea of the early-mid 90's: no internet, limited scope of computers, primitive game consoles etc. Nowadays technology is a huge part of out lives so it amplifies the effect of "Holy shit we've come a long way."
I don't mean to assume your old or anything but even if my parents did have a laptop I certainly wouldn't have remembered it or even fathom the concept of GPS.
Its also interesting to see what the current generation will think of our advancements. My kid brother isn't at all impressed by an iPhone, while I still marvel at how far we've gotten in phone tech.
I grew up in the UK. Perhaps the humour doesn't translate.
Anyway I have always got the distinct impression that car-buying trends in America traditionally favour larger-engined saloon cars. In the UK and Europe, on the other hand, smaller-engined hatchbacks are popular.
It was my belief that this belief was shared by most Americans too, and so to state that "Americans don't drive hatchbacks" would be relatively uncontroversial, even though as a statement it is demonstrably false.
car-buying trends in America traditionally favour larger-engined saloon cars.
That's not really very accurate. The Ford F-150 pickup truck has been the best selling automobile for nearly 30 years. As of the 2009 article I'm looking at, the Chevy Silverado pickup truck was the #2 seller. That's a lot of pickup trucks.
As for the rest of the market, it fluctuates tremendously with fashion and fuel prices. Cars overall have shrunk over the years, and enormous sedans, convertibles, or station wagons have come and gone as status symbols. The most recent notable trend was the SUV. Hatchbacks come and go, but we tend to associate them with the cheap compacts following the 70's oil embargo. Also, why buy a hatchback when you can buy an SUV (which is also technically a hatchback, but 'cooler') for not much more?
If the U.K. had the buying power and parking space, their automotive purchasing trends would likely look much more like the U.S. Then again, the depreciation rate on vehicles in the U.K. is extremely high, so perhaps that would limit adoption.
I think it has a lot to do with a general backlash against people who hardly ever leave urban areas driving stupidly large vehicles consuming vast amounts of resources for no good reason whatsoever. They were fashionable for a while and now they most certainly aren't and a lot of people buying them were motivated by fashion rather than practicality.
Even in situations where you have deep snow etc. a lot of modern SUVs aren't actually that good because of huge low profile tyres. For most people in urban environments, SUVs are silly.
I disagree. Having lived in San Francisco and Oakland, I've found an SUV (Grand Cherokee, mid-size as SUVs go) to be positively fantastic. The suspension can handle terrible roads, the elevated position gives much better visibility, the turning radius is very good. There were times that I wished it were the length of a Miata for parking, but at least I could carry four friends in comfort while looking for parking.
As for snow, I credit the tread design and composition entirely. A good mud/snow tire, with non-continuous tread blocks and plenty of siping, makes an amazing difference. Any car with high-performance street tires will suck in the snow.
Cars in America have shrunk over the years, which isn't difficult if you're starting with the monstrosities of 1950s and 1960s. Cars in Europe stayed mostly constant, although they seem to be trending slightly larger.
People ask me why I like to keep around some old computers. My response is that you can't see where you are going unless you know where you have been. This is my version of 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it' (or the more modern 'repatent it')
It's a good post and it reminds me a little bit of those old tv commercials from Qwest and AT&T about how you'll be able to "watch any movie ever made in any language" in a dumpy roadside motel or 'send a fax from the beach' that were run in the 1990s.
But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network.
There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).
There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces).
Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.
Yes, and running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other over and over. Everything is incremental. It's how we get from "here to there" in every conceivable sense, but it's ok to step back sometimes and marvel at how far we've come. Just because we're not colonizing planets doesn't diminish all of our other accomplishments.
I'm surprised you don't think computers have changed much. To me, sitting at a desk staring at a big CRT while using dialup AOL is a completely different experience from sitting in bed with a laptop or on the couch with an iPad watching YouTube over wifi.
The weird thing about flying is that the bottle neck has become the "security" measures, flight delays, and all the other time spent from leaving your home to when you actually arrive at your destination.
Speeding up all of those steps probably has even more effect on door to door travel time than reducing the amount of time the plane has to be in the air.
For some trips, yes. The travel to the airport and time through security and boarding are fixed. Taking a 1 hour flight from Detroit to Chicago almost isn't worth it when you can drive it in 4 hours, because you've got probably an hour to the airport and an hour of waiting around at the airport to board, then more time at the other end getting more transport to your final destination.
But those same ~2 hours prep pale in comparison to, say, LAX->SYD. :)
Every time I make that trip on the A380, I'm Louis CK for the whole trip. I'm going as far as I can go without starting to come back again in one night and all I have to do is sit here and eat the snacks and watch my choice of movies on the tv in my seat. Bump future.
> a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.
But these ideas are not unimaginably far from what we presently can do.
Previous sci-fi ideas were unbelievable. I'd like to hear some ideas which are unbelievable again. Everything I heard so far just seems quite sensible and achievable.
There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).
No, the hardware may not have changed much, but the usage of computers in general society has changed, a lot. due to the internet.
When Windwos 3.1 was popular, odds are you couldn't use it to order cinema tickets at your local cinema, buy pizza, order your shopping, send a message to your mother, or watch the latest film as soon as it came out at whatever time suited you.
Now, when Windows 7 is popular, you can do all these things.
I don't know why you're being downvoted so savagely. You've just set the bar high. I do disagree with you, though. The internet and its potential still amazes me...
I marvel how the world changed during my mother's lifetime, 1910-1999. Her family was the first to get electricity in the town and her uncle was the first to get a car. It died after a couple of thousand miles. No one had told him to change the oil. Airplanes were in their infancy. If you wanted to go to Europe, you took a steamer, but of course no one she knew ever did anything like that. In her lifetime she saw transcontinental telephones, radio, antibiotics (she was a nurse), nuclear weapons, airliners, television, the interstate highway system, 4 states added to the union, a man on the moon, computers, and the internet, although she never did try that.
I started reading science fiction in the 1960s and the authors didnt come close to reality. Heinlein wrote a novel that featured an automatic drafting machine, but it was a robot, not autodesk. The societies were often quite dystopian, American dictatorships or theocracies. An the flying cars, automated households, and colonies on mars never came to pass.
I tell a similar story for my grandfather, who lived pretty much the same years as your mother. When my grandfather was born, his father's business was a horse changing station for the Madrid-Bilbao stagecoach. Eventually my great-grandfather sent his older kid (my grandfather's brother) to France to study cars at Renault, so he could turn the business into an automobile repair shop and service station. In the 70s my grandfather would fly to the US on a Jumbo jet. From stagecoach to trasatlantic flight in one generation.
Heinlein's novel: I think you are talking of Door Into Summer. It also contained a precursor to the Roomba. It was called something like the Mechanical Maid, but the description is of a vacuum-cleaning creeper.
On one hand the present is so strange as to be beyond sci-fi.
On the other hand, most everything he mentions is internally-directed tech: computers get smarter and we are more and more self-absorbed in them. "Big" sic-fi, like jet packs and field propulsion are still nowhere in sight.
So yes, if you want to plug a computer into your neocortex in 20 years and become one with the collective, life is looking awesomely like sic-fi. But if you want to visit the moons of Saturn, or have a Mr. Fusion power your time-machine car, it ain't happening.
The strange thing is how some things took a huge leap (3g Internet on a cigarette pack sized computer with GPS) while others are stagnant (my car is, comparatively, barely changed).
The trick is to guess what will stay the same and what will jump eons forward.
They have been speaking about nano-tube based building materials, alternative fuel and better batteries for decades now.
My car gets 50-55 MPG and could auto-route me places if I want. It starts when I shove a piece of plastic in in and push a button. It makes no noise below 10mph, later models of this car make no noise below higher speeds.
I drive an Audi A1 Petrol with no electric hybrid motor and get more than 55 MPG, which begs the question, why do you drive your car like a maniac?
P.S. A friend of mine drives a Citroen C1 Petrol and gets 70MPG regularly, sure it's a tiny car, but still, I don't see how 50-55 MPG is so mind blowing.
I'm using american gallons. Multiply your figures times 0.83 to get american gal.
In imperial gallons, my figures are 60-66 MPG-imp.
If you were using american gallons, here are some substantive things that probably offer a difference or two in our relative inefficiencies:
I live in the southeastern US (Atlanta, GA), which is basically a sauna for 150+ days a year (today is 82% humidity, with a "Feels like" temp of 37 C/99 F), so constantly run the air (which is actually more efficient than opening the windows for my particular car, a 2005 Toyota Prius).
The Audi A1 is a mini-cooper sized car (which my wife has). My car (a prius) is a mid-sized sedan (comparable in size to a Ford Fusion, which gets 22 MPG City/32 MPG highway). You can easily fit 2.5 as "person" and 4x as much stuff in my car as you can hers.
I take very short trips (living in Midtown, which as it sounds, is in the middle of town), so the engine is only at maximally efficient thermal profile for a short part of the time.
My car is actually 6 years old (although newer models don't really have higher overall MPG it seems). But to someone from 1995, my 2005 Prius getting 52 MPG would seem strange indeed, seeing 27 MPG in the city and 34 MPG highway was typical gas mileage for a 1995 Nissan Sentra, a popular midsized car of that year.
Well, we do have our jet packs http://martinjetpack.com/ and flying cars http://www.moller.com/ Maybe we just need a successor to concrete to start a new age of huge civil engineering feats -- I'm still hoping for the space elevator.
You are far too attached your squishy, fragile body..
Edit: To actually add some substance to that, I mean space travel is dangerous, slow, and radioactive, and likely to remain that way for a while. So uploading to a robot really is probably the best way to go visit other planets for a while.
Loved reading that, especially the comments. Really makes you think how far we've come over the years, and we haven't really noticed. Suppose it's been so gradual that it's hard to. A cure for cancer would really be a massive milestone for me in the future (and maybe teleportation!)
That's fantastic :D ye hopefully we'll have a definitive cure in a few years, even for the people who only notice they have cancer when it's in its later stages.
Of course by the time we have a cure, there will be some other disease we have to deal with :P
And I didn't even manage to cram in, "Technology exists that can let anyone, anywhere, listen to any song or watch any movie ever made, instantly and in excellent quality [...]
- well, I'm glad you didn't, because it is not true, at least not if you live in Germany. Here, it's more like: "This content is not available in your country." So much about anywhere...
Piracy allows you to do it. I know it's not legal, but you can easily and quickly, and for free get (almost) any TV show, film, or music album (and soon, book) rapidly via P2P networks.
In '95 piracy meant buying dodgy low quality VHS tapes from the back of someone's car in a car boot sale. The quality and selection was no where near as good. Now you can pirate the TV show about 1 hour after they are first shown and watch them before they are aired in your country. You can stream loads of sports events as they happen live. You're an american in germany and want to watch the superbowl live? no problem!
16 years from now - I'm guessing we may be seeing the start of an energy revolution ... which will be even more significant than the communications and data revolution which just happened.
Also, a lot more progress will have been made in the area of genetics and medicine ...
I've read a good chunk of science fiction over the years, but the most accurate Cassandra I've talk to in my life was my aunt and her colleges whom were historians, futurists and history profs. Many of the recent big changes in the national and international economies and political environment were discussed/forecast by them over two decades ago. And a few science fiction writers have gotten some of these trends right, while failing on the little details like gadgets.
Yesterday's historian is today's prophet. Instead of tracking the evolution of gadgets, tools and tools, it's more important to notice the social and political changes in one's lifetime. Many of those have been impacted by technology, not always a positive way when viewed on a macro-scale. While technology advances, basically civilization/society is still the same bunch of greedy primates that existed by the Tiber over two millennium ago.
The difference between things that came true, and things that are still as far off as ever seems to come down to how much energy they take to do, and (which is much the same) whether the advance depends on Moore's law or not.
Tiny computers that auto-translate - not much energy, just raw computing power
Jetpacks - lots of energy, applied in a big dumb way.
One of the things that really gets me is the fact that we're now disappointed when we go to a place and they don't have a way for me to open up my nicely designed aluminium computer and just browse the internet with nothing more than a password.
And then further than that, that we're getting to a point where that is beginning to matter less and less thanks to advances in cellular technology. When I stop to think about what we can do with cell phones and their networks it's just mind boggling - from what the cellphone can do, to the fact that you press a button, and suddenly my laptop and my friends are browsing broadband internet sourced through my cellphone (which has a processor core 3 times more powerful than the machine that my dad paid $5000 NZD for in 1998 - which was super top of the line, PII 300, 3d accelerator, video capture and EVERYTHING!).
Proliferation of wireless and cellular technology is just so damn cool.
Good post, but it would have been difficult to write without including IT (or media). You'd have to use the year 1795 or something. There are probably lots of fields today where Aristotle, if he would be brought back to life, would go "meh". (But he would think it was damn cool that he could be brought back to life.)
I don't know about other fields, but math has made amazing progress. In my undergraduate studies I couldn't really tell because aside from some cute but not overly impressive graph theory I didn't learn anything more recent than the 1930s (some basic algebraic topology, a little functional analysis, some ergodic theory, some differential topology, ...). Most of the stuff I learned was, of course, much older. But know that I know some of what mathematicians have been up to since then I am constantly amazed.
I hate this submission, but only because it lead my to use a proxy to bypass "reddit.com" in my hosts file. Now that I've experienced how easy it is, I'm sure I'll be going back.
In that case, either add the proxy to your hosts file, find the willpower to resist distraction, or establish a system of incentives to stop you from getting distracted (unblock Reddit from your hosts file, then write a program to, for every minute you spend on Reddit, donate a dollar to a charity that you hate).
The present is weird.