Horse poop on the 60 year prediction.
Where is my immortality and my sexbot?
I’m guessing a BFR aka big friggin rock hits earth any day now and its back to day one for inovation......
“Scientists will discover direct evidence of dark matter.”
Bwahaha! You can’t discover evidence of something that doesn’t exist.
Most commuters already know when certain freeways become slow moving parking lots on a daily basis.
The possible advances in medicine, engineering and technology sound remarkable. However, nowhere in this lengthy report is there any suggestion on what 85% of earth’s inhabitants will be doing for a living. That fact of life has been given no consideration whatsoever. The old phrase was called ‘painting oneself into a corner’.
I will be too old (maybe) to care that much, but multitudes of people will need to have some short term, in your face reason for living, other than waiting for a new techy toy.
I predict there will be societies of people who defiantly chose to live as we now exist. Most people both work to live and live to work. This must be recognized as a legitimate human need, and not just joked away, calling them ‘Flat-Earthers’.
Well, according to Back to the Future, we're supposed to start dressing like this:
“· An ion engine will reach the stars. If you’re thinking of making the trip to Alpha Centauri, pack plenty of snacks. At 25.8 trillion miles, the voyage requires more than four years of travel at light speed, and you won’t be going nearly that fast. To complete the journey, you’ll have to rely on a scaled-up version of the engine on the Deep Space 1 probe, launched in 1998. Instead of liquid or solid fuel, the craft was propelled by ions of xenon gas accelerated by an electric field.”
And when this groundbreaking spaceship reaches its destination, the explorers will be greeted by their descendants who waited for better technology and got there faster.
Most of them came true, insofar as the author(s) had means to express the prediction, or the prediction was correct in our ability to do it but waylaid by our lack of interest in actually doing so (living on the Moon is, ya gotta admit, boring - it's a dead rock).
Just bought a new car with navigation. The route changes automatically based on traffic. I'm learning a lot of shortcuts! Also, I like the feature where if you put the left or right blinker on, an alarm will sound if somebody is in your blind spot. That's going to save a lot of accidents right there.
My predictions are somewhat different.
1) The effort to create a universal language, Esperanto, was a bust, because they didn’t have the technology they needed to make it practical. A more modern version would be tremendously complicated, but be less a written or spoken language, as such, than an effective computer interpreter based on the individual.
Bottom line, a Star Trek style, anybody to anybody, “universal translator”.
2) The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story called “The Roads Must Roll”, about a future society where vehicles only went short distances to highways that were giant conveyor belts. And while having an entire highway doing that is technologically unfeasible, having a short segment of the highway doing that is not only possible, but could alleviate one of the banes of the modern world, the traffic jam.
As anyone who has used the conveyor belt sidewalks in a long airport concourse knows, they are a very fast and efficient means to transport a lot of people a medium distance quickly, without jams or hassle.
Just an eighth of a mile or highway engineered to do that, which would only work when there was a traffic jam, not when traffic was flowing smoothly, could speed things up enormously. Instead of stop-and-go, a consistent speed of only 10 or 20mph would feel like racing to drivers.
Bottom line: an end to many freeway traffic jams.
3) A shift in the military balance of quality and quantity, to favor quantity. Which is more likely to win an air battle: an extremely expensive high tech aircraft, or a thousand cheap and expendable drone aircraft?
The same applies to ships at sea. Who is more likely to win a sea battle: a single super carrier, or a thousand disposable, modular PT boats, with a torpedo or two on each?
btt
B4L8tr!
damn, everybody already beat me to the punch with all the PopSci and PopMech “flying car of the future” magazine covers.
Maybe newer cars, but not the vehicle I just bought ('67 GMC 1/2 ton). It's got power nothing, and I like it that way.
Bookmarking
This is already being done in Australia with much success (being done indoors and they were the first to pull it off if I recall)