Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
OTOH, we actually still don't have many things that SF authors have predicted for our time, or even for earlier time - real AIs, intelligent robots, self-driving cars, nuclear fusion or some other cheap, never-ending energy source, space colonies and so on. We haven't solved our hunger and poverty problems either.
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SF is mostly about entertainment. Sometimes a warning. But only the poorest kind attempts to be predictive. Most has Science fantasy or even "magic by another name".
Cordwainer Smith's work is classic SF but certainly has psychic power and fantasy.
E E Doc Smith started publishing his Space Opera in 1928 and being a scientist/chemist would have known that iron is the most impossible fuel for spacecraft. Fusion & Fission was certainly known to have iron as the valley point even then.
Some "predictions" have happened by accident, some by people or companies deliberately trying to implement the idea. Musk, Zuckerberg et al forget SF was never meant to be a blueprint and if serious at all was warning of dystopian results. See Brunner's brilliant "Shockwave Rider" inspired by rather silly book by I think Toffler.
There is a spectrum between "pure" SF and "pure" High Fantasy, no sharp barrier. Most so-called Hard SF is nothing of the sort and is best when the Science/Technology aspects are simply a backdrop (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: the submarine, batteries, electric engines and diving suits were all already real).
We do have miniaturisation and CPU/GPU power hardly imagined.
Fusion does exist and has a net output if the neutrons from reaction irradiate Fission waste, otherwise the system consumes more than it delivers.
Electric cars, radio, fax, colour photography, mechanical TV, batteries, movies are all Victorian or slightly earlier inventions. Electronic TV outlined in 1905. The CRT invented in UK and Germany in 1890s.
First programmable computer was the Z1 in 1939.
LEDs (accidental) and transistors (couldn't be made) known before 1936 but took till 1960s for LED and 1947 to make a working transistor (due to purer Germanium).
The magnetrons in a microwave oven date from WWII and the Victorians could have made microwave ovens but not Radar if they had stumbled on the Magnetron idea. It only needs a clockwork timer, metal box and a mains transformer (they had AC mains and also transformers) as well as the simple magnetron.
Some things have physical limits. So we are nearly at transistors as small as they can be. Programs need a specification and on silicon are simply faster than on a mechanical machine, so some argue that while simulations that fool the naive are easy, real "hard" or "general" AI like in Banks stories or ST-TNG Data are impossible.
The speed of light is a limit. Entangled particles seem to break that limit, but actually they can only be used to validate light speed messages, it's as if your randomly shuffled deck of cards
you've not examined is instantaneously re-shuffled. Since you didn't know the prior state the new state can't carry a message.
Unless some unknown physics is discovered the only kind of Starship is the coasting Generation ship, which would need to be a big ring or tethered ships rotating on a common axis, or everyone would eventually die due to zero gravity. The ship would be like a nuclear sub as those can probably already be self-sufficient and stay submerged for a year. They use the fission power unit to get oxygen from seawater. A generation starship would carry water as shielding.
We had a radio controlled biplane in WWI and a modified passenger jet (no passengers) took off, flew and landed autonomously maybe in 1972.
Rocket engines using liquid hydrogen and oxygen tested in 1930s
German supersonic V2 had a mechanical inertial guidance computer and almost hypersonic.
Jet aircraft based on a Spitfiire airframe tested in 1939.
The Russians landed a probe on the moon in 1959 (Luna2). Early Russian spacecraft used valves (tubes) of a specialist kind. Luna 3 sent back photos of the far side of the moon in 1959.
Early spy satellites dropped the film canister to Earth. Ice Station Zebra based on a real event in Norway. Later they used the idea Baird developed in the 1930s for TV to develop and scan the film in the satellite. He did it because he had no electronic camera (that was an RCA/EMI design invented by a Russian in the USA). Then the images could be transmitted back. It was decades later before electronic cameras could match film.
The Six Million Dollar Man was based on a book called Cyborg. In reality electronic eyes, ears and mechanical body parts are never going to equal self-repairing biological parts. Regrowing teeth is almost here. Stimulating the body to kill some cancers is almost here and vaccines are since Crimean war. Cholera deaths massively reduced when they treated symptoms so someone could live long enough to get better. Salt, water and sugar, though now a banana is known to help.
There is no shortage of food or energy.
The problem is greed, not technology. The USA alone consumes
over 50% food and 80% energy with about 12% of population, though USA only 5th highest meat consumption.
Some research will easily find the links for all this. It's well known.