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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc. They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them =) Houses underwater was a thing they thought were right around the corner as well. It really reads like you just picked up a Scientific American magazine issue from your doctor's office lobby that's from the 50s.

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> Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs,

You can buy those, they're just expensive to buy, to run, to insure, and to learn how to operate.

But you can buy them.

The future has arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed yet. - William Gibson

And soon, it'll be smeared out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - Neal Stephenson

They're also, more often than not, far more limited in scope and capabilities than their imaginative 50's counterparts.

i want my flying car that collapses and folds up into a briefcase like in the Jetsons. parking should be that easy

I want tailor made drugs that convince my brain all this exists while in the real world we live docile, simple lives to extend the viability of human habitation on Earth.

The material resources do not exist on Earth to switch to EV cars. The idea we’re going to live on Mars is hallucination.

Transfer of consciousness to other substrates is far more interesting than literally living out pop culture from the last half of the 1900s.

Watch the Jetsons. You'd be surprised at how many of their futuristic gadgets we have today.

Yeah, and, so? We don’t have the briefcase car and that’s what I want. Don’t come with your whataboutisms and try to make me accept less. Your games are transparent!

Anyone remember or watch 90's TV Show Seaquest DSV. its timeline had us living in underwater stations by now.

Unfortunately Sealab 2021 was more accurate in predicting the future.

I was joking with friends, that it appeared that people saw shows like Star Trek and Star Wars, and thought - hey, we can do that.

The problem is that politicians and governments saw shows like Idiocracy and Space Balls, and thought - hey, we can do that.

Star Trek convinced me that keyboards spit out sparks and smoke and throw you across the room if you type in illogic.

If only.

More pylons required.

Star Wars is pretty dystopian in every era shown in the movies. Even at the height of the Galactic Republic large areas of the outer rim have people living in poverty and outright slavery. Coruscant appears nice, but a little below the surface criminal gangs are running the place with most of the planet's population never even seeing sunlight.

Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.

I'd say Biodome and Idiocracy were far, far more accurate.

And Idiocracy is a hopeful movie -- it shows how an enlightened leader (Herbert Camacho) can actually help society move out of a collapse (that feels more and more likely to happen in real life).

Not really. Because at the end some annoyed pimp called Upgrayedd tunnels there through time. Presumably to pursue an upgrade for his revenue stream.

Fuck yeah!

Yeah, but if you're Not Sure, then it's really hard to convince other people as well though.

Idiocracy got the timeline wrong so, Star Trek and co assumed we are much faster, Idiocracy assumed we are much slower.

Star Trek's DS9 episodes featuring Sanctuary Districts were set in 2024, and Star Trek's WWIII started around 2026. We're kinda on track.

Octonauts is the Seaquest DSV reboot we didn't know we needed.

Boy that takes me back. I liked to think that Roy Scheider was playing the same character he played in Jaws.

> They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them

I think that styling trend was due to making them look like jet aircraft. The taillights mimicked jet exhaust pipes closely. Even the front grille was often fashioned to look like a turbine intake.

Jet engines were some of the coolest, most visible, and most advanced tech in the 50s.

And what to jets do? They fly. QED.

Particularly applicable given we also had spaceflight in the 50s...

Sometimes I wish I could’ve been around to experience that kind of forward-looking optimism. I got a small taste of it in the mid-late 90s, but from the looks of it, 90s futurism was rather tame in comparison.

I'm just old enough to remember the massive optimism associated with the Apollo program (I was a space-obsessed nerd kid). The mid to late 70s though were depressing by comparison, without the rapid cadence of the moonshots.

.... and in the next decade, I saw the Challenger blow up in an elementary school gymnasium.

> The 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc.

Maybe they were right but a little off on the timeline. For example there was a lot of crazy tech that people thought would take off in the 90s and flopped, but are now a reality (Online shopping, smartphones, electric vehicles).

Futurologist back then must have placed almost no importance on the cost of energy.

Might be due to the fact that man made energy was quite a new thing and it's getting cheaper quite fast and seemingly boundless.

Like Moores law. It ends eventually.

There are still a couple of orders of magnitude within reach, if we can commercialize molten salt reactors. After that, solar power in space (using asteroid or lunar mining) for gargantuan scale.

The cost of energy would have been less of a problem without nuclear scare.

The price of energy dropped continuously and exponentially from 1873-1973, and ~1973 is the start of the "great stagnation".

The price of energy recently resumed its exponential cost reduction, but only for those who have access to solar energy. Hopefully those cost reductions result in price reductions for the rest of us soon.

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