This lunchtime, as I was walking across the Guildhall Square in Portsmouth, there was an opera singer performing on the steps of the Guildhall. I'm no expert, but I think she was pretty good, and it's quite unusual for anybody to perform to passersby like that. So I did something very obvious: I phoned my wife so that she could hear the singing over the mobile.

Imagine reading the above in the 1970s. "Are you saying that in 30-odd years time, ordinary people will be walking around with Star Trek-style communicators? No way!"

And of course the idea that I'd be sharing this little story with people on other continents later that day would have seemed... unlikely.

Driving in heartland America, over the horizon you begin to see strange shapes looming through the morning light, getting closer you see rows of windmills, glistening white in the sunlight

The scale of the construction defies imagination. Each tower rises over a 150 feet into the air, each blade, made toy-like with distance is forty feet long and needs its own semi trailer to transport

You cant help but smile and think "I am living in the future"

Yes, that's the sort of thing I mean.

i'll believe i'm living in a science fictional future when i get my flying car.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Be careful what you wish for...

That is so old fashioned, I use a teleporter now-a-days.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

a teleporter might be good if you just want to get somewhere fast, but i like to take my time and take in the scenery. you can't go cruising around with a teleporter.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Science fiction future stuff:

When a medical tech uses a hand scanner and reviews the results on a flat screen that could be right out of Star Trek, except for the wires.

Watching a crewed space station that can outshine Venus go overhead.

Seeing a vast and growing library of images and information about other worlds, other stars, other galaxies, even worlds around other stars, and all this on a planet wide information network.

Gigabytes on a keyring.

Personal computers that exceed the specs of supercomputers I used to dream of using.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The half-foot thick plasma TV in my living room doesn't amaze me; but occasionally I'l realize that, and then the fact that it doesn't amaze me amazes me.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Yes, that's the point. We should be amazed at what we're not amazed at.

Well getting away from physics, other sciences
have progressed. DNA matching is now good
enough evidence to remove doubt about
convictions. Though strict procedures
guarding against forensic fraud are still
nessessary. And the trick of alternately
warming and cooling a trace sample to "grow"
the DNA to analysable levels was a spectacular
development. Again though care must be used.

Several culprits have now been convicted
decades after the crime. And others cleared!
And I suspect a few convicted people who
cannot admit to a crime want some testing
done to clear their name if possible.

These are science fiction dreams that have
come to pass alright!

We have computers as powerful as the supercomputers of the 1970s and 80s, and we use them to play games or chat on a network that spans the world. I can sit in my chair and read breaking news stories from around the world. Millions of people carry cameras (still and video) built into tiny cell phones and catch all sorts of things as they happen. A plain and obscure Scottish woman goes on a British TV show and wows millions of people around the world with her voice. With the right equipment, we can watch just about any movie ever made whenever we want in the privacy of our own homes.

And flying cars? I know a man who owns one. He's working on his own design for another one, too.

Gene map of a Neanderthal comes to mind.

The SF future that never came was the 1930's and 40's of mighty machines, limitless matter and energy. What happened was that things got smaller instead of larger, that it was faster to push electrons and photons than it was to push metal.

Everything getting smaller. The expected future was landing Huygens on Titan. The unexpected was getting reams of data from a space probe transmitting from Saturn with a five watt radio.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

a Heinlein one--we have this device that can show, in full color and motion, what is happening on the other side of the world, and we use it for....I'll give you a hint--it is called an "idiot box" by some.

We now have a network connecting a very high percentage of American homes together with major databases of information at companies, universities, etc. and we use it for downloading...ok, can't say on this forum!!! Well, ok, I can say "warez" anyway, I guess. For those who don't know the term, warez is a way of installing a virus on your computer (in practice if not in theory).

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

The really unexpected is "we have a massive space program, put a man on the moon, AND THEN STOP".

Ok--when I was a kid, finding planets around stars was SF for sure. All kinds of reasons it couldn't be done--Barnard's Star thought to have one, but of course, the errors in measurement were bigger than the effects of the phantom planet. Now, we can find out things about the planet's atmosphere, etc.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I was watching The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes the other day, and they had a third-hand computer; the person who donated it to the college did so in lieu of a $20,000 donation. They also had reel-to-reel tapes for it from some company that wasn't actually JPL in that vaguely disguised way, and they had to have a separate room for it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The old film Things to Come was broadcast in
the early nineties, I had not seen it for
decades. Great ending with the Space Gun
operating. Then I realised the newspapers were
full of the SuperGun affair!

My job: I maintain an army of robots, each of which does the work of a hundred thousand men.

ETA: I mean, I'm a sysadmin in the e-commerce field. My robots are computers serving the needs of millions of customers worldwide. The number of clerks, secretaries, switchboard operators, and bookkeepers necessary to do this volume of business "by hand" would be mind-boggling.

I might beat Mike to this one Gillian, maybe it shouldn't play tennis if it is nervous.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

Even the simple automatic washing machine, fill it with clothes add your powder and go out, it is all clean when you return.

Well not hand held, but the CT scan is close enough, amazing to see your entire internal body organs from all angles.

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You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can not please all of the people all of the time.

"Why change passwords when you've got a baseball bat?"

I often do pause to be amazed, or at least amused, at the science fiction aspects of the world. There are just so many. A couple more come to mind:

A person walking along with an Uhuru earphone, having a real conversation with someone else, somewhere else in the world, essentially using a form of technological telepathy.

Or the Lasik that allowed me a decade without glasses for the first time since I was a kid (it is getting to the point I'll need correction again, though).

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Two celebrities are fighting over who will instant message 1,000,000 people, people are complaining about the carbon footprint of virtual spam email, but you still can't reserve your room at the Luna City Hilton. Heinlein never saw that one coming.

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Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, people want to be entertained.

I should point out that I was thinking of echocardiography, an ultrasound system where they use a hand held probe and can review the results on a flat screen after being processed by computer. Okay, there are wires and gel, but still, very Star Trek like.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

They used the wand and screen when I was pregnant with my daughter, I remember.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Which means, in proper 1950's Golden Age SF context, you maintain an army of robots, each of which does the work of a hundred thousand women.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

- Your car tells you what the weather is (warm/cold)
- Your car tells you not only how much gas you have left, but how far you can drivee on it and your fuel economy (both instant and average)
- Your car tells you when you need to air up your tyres.

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Perhaps ironically, it seems that I don't live in as much of a science-fiction world as I could do to lack of money.

none of my cars tell me those things.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Your car can (not mine, but still) tell you how to get somewhere, and which roads are busy.

Kids get toy computers and robots to play with that are more powerful than what was bleeding-edge ten years ago.

There are portable phones that also play music without tapes or albums, takes pictures and "films" movies while also acting as an alarm clock, reminder of appointments or medication, allows you to look up vast amounts of information, act as a secretary and answering machine and send written messages and play videogames.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

1950's reader: "What's a videogame?"

Seriously, the whole concept of a game played inside a computer-generated environment (as opposed to computer playing a game, like HAL playing chess) is something no SF writer came up with before Pong made its debut. At least, to the best of my knowledge.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.