Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to It shar is pleasant sittin har in the sun recollecken 'bout the good ole days, ain't it?

Heinlein and the future
Tom Brosz — (archived)

What's both scary and exciting about technology is that it almost blindsides you. Star Trek showed Kirk flipping open a communicator to talk to people. Back then, only millionaires or cops had phones in their cars, and the millionaires worked through mobile operators. If you had told anyone back then that in forty years (not two hundred) school kids would have those phones, who would have believed you? Then tell them that the phones would also hold hours of music, play videos, and take pictures.

The microchip? Showing the first builders of transistorized computers an Intel Pentium chip, and explaining what it did, would probably have gotten you burnt at the stake. Handheld video games? DVDs? The internet? NOBODY really saw these things coming, or what they would do.

Heinlein, no slouch at future prediction, still had his starship-flying characters using slide rules. His Mars rockets used flight computers that had cams in them.

Pournelle and Niven's characters in "Mote in God's Eye" used handheld computers that could take pictures, remember things, and look up information. Who knew?

What's really amazing is how calmly people simply absorb these things until they can't imagine life without them.

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