Bob Blaylock
Forklift Operator
Playing with one of my several laser pointers, I realized something.
When I was a child, science fiction movies and TV shows depicted a laser as an exotic weapon, a “ray gun”, that would disintegrate anyone shot therewith.
Now, lasers have become very common items. Research into laser-based weapons has so far failed to produce any practical technology in that category, but lasers have come to have quite a few more benign applications.
Science fiction from my childhood also predicted that by now, we'd be much farther along in manned space travel. 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted that we'd have colonized the moon by that time, and be sending a manned spacecraft to Jupiter. The Star Trek character Khan Noonian Singh was supposed to have departed the Earth in an interstellar sleeper ship before the end of the 20th century. Space 1999 predicted that by that time, we'd have colonized the moon, and been using it as a dumping ground for nuclear waste for long enough to accumulate enough such waste to create a catastrophic explosion that would knock the moon out of orbit and send it speeding off into space at a sufficient rate of speed or the occupants to encounters new alien civilizations every week.
We sent men to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but since then, the farthest that any humans have gone has been in orbit around the Earth.
Computers used to be huge, massively-expensive machines, that filled whole rooms, or even whole buildings. A very large company might own one or two. It seems that back in the day, no science fiction author ever predicted that computers would be otherwise. They certainly didn't predict them becoming as small and as inexpensive and as common as they have become; to the point that most modern households have at least one or two general-purpose computers; with more application-specific computers commonly serving as cellular telephones, watches, clocks, MP3-players, digital cameras, and such.
What else?
When I was a child, science fiction movies and TV shows depicted a laser as an exotic weapon, a “ray gun”, that would disintegrate anyone shot therewith.
Now, lasers have become very common items. Research into laser-based weapons has so far failed to produce any practical technology in that category, but lasers have come to have quite a few more benign applications.
Science fiction from my childhood also predicted that by now, we'd be much farther along in manned space travel. 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted that we'd have colonized the moon by that time, and be sending a manned spacecraft to Jupiter. The Star Trek character Khan Noonian Singh was supposed to have departed the Earth in an interstellar sleeper ship before the end of the 20th century. Space 1999 predicted that by that time, we'd have colonized the moon, and been using it as a dumping ground for nuclear waste for long enough to accumulate enough such waste to create a catastrophic explosion that would knock the moon out of orbit and send it speeding off into space at a sufficient rate of speed or the occupants to encounters new alien civilizations every week.
We sent men to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but since then, the farthest that any humans have gone has been in orbit around the Earth.
Computers used to be huge, massively-expensive machines, that filled whole rooms, or even whole buildings. A very large company might own one or two. It seems that back in the day, no science fiction author ever predicted that computers would be otherwise. They certainly didn't predict them becoming as small and as inexpensive and as common as they have become; to the point that most modern households have at least one or two general-purpose computers; with more application-specific computers commonly serving as cellular telephones, watches, clocks, MP3-players, digital cameras, and such.
What else?
