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Things That Science Fiction Got Wrong…

Are these things that don't exists? I think that's what you mean to say, considering some things in your list are certainly not occurring. But others...

NoCoPilot said:
Driverless cars
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Google is working on it.

NoCoPilot said:
Voice-activated computers
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This time, it's both Google and Microsoft to the rescue.

Using the Kinect, if my wife decides to go to the bathroom while we're enjoying a movie, she or I pause the movie by speaking aloud, "Xbox...pause." When she comes back, I speak aloud, "Xbox...play." If were watching a movie and I want to see a scene again, or I miss'd a word of dialog, I'll say aloud, "Xbox...rewind...faster...faster...stop...play" and enjoy the scene again. It works fantastically.

And for Google, one of my primary ways of inputing instructions to my Droid phone is by talking to it. If I want to call my wife, I'll push the little spyglass search button, and say, "Dial Jessica's mobile." It calls her. Or I'll command, "Dial Radio Shack." It'll assume I mean the local one, and call them. I can even say, "Text Jessica...I'll be home a little late." It'll send her that text. Or I can say, "537 times 42 divided by 0.0237." It'll return the correct answer. Hell, I can even speak English to it, and it'll translate, audibly, with the language of my choice. That's right. A universal translator.

It sure seems that voice-activated computing is working well for me. Maybe you're not talking to the right computers?

NoCoPilot said:
Flying cars
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Not exactly. But we do have drivable planes. Or, as they call it, "roadable aircrafts." Now those folks need to talk to Google. And get me a driverless roadable aircraft.


NoCoPilot said:
Extended lifetimes
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And this is the entire reason that the US Social Security retirement system is failing. At inception, we weren't expected to live long enough to collect the benefit. Now, life expectancy is far past the collection age.
 
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Astrodude said:
I can't remember the story, but I think I recall that H.G. Wells didn't predict a moon mission until 2030. It took me a long time to look up, but it wasn't a book by Wells. It was a screenplay by Wells based on his book, The Shape of Things to Come. The screenplay is called Things to Come. It's a weird example of a movie being very different from a book even though they were both written by the same author. Anyways, the film was screened in 1936 and had the first manned mission around the moon taking place in 2036.
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In the opening narration of 1956's Forbidden Planet, it states humanity didn't reach the Moon until the the final decade of the 21st century. A film made only 13 years before we actually did reach it.
 
One thing they did get right in the development of energy weapons;

Tom Swift's electric rifle, which had been previously seen in the hands of Captain Nemo's crew in a more primitive form as well, in the form of guns that shot 'leyden jar' bullets to shock and paralyze.

Don't taze me, bro...
 
Myriad said:
Just about every science fiction author makes space too small.
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Agree
They don't really have a choice. The extremely rare science fiction that makes space feel anywhere near its actual size, while still having human characters moving about in it, becomes horror. Like the short story The Stone City by George R.R. Martin.
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Disagree. It's rare, but not THAT rare, and it does not have to be horror. Asimov's "Martian Way" carries across the distances of Solar System pretty well. Alastair Reynolds does pretty good job with interstellar distances -- and with Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud distances. The novella "Galactic North" brings quite jarringly the fact that once you lost your relativistic drive, traveling from one Kuiper Belt object to another takes longer than traveling between stars. Granted, a lot of Reynolds stories ARE horror, but that's intentional, and has nothing to do with space distances.

Speaking of "Martian Way", when I first read it I thought the claim "anyone born on Earth spends six months in space, and he is a psychiatric patient" is absurd. What happened to the PARENTS of these "born in space" Martians -- were they off their rocker during Martians' entire childhood?
 
Corsair 115 said:
In the opening narration of 1956's Forbidden Planet, it states humanity didn't reach the Moon until the the final decade of the 21st century. A film made only 13 years before we actually did reach it.
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I'm not a JFK fan compared to most of my peers, but I give him credit for his starting the space program and aspiring to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. He did something that few presidents have done; he actually started a government program that made its deadline.:)

I heard an old joke about the Mets once. In the early 1960s, someone said the Mets will win the World Series when man walks on the moon, meaning that they wouldn't win for a very long time. When man reached the moon in 1969, sure enough, the Mets pulled off the biggest upset season ever to win the Series.


Beerina said:
Flesh sexbots with robot brains. I was certain they'd be real by this time.
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We've got 'em, but it'll cost you more than a car.
 
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Myriad said:
In The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke described today's laptop and tablet computers pretty well. However, that was published in 1979; the microcomputer revolution was already well underway (though practical home uses were still limited) and I had built my first home computer kit three years before. Reading it in 1979, I remember it feeling a lot like Clarke was "retconning the future" to conform to obvious but previously unforeseen new trends. Which was probably the case.
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I think even that's overstating his vision.

The first proposal for a tablet-like device was the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook, proposed in 1968, a whole decade before Clarke's writing about it.

But even that's somewhat less visionary than it sounds. It had been clear for a while now that computers become more and more integrated. E.g., Moore's Law was published in 1965.

And it was already clear that once computers of class X become more and more powerful, a branching happens, as a new class Y that does a quarter as much but for a tenth of the cost and size is a viable market. IBM had become a major success by making computers crappier but smaller and cheaper than those of Remington Rand. Then as their computers became more and more powerful, someone came up with the mini-computer, which was, as I was saying, offering a quarter of the power for a tenth of the cost. The rise of Unix in 1969 was also a case of someone offering a bare-bones system, but which ran on cheap machines that previously had been barely enough to be co-processors for the big machines. And then in the 1970's, as mini-computers became insanely powerful, someone made a micro-computer which again was at best a quarter of the power, but for a tenth of the cost. And much smaller too.

That if you follow that trend, you end up with a tablet or such, did not require one to be much of a visionary in 1979.
 
Fishstick said:
Sure, there's no flying cars. But seriously, you'd think that in 2011 you'd have toothpaste that didn't ruin the taste of OJ.
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Ain't nuthin' that can make OJ tolerable.
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Oh!!! I brush before breakfast.
 
Rolfe said:
The bit you're missing here is the word "fiction". That's what it is, fiction. It's seldom, if ever, an attempt to predict the actual future.

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It's FICTION, not prophecy.

Rolfe.
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Yes, it need not ever be "right".
 
Andrew Wiggin said:
One thing they did get right in the development of energy weapons;

Tom Swift's electric rifle, which had been previously seen in the hands of Captain Nemo's crew in a more primitive form as well, in the form of guns that shot 'leyden jar' bullets to shock and paralyze.

Don't taze me, bro...
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There are 12 ga rounds that now allow you do do this from a distance. :)
 
One of the early earth-to-the-moon movies had the spaceship caught up in a asteroid/meteor swarm and get to Mars.
Then the crew recovered consciousness and the high-jinks began... with semi-clothed ladies and really ugly hairy guys... if memory serves.
An earth-moon ship couldn't get to Mars. I knew that back then. 1954?
 
Bob Blaylock said:
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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.

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What were Asimov's Positronic Brains then? Seems to me that most were about grapefruit-sized by the descriptions.

Or the calculator pads from Asimov's Foundation series?
 
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