Re: tech miracles of the year 2000 as seen from 1950

From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 03:12:52 MDT


|Spudboy100@aol.com wrote,
|> Wow, so much for analysis and prognostication. Basically, the article
|> suggests that the technological forecasting is always wrong and always
|> hideously, overly optimistic.
|]
|I'm afraid this is how I see most of our predictions. After watching the
|moon landings, I regularly saw predictions of Moon bases by 1980, Mars bases
|by 1990, flying cars in the year 2000. AI such as HAL was predicted to be
|this year, as well as a manned mission to Jupiter. I really thought I would
|live to visit other planets, but now that hope seems unlikely unless a major
|breakthrough in life-extension allows me to go farther into the future.

In fact, if humans decided they _needed_ a Moon base, they would exist one.
The technology to go there exists, as the Moon landing demonstrated.
The technology exists, but not the economics.



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