I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
To be fair, you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying in an automobile accident.
Based on modern safety standards for everything else, that’s unacceptable.
If I offered you a job and said you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying from working this job, you would refuse. The most dangerous job in the USA is logging, with about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying. More lumberjacks die driving home than die working their extremely dangerous job.
Not only should we have self-driving flying taxis by now, but we should also at least have level 5 self-driving cars so people aren’t constantly dying driving to get groceries or pick up their kids.
No
What we need is more bicycle roads, pedestrian walk ways and public transportation
Suffice to say that 1 bus is safer than 30 cars but it also generates a shit tonne less pollution, but also keep in mind that the vast majority of car rides are short distance, even in the US
In the Netherlands they changed everything to prefer bicycles and walking and it’s noticable. It changed architecture. It’s why in the Netherlands there are broad loads of small super markets. Wherever you are within a town you’ll have a super market at walking distance
Many people there don’t have a car, not because they can’t afford it but because they don’t want one. Cars are expensive, cumbersome, dangerous, and ugly. You won’t see depressing towns there that are 70% concrete roads or parking lots. It’s all beautiful because they got rid of all that, it isn’t needed.
In before anyone starts about how this can’t be done in the US: it can, and quite easily. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction of car infrastructure, it’s easier and faster to build, no parking lots required, you can now make that a store and get taxes from it, it’ll make your cities richer. People get more exercise, they’ll be healthier and happier, there are no downsides. Inclines near mountainous areas? Electrical bikes to the rescue.
Please please do NOT push this car stuff, especially flying car stuff. It’s not needed, it’s a waste, it’s polluting even when electric, and we have flying cars, they’re called planes and there is a reason why pilots need to learn and train a LOT more than car drivers.
Sure. I agree with all of that. But I live in a suburban sprawl of a US city that is just dense enough to have lots of cars, but nowhere near dense enough to have decent public transportation…unless we as a society decided to bulldoze this entire vast suburban landscape and start over with density as a goal. It’s hot here too. Nobody is riding their bike 12 miles to work in 95⁰ weather (35⁰ for our metric homies).
Maybe within the next few years the Netherlands will let me and my family in as refugees so I can bike everywhere on a 72⁰ summer day.
But I like where your head’s at. Hopefully you’re young and can make a difference.
Asteroid mining. We’ve had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
Okay I’ve had this astroid mining concept dining around my empty skull for a while now. The way I see it is that going up to space and mining an astroid for minerals and then bringing them back down to earth will never be a worthwhile endeavour. If you’re mining them in space and using the material manufacturing in space then that seems more plausible. The only way I can think of planetary based astroid mining being worthwhile is if instead of mining the rock and sending it down in crafts, you just bump the astroid so it’s on a collision course with earth and then mine whatever is left from impact. In anycase, I’d say we are far off being able to mine asteroids since imo, the only worthwhile way to do it is by having the entire process in space. And we’re not even close to that level of infrastructure existing in space.
Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
I read that as Sucide Marines and was confused for a bit
The military mental health epidemic. That’s the future I want.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
