The 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc. They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them =) Houses underwater was a thing they thought were right around the corner as well. It really reads like you just picked up a Scientific American magazine issue from your doctor's office lobby that's from the 50s.
I want tailor made drugs that convince my brain all this exists while in the real world we live docile, simple lives to extend the viability of human habitation on Earth.
The material resources do not exist on Earth to switch to EV cars. The idea we’re going to live on Mars is hallucination.
Transfer of consciousness to other substrates is far more interesting than literally living out pop culture from the last half of the 1900s.
Yeah, and, so? We don’t have the briefcase car and that’s what I want. Don’t come with your whataboutisms and try to make me accept less. Your games are transparent!
Star Wars is pretty dystopian in every era shown in the movies. Even at the height of the Galactic Republic large areas of the outer rim have people living in poverty and outright slavery. Coruscant appears nice, but a little below the surface criminal gangs are running the place with most of the planet's population never even seeing sunlight.
Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.
And Idiocracy is a hopeful movie -- it shows how an enlightened leader (Herbert Camacho) can actually help society move out of a collapse (that feels more and more likely to happen in real life).
> They were so convinced cars would fly, they all came with wings on them
I think that styling trend was due to making them look like jet aircraft. The taillights mimicked jet exhaust pipes closely. Even the front grille was often fashioned to look like a turbine intake.
Jet engines were some of the coolest, most visible, and most advanced tech in the 50s.
Sometimes I wish I could’ve been around to experience that kind of forward-looking optimism. I got a small taste of it in the mid-late 90s, but from the looks of it, 90s futurism was rather tame in comparison.
I'm just old enough to remember the massive optimism associated with the Apollo program (I was a space-obsessed nerd kid). The mid to late 70s though were depressing by comparison, without the rapid cadence of the moonshots.
> The 1950s called and wants it's meme back. Seriously, though, the 50s promised flying cars, personal jet packs, moon bases, etc.
Maybe they were right but a little off on the timeline. For example there was a lot of crazy tech that people thought would take off in the 90s and flopped, but are now a reality (Online shopping, smartphones, electric vehicles).
The price of energy dropped continuously and exponentially from 1873-1973, and ~1973 is the start of the "great stagnation".
The price of energy recently resumed its exponential cost reduction, but only for those who have access to solar energy. Hopefully those cost reductions result in price reductions for the rest of us soon.
There are still a couple of orders of magnitude within reach, if we can commercialize molten salt reactors. After that, solar power in space (using asteroid or lunar mining) for gargantuan scale.
