this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
21 points (74.4% liked)
Futurology
2908 readers
377 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Everything is impossible until somebody goes and does it. While going to Mars and beyond is going to be very hard with current technology, there are other possibilities. Even in situ resource utilisation, e.g. making rocket fuel on the moon, would make it drastically easier to get around the solar system.
Then there is nuclear propulsion, which would hugely cut travel times. These are technologies that will likely be viable in the foreseeable future. Then we have fusion, which will probably take a little longer. And then there after things that nobody can even imagine today. Like nobody could imagine a smartphone thirty years ago.
I mean, there's people who did, going back pretty far. Just not the exact societal impact they would have. The laws of physics have been nearly complete for many decades, so don't expect a life of true surprises like a person born in 1870 would have experienced.
If you actually read this, OP says there's little point going anywhere in the solar system other than Earth. There's barren rocks right here if that's your thing, and they even come with free oxygen, gravity and radiation shielding. The rest is about interstellar travel.
it's been 100 years and we still haven't made any progress on the measurement problem besides thinking up reasons not to think about it.
People imagined all kinds of portable computers but none resembled a smartphone, as far as I'm aware. If I'm wrong, I'll be happy to learn about examples.
I'm actually not sure about the "one big touchscreen" idea - it's seems likely some designer considered it, but even Star Trek TNG PADDs had more than one touch display segment.
Portable radio-type devices have been all over, portable computers as well, and networking radios autonomously together made appearances. Ditto for adding a camera to standard communications devices. I'm not really sure how much of it you need going at once to consider it a smartphone.
Like the guy in the link mentions, what people would choose to do with them and just how often was the hard thing to predict. When someone pops open a version of the internet in Heinlein it's always to do research. It's never cat pictures or porn or to post a random picture of themselves and what they're doing. Usually the computer is part of your spaceship or whatever, not in your pocket, just for that reason.
The Star Trek Communicator somewhat resembles it, and that is from 1964.
The Star Trek communicator was basically a walkie talkie. That was well established technology at the time and had nothing whatsoever to do with a smartphone.
The first commercial smartphone was released 31 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon