What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?
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I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
The problem is capitalism and corporations. We don't need fiction to see those two don't work, they don't work in real life.
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That's called geoengineering generally
And it’s a very bad idea to experiment geoengineering with Earth. You don’t develop in production.
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Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won't need money
Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
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We have the technology to do this. What we lack is the economic willingness to actually do it. We are literally letting people starve to death because they don't have the money to buy food. The USA literally pays farmers not to grow food to keep prices artificially high.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
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Nuclear rocket engines. A bit less ambitious than most of the responses, but most things here seem to either refer to technologies we don't have yet but seem within a century or so of developing, which doesn't fit the question, or vague consequences that one wants that tech to have without it being clear how our current technology gets there. But nuclear rockets definitely fit the question, because we have built and ground tested them before, decades ago even, we just haven't bothered to actually use the things. And they should theoretically make developing things like space industry or manned space exploration beyond the moon more viable, by being more efficient than chemical rockets while giving better thrust than ion engines do. They don't work well for launching from the ground, but since our launch abilities have increased a fair bit in the past decade or so, actually getting the things to space in order to use them should be easier than ever.
Last time I checked on that one, the opposition to the idea was focused on the risks of nuclear fallout from a failed launch.
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We throw out massive amounts of food every year, often because it sits too long and rots.
We have the technology to fix this. Corporations just don't.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.
A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.
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Flying cars.
Asteroid mining.
Maybe a Moon or Mars colony.
End poverty.
Universal basic income/ post scarcity society.
Least to most fictional I think.
Flying cars.
Not just no, hell no. I've driven in Tennessee.
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Last time I checked on that one, the opposition to the idea was focused on the risks of nuclear fallout from a failed launch.
It's a valid concern, but considering that quite a few rockets, to include some currently in use, can contain quite large amounts of some truly nasty chemicals already, and apparently can be made acceptably safe despite this, I'd bet that it's probably possible to manage that risk or find flight paths that minimize exposure in the case of an accident. For that matter, we've launched radioactive materials into space before, some space probes use decay heat for a power source.
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the end of scarcity. that's a totally bogus concept that capitalism uses to keep the rich in power. we produce far more than the whole of humanity would need to feed and cloth themselves, and we have more houses empty than there are families. we could end poverty right now, we just choose not to.
Well more accurately, some of us did chose that for the whole of us
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Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
I've got good news for you! We've been terraforming the planet to be more like Arrakis for a couple decades already!
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Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won't need money
There's a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they'll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn't have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That's why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone's resource needs are different. You can't just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we're not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn't require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
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Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won't someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It's literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don't change a system by feeding it.
I won't say it's a bad thing... but it's not a solution. It's a stop gap.
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And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
This is the sole reason we can't have mechs until we develop high energy portable nuclear power, or discover something equally as capable.
A rocket launching satellites is like 90% fuel, the structure is remarkably similar to the thickness of a tin can, and it only carriers a few thousand pounds of payload, all while only running for a minute or so before being empty. We simply don't have the power capability for anything approaching a large mech without it having to be wired to a power grid.
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Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it's just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won't. They'll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
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I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
You'll get more interest in an anarcho-syndicalist zone.
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We already know what a president with a robot body is like.
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I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.
I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.
We could have been doing this since the 70s. Nothing sci-fi about it. The plans to do it are outlined in:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
When humanity turned it's back on this project, we sealed our fate as a failed planet.
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Mech suits.
We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
I'm an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don't have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn't demand them much, at least with our current technology.
There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side--the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less "mech suit" and more "assistive arm" type of things.
