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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Why think small?
The asteroids are just sitting there.
We could move all of Earth's heavy industries off planet.
We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can't really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we'd need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we'd have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there's very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.
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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.
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.
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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.
Terraform a planet.
Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.
If we can't even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they're gonna bring dead space rocks to life?
At the current rate, wherever humans go, we'll just bring our trashy ways with us...
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IDK why they would need to be that big. I don't even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.
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Free food.
How exactly is free food (or free anything) achievable within our current technological level?
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Terraform a planet.
Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.
If we can't even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they're gonna bring dead space rocks to life?
At the current rate, wherever humans go, we'll just bring our trashy ways with us...
That's called geoengineering generally
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First explain to me what technological limits are creating the food scarcity we're experiencing.
Sounds to me like you don't understand the question.
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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]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.
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UBI. Not only is it viable but it works in improving everyone's lives, not just the people receiving it.
Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won't need money
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Terraform a planet.
Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.
If we can't even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they're gonna bring dead space rocks to life?
At the current rate, wherever humans go, we'll just bring our trashy ways with us...
Terraforming Earth. Making Earth Earthlike.
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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.
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.
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IDK why they would need to be that big. I don't even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.
Reasons I can think of for the size:
- Ammunition is large and needs to be stored carefully so it doesn't explode. 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.
- Human beings are soft and squishy. We'd need huge amounts of suspension for the purpose, plus the matter of armor. Think about how large a jet plane really is, or a tank.
- Physical laws around mass and movement. Tanks are as small as they are because treads are effective at transferring torque and creating linear acceleration. If they were just on wheels, they would need to be larger. Legs would require huge amounts of mass to safely support the machine, and we'd need to have excellent stabilizer systems in addition to the suspension mentioned above so that you don't fall flat on your face
- Passive cooling (which would probably be necessary for safety - you don't want a sniper stopping your whole mech by shooting a few fans) requires wide surface areas to dump the exhaust heat.
That's all I can immediately justify, but basically, it would have to be huge.
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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.
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. And the limits to us having post scarcity are all societal/political, not technological.
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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 itâs a very bad idea to experiment geoengineering with Earth. You donât 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.
