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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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.
How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?
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Alarm clock that reads my brain activity and only wakes me up at the point in my REM cycle, where i'll feel refreshed waking up.
Along somewhat similar lines, I wouldn't mind a fan that monitored my temperature while sleeping and adjusts its speed accordingly.
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You don't need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn't say it had to be distributed equally just because there's no money.
Chicken and vegetarian was just an example, also the chicken was implicitly dead in my example so it was no longer sentient, also also there might be non moral reasons, which paint color do we give people for their walls? How often? Etc etc etc.
In the request system you propose there needs to be some sort of pointing or valuation, requesting a car should not be equivalent to requesting an apple. Whatever form of valuation you use for that, there's your currency. Not to mention that for the requesting system to be able to work the government would need to own all products so it can redistribute them according to requests, and what would it do if 100 people requested something that only 50 were made? It's a nice idea but it becomes very complicated very fast, whereas using currency takes away all of that complication and gives you something tangible that could be implemented tomorrow instead of in 20 years being very generous.
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We easily produce enough food to feed everyone with our current technology level. Making it free and available to everyone is mostly a logistics and economic problem.
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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.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
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From what I've seen about a space elevator, is that the we don't have the means to do it without creating a massive material shortage in the world.
The most plausible idea I've seen is using the centrifugal force of the earth spinning to keep a mass at LEO. But without a futuristic material like long carbon nanotubes, we would have essentially a ten mile thick metal cord tapering to something a few feet thick, and you would be limited in payload to like a few hundred pounds.
Just curious, why do you think a ring would predate the elevator?
Just curious, why do you think a ring would predate the elevator?
(Not OP) Because simply from a construction-point-of-view it's achievable now. Unlike a space elevator, a ring could actually be built and used with today's materials.
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Just curious, why do you think a ring would predate the elevator?
(Not OP) Because simply from a construction-point-of-view it's achievable now. Unlike a space elevator, a ring could actually be built and used with today's materials.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see us launching enough space raw material from ground level to build it. Not trying to sound rude, I've just been in the logistics game(even helped put a small satellite into orbit) and I just don't see the millions of tons of material needed being launched from the ground. Again, not trying to sound rude, this is just my observation from being "in the game".
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How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C76osXtpLeM
someone was working on one years ago and it seems to never have come to market
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Constructing an Orbital ring and then using that to get a form of space elevator built.
Totally possible to build with our current technology but the cost if we do it pre space elevator or similar is pretty insane.
Building a ring let's us basically have a stable space side anchor at low earth orbit instead of geo sync ish like you need for a normal space elevator to match ground speed.
Even more fun is cost for additional rings drops massively and you can build them in different orientations you can get space elevators to rings without having to be on the equator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
Last and my favorite part is the possibility of having literally trains that go up to a ring cross an ocean and go back down. Wouldn't be faster than planes but massively better cargo capacity and efficiency as well as comfortable for passengers.
skyhook!
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Downloadable internet. You stick a pendrive in your PC with internet connection, fill it with internet and then go wherever you want, you have a usb router with data available to use and surf the net.
It is funny because that defeats the principle of the Internet as a shared, live, always on always available data space
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Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see us launching enough space raw material from ground level to build it. Not trying to sound rude, I've just been in the logistics game(even helped put a small satellite into orbit) and I just don't see the millions of tons of material needed being launched from the ground. Again, not trying to sound rude, this is just my observation from being "in the game".
Mine the moon and build the elevator and/or ring from the top down.
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Arcologies.
Dense housing with good soundproofing, atop commercial space, in a walkable neighborhood.
Wouldn't need rent control if there was more houses.
Walkable cities are sOcIaLiSm!
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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.
Found Peter Thiel's account
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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.
The food scarcity is certainly not due to technological limitations, but we very much can't create food for free. The food you eat is produced by the very hard work of many people, most (probably all) of them severely underpaid. In a fair world it will be these people the ones receiving the fruit of their labor instead of some rich bastards, but I don't think food will be cheaper, maybe even the opposite.
I understand the question, maybe you don't understand how the world works.
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From what I've seen about a space elevator, is that the we don't have the means to do it without creating a massive material shortage in the world.
The most plausible idea I've seen is using the centrifugal force of the earth spinning to keep a mass at LEO. But without a futuristic material like long carbon nanotubes, we would have essentially a ten mile thick metal cord tapering to something a few feet thick, and you would be limited in payload to like a few hundred pounds.
Just curious, why do you think a ring would predate the elevator?
As AAA said in a comment beside me it isn't so much that I expect it would predate a space elevator. Simply that it is possible with current tech rather than still waiting on additional moderately likely breakthroughs like long chain carbon nanotube tether.
Also there are plenty of options to have the vast majority of the material be from space and not the surface since the core idea is a metal like copper being spun above orbital speed after being made into a full loop then used for the mag lev to keep at ground speed. There are absolutely a lot of astroids that might allow for that.
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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 torment nexus
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Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won't, not can't, fix these problems.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, "won't" is the wrong word.
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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.
Finding a way to use organic matter in 3d printing so I can say "Computer...one strawberry milkshake", similar to Picard.
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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 viewscreen from Star Trek. It's actually real but nobody really wants to use it.
Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.
I've explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually "okay why TF would I wanna do that?" So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other "big family holiday" thing where you have that one person who won't participate because it's their partner's family's turn to see the kids or whatever... so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they're 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you're broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it's like Thanksgiving and it's based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you're looking into that other room.
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How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?
We're so close. My dryer turns all my stuff inside out. I feel like if it can do that, it can fold the stuff too...
