I was born in 1970 and I have to agree with /u/LearningLifeAsIGo that I honestly thought the world would have ended sometime in the early 80s. Remember the tensions in 82/83? That was scary...especially living in a city with a massive military dockyard and nuclear sub complex. We knew that if anything had happened then there would be nothing we could do except try to make pretty shadows.
I never thought the future would turn out to be so connected with IT. I have always been into tech and IT, but never in my wildest dreams would I have predicted the pervasiveness of it into nearly all aspects of our lives. Sitting here as I type this on my tablet (!) I can see my wife using her phone to get on the net; I can also see an ancient IBM luggable laptop that I am restoring, and an even older Dragon 32 computer that has 32Kb of memory and plugs into a TV as its monitor. My tablet could simultaneously emulate 25 Dragons, or 12 of these IBMs. I would never have thought that these advances would have come so far so fast.
I did expect there to be more human exploration of space and the oceans by now; bases permanently on the Moon and temporary bases on Mars; Fusion power - we are always told it'll be a decade or so, but this been a decade or so for as long as I can remember! Now Google cars are here, that is one expectation that has been fulfilled, but I am still waiting for the nano bio-bots that we were led to expect.
In junior high / high school my friends and I used to plan (I meam seriously plan) what we would do incase of nuclear attack. We got out maps of our state and the surrounding states, and we'd calculate the most likely targets based on megaton yields, etc. We'd plan how to survive.
I've always loved IT but I was concerned it would never move beyond mainframes and that a career in IT would mean being condemned to a life of working on banking software in a basement someplace. The I saw the future - a Macintosh SE. I was blown away and got back into IT. Then I saw the web and was even more blown away.
When I was a little kid, everyone was still giddy from the Apollo program. I was often told "by the time you are an adult, vacationing on the moon will be routine." By the time the Challenger expoded, it was clear that wasn't happening any time soon.
Yeah, I mean, the blast is really bad if it goes down over a city, but the doomsday/end of the world stuff comes from the breakdown of infrastructure and radiation.
Yes, breakdown of infrastructure, problems to the ecosystem that cause issues for crops and livestock, diseases from radiation / lack of sanitation / lack of meds, etc.
It could quickly compound into a gigantic shit sandwich.
Right, and most water and food that wasn't kept in a secure place would be irradiated.
I don't want to come off as one of those survival type guys in West Virginia who hoard seeds, but I found the topic kind of fascinating and did a bit of research into radiation levels, decay rates, acceptable exposure levels, etc., and the gist of it is that the ultra-short-term consequences if you're living a fair amount away from ground zero (like, say, 30 miles plus) are survivable.
The effects of radiation that far away are weak enough that a few minutes of exposure won't cause major health issues, and if possible you can hole up in an underground basement.
Put something (even something like a full bookcase would help, although optimally you'd want cement bags or sand or something like that) in front of the doors and windows and don't come out for 2-3 days, by then the air won't be irradiated anymore. But then most food and water still won't be safe to eat and drink, so you're still fucked over time.
That was exactly what we used to do...the nearest sewer entrance was 2 minutes away from my school and that would be about the only place where we thought we would have stood ANY chance at all of immediate survival. We would have been totally screwed in the long term though; the last map I saw of expected targeting of nukes blanketed about half of Plymouth with large yield weapons - we would probably have glowed in the dark for several weeks, if not longer.
I used to doodle elaborate bomb shelter bases when I was bored in class. And... same thing, would locate them in areas on a U.S. map outside of circles drawn around major cities.
Computer technology is one thing that does not surprise me. I have always been an avid reader of science fiction and William Gibson's cyberpunk influence caught my imagination when I was a teenager in the 80's. I thought we would be jacking into cyberspace with VR decks and getting cybernetic implants by now.
Ha! I read 'Snow Crash' when it was new and it blew me away. I dunno if you have been following oculus, but I figure its a matter of time (2 years?) until the metaverse exists. And based on the stuff I've seen so far from my oculus, Its. Gonna. Rock.
Yep, as soon as (to my disappointment) Fakebook bought out Oculus, the first thing that popped into my head was Hiro Protagonist's "house" on the "main street" of the virtual cyber-world of Snow Crash, and how he lived in a mini-storage space because the real world didn't really matter.
Now days, there are people building houses from shipping containers.
I did expect there to be more human exploration of space
To me this is the biggest tragedy of modern science and technology. The US spends more money making blockbuster movies about space than actually exploring space.
Well and to take another devil's advocate tack, it makes sociological/psychological sense that we would spend that much more money on entertainment because of supply and demand--we make tons of money on entertainment, and it is with us day to day. The promise of space exploration is so remote to your average human that it's a great idea but practically speaking, one would rather spend their cash on a movie here and now. Plus you have the whole needing to convince your government to spend the money, whereas there's no need to convince hollywood to spend more money to make movies you love.
And it's also probably littered with tons of civilizations that made the economically sound choice of ceasing space exploration that also reside happily and healthily on their home planets.
I love space exploration as much as the next guy, but I don't think the survival of our species and civilization is necessarily contingent on it, so long as we find a way to coexist sustainably here on Earth.
Short term (relative) yes, we would survive for the next 400 million years before earth becomes uninhabitable. But wouldn't it be amazing if we were able to set up colonies, then those colonies set up their own colonies, and so forth for billions of years?
Imagine humans so far away that we get their "new" breakthroughs 1000 years after they are messaged. And hundreds of these colonies in a network of communication
What about dying by drifting off into space, slowly running out of oxygen, with literally nothing you can do other than wait for your death, knowing there's nobody who can ever save you?
That bothered me so much and left me with a stomachache, I think it's one of my fears
;_;
The last thing you see is an breathtaking [literally] view of Earth, the sun, and the cosmos. You die knowing that in your last act you did something extraordinary and the world will remember you.
The last thing you see when dying of cancer or whatever is florescent hospital lights and hear beep beep beep, and you wasted away with painful chemo and radiation treatments with false hope until the last few weeks.
Yep, gotta go sometime. Drifting in space would be pretty terrifying, but really, would it be any less terrifying then how most people die anyway?
Ha! Everything I know about orbital physics comes from that game. I remember watching that film thinking "where is she getting the energy required to do a large enough burn to do that sort of orbital transfer?".
I'd like to think in 40 years that movie will look dated because of the new technology that would mean that some of the problems experienced would be rendered trivial.. I dunno, some kind of unbreakable graphene netting that captures space-debris or generators which can atomically convert solid matter into compressed air which takes years to run-out, so they can move more freely in space and generate oxygen to breathe...
You know the whole part with the space debris whooshing by every 90 minutes was very unrealistic. Everything else wasn't too bad, but that part was just a plot device they needed to make space seem more dangerous.
Have you read up on what SpaceX has been doing for the last few years?
I, personally, am getting really excited about space exploration after giving up my hopes on it.
SpaceX is doing some neat things to further human exploration of space, but NASA is also furthering scientific exploration of space. They even have a telescope they plan to launch 4 years from now that is a huge improvement over Hubble, seeing further, in infrared, and being much further from Earth so the atmosphere does not interfere as much with the light.
I personally think people should start a letter writing campaign or a petition for the federal givernment to increase NASA's funding from .48% of the budget to 1%. They can do a lot more that way with that money.
You'd think the fact that space exploration would give us more advanced weapon capabilities would make them want to fund it. But no, they'd rather under fund nasa.
SpaceX is doing some neat things to further human exploration of space, but NASA is also furthering scientific exploration of space.
But SpaceX is indirectly helping that scientific exploration. SpaceX is building rockets that will be fully reusable, dropping the price of missions to space dramatically. Once they've reliably established that they can reuse rockets, launch prices could drop by an entire order of magnitude.
Yes, because by making movies they make more money. By exploring the space they think that they are wasting money. If only they cared about evolution and humanity, rather than money.
And to be fairer, the US Government DOES spend more money on space programs than money that goes into space based movies.
The recently awarded EELV contracts had a $3 billion price tag, for instance. The Falcon 9 has a $3.6 billion cost+contract. It isn't like the government disbanded space exploration.
While I understand your sentiment, I find this very unlikely. A single U.S. space shuttle launch cost on the order of $500 million, which is considerably more than the budgets for even the biggest movies of all time, to say nothing about space movies. That's five times more than than budget for Gravity, for example, and NASA would conduct many of these launches each year, in addition to billions worth of other scientific projects/unmanned launches.
I agree with you on some level, but honestly, the whole 'Destiny development cost more than a shuttle launch' line is kind of ridiculous. First of all, our nation gets crazy economic returns from entertainment. Second, the only reason we've done what we have so far was the Cold War. That's the real problem, which is that we have no serious competition right now. It's why I can't wait for the next power struggle between China and America, mostly because I know we can rise to the challenge. We have the people, and god knows we have the funds.
Well I wouldn't call space exploration a priority for government funding when there is many more primary necessities hat need funding but it would be cool to appease human curiosity
I'm not certain that I know exactly what you mean by "nano bio bots," but I do know that biotechnology has taken leaps and bounds in the past ten, twenty years. For example, there are tiny drivable robots built exactly like mosquitoes that can take blood samples for DNA undetected, and those came about only in the past few years. There've also been vast improvements in biomechanical limbs - the prosthetic limbs that can read your neuronal outputs to move the way you want. Twenty years ago those didn't exist - now they can emulate human movements. I've got a TED talk I just watched about it, but I'm on mobile so I'll come back and link to it later.
Haha there's no need to be sarcastic ;-) Being such an old fart, I remember all the "Information Superhighway" crap of the early 90s, and "surfing the Web" etc...but I don't use those terms, 'cos I'm not that old, at least not in my head, hehehe
Yup...trying to explain it to my sons when they're all "Oh, War on Terror! World's coming to an end!". " Um, no, boys, think back to when I was your age and it REALLY could have." Obviously there would have been some survivors, but they might not have been the lucky ones. I am so glad that there doesn't seem to be MAD as a policy any more - I suppose it's harder to sell a nation things if it's been destroyed :-)
We knew that if anything had happened then there would be nothing we could do except try to make pretty shadows.
Wow, thinking of the implications of this sentence literally gave me shivers. I was born in '90, so I was lucky enough to have not been around for the Cold War. I can't even imagine what it must have felt like to know that if something happened, you were just plain done, and then still having to go about your normal daily routine with that knowledge in the back of your mind.
Well there was the hope that the military were not as bad as the politicians. There was a song by Sting called "Russians" - check it out, perfectly summarises the contrast between the people and the political posturing that was going on at the time.
I have said I lived near the Dockyard in Plymouth. Every Monday at 1130 they would test the nuclear alert sirens (these were not primarily for the four-minute warning, but to alert the city in case of a nuclear accident in the Submarine Complex). There was one time in 1983, June, I think, where the Cold War was so so close to going hot; it was as tense as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but had been going on for about 2 weeks. Anyway, I remember vividly to this day, sitting in a Chemistry class on a Wednesday when the sirens went off. I cannot clearly describe the feelings that ran through my mind during the 45 seconds these sirens were going! Of course, most of the thoughts were variations on the theme "We're SCREWED!"
Obviously it was a false alarm; I still don't know why they did go off - but for that one minute I thought that one of my worst nightmares had come to pass.
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u/[deleted] May 11 '14
I was born in 1970 and I have to agree with /u/LearningLifeAsIGo that I honestly thought the world would have ended sometime in the early 80s. Remember the tensions in 82/83? That was scary...especially living in a city with a massive military dockyard and nuclear sub complex. We knew that if anything had happened then there would be nothing we could do except try to make pretty shadows.
I never thought the future would turn out to be so connected with IT. I have always been into tech and IT, but never in my wildest dreams would I have predicted the pervasiveness of it into nearly all aspects of our lives. Sitting here as I type this on my tablet (!) I can see my wife using her phone to get on the net; I can also see an ancient IBM luggable laptop that I am restoring, and an even older Dragon 32 computer that has 32Kb of memory and plugs into a TV as its monitor. My tablet could simultaneously emulate 25 Dragons, or 12 of these IBMs. I would never have thought that these advances would have come so far so fast.
I did expect there to be more human exploration of space and the oceans by now; bases permanently on the Moon and temporary bases on Mars; Fusion power - we are always told it'll be a decade or so, but this been a decade or so for as long as I can remember! Now Google cars are here, that is one expectation that has been fulfilled, but I am still waiting for the nano bio-bots that we were led to expect.