Tzortzakakis Dimitrios <nowhere@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In fact, I've never seen a slide rule. ( I am just 35).
Heinlein's stories are notable for depicting a future with not just
interplanetary, but interstellar travel -- in which people use slide
rules, not calculators or computers, which don't exist.
There there's Olaf Stapledon's _Last and First Men_, written in the
1930s. It says nuclear power will be invented in several thousand
years, then promptly forgotten again. And space travel will be
invented in several million years, then promptly forgotten again.
And that even millions of years from now, the most significant
event in the history of our species will have been World War I.
Computers will never be invented. Neither will television.
Then there's the Larry Niven story, written in 1967, which said the
first neutron star would be discovered in about 5000 years. In fact,
it was discovered in 1968.
In 1957 Isaac Asimov wrote a story that mentioned a pocket computer.
It was set in the distant future, after thousands of years of work on
miniaturization. But he later said it was intended to be completely
absurd, a joke. After all, the next step in the story after the
pocket computer was to shrink them to zero size, i.e. to do away with
computers entirely, as people learn to do arithmetic without computers.
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
> Maybe that there *wasn't* a nuclear war is the final proof of the
> existence of God, not letting His best creation, Man, perish.
Or maybe it's proof of the multiple worlds theory of quantum
mechanics. Our consciousness continues only in those worlds, however
low in probability, in which we were not all va****ized decades ago.
> Flying cars-how about a private airplane? Not everybody can
> afford that.
Not useful for commuting, at least here in the DC area. Everywhere
I've ever lived, and everywhere I've ever worked, is within the
security zone in which no private flights are allowed. Not to mention
the vast majority of homes and businesses don't have a runway or room
for one. Or that millions of people couldn't pass an FAA medical exam.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html
before emailing me.
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