As pointed out in email

[james_davis_nicoll]

One day, sitting around with a group of undergraduate physics students, I listened as one made the bold statement: “If it can be imagined, it can be done.” The others nodded in agreement. It sounded like wisdom. It took me all of two seconds to violate this dictum as I imagined myself jumping straight up to the Moon. I may have asked if the student really thought what he said was true, but resisted the impulse to turn it into an impromptu teaching moment. Instead, I wondered how pervasive this attitude was among physics students and faculty. So I put together a survey and in this post report what I found. The overriding theme: experts say don’t count on a Star Trek future. Ever.

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Interesting link. Thanks.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think my spitballing attitudes are pretty close to much of the faculty opinion here, except that the (long-term) expert bullishness on fusion power and smart robots is surprising to me.

I think that C3PO-level robots may turn out to be technically feasible, but by the time they're possible it will probably be clear that they are an impractical solution to most problems that a science-fiction author might want to throw such a robot at. But I also think that the availability of truly colossal networked caches of information is bringing a lot of gee-whiz AI-like futurist predictions in through the back door.

Not sure how I'd answer about space colonies and aliens.

My skepticism about synthetic food as a solution to food crises or enabler for trillion-person Earths has come up here in the past, though obviously synthetic food is a present-day reality in some regards.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Hey, ICL showed you can grow cattle feed from natural gas ("Pruteen"). It's a shame the high nucleic acid content made it unsuitable for human consumption.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I thought that the synthetic food one veered to far into woo-woo land by ruling out *any* biological contribution. I think synthetic food using biotechnology is a bit more likely, if food shortages get bad enough for people to be willing to eat it.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Right. One can grow microorganisms on energy sources not derived from photosynthesis (chemosynthesis, electrosynthesis). This is actually proven technology, although it's not competitive in general.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

"But I also think that the availability of truly colossal networked caches of information is bringing a lot of gee-whiz AI-like futurist predictions in through the back door."

Which is how we finally got "videophone". Kids have had webcams for years. Eventually they wanted mobile ones. Traditional progression was imagined as "telephone -> videophone -> mobile videophone". Instead it was:

cell phone -> camera phone
......................................\
........................................---> mobile webcam
....................................../
web cam ------------------

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

My answer to a lot of the first questions (jet packs, for instance) was, "Won't happen, not because of the difficulty, but because there are better alternatives that will be developed first. Obsolete before it leaves the drawing board, essentially."

Since this didn't seem to fit the spirit of any of the provided answers, I gave up.

[jwgh]

I would probably pick "probably not ever for humans" for that kind of thing.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

You need an option like that on a survey of this sort.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

I think I figured that out when I realized that I am never, ever, ever going to get a robot maid.

In some ways, we're pretty close to the holodeck, though.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Roombas?

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Bah! Fie! Roombas are the false idol.

What I need is a robot to pick up my dirty clothes, do the wash, corral all the dishes back to the kitchen, organize the paperwork, put the baby's toys back in her bin, unwrap what needs unwrapping, and unbox what needs unboxing.

Vaccuuming my one area rug is the least of my issues. And the floor is too covered with items (see above + bibs) for the roomba to do anything useful for me at this moment, any way.

[ilya187.livejournal.com]

I think the aging of society will provide (in Japan, is already providing) a strong push toward such robots, in two different ways. One way is obvious -- society with much greater old-to-young ration simply needs such robots more. The other way is less obvious: houses, furniture and appliances engineered for ease of use by old folks, will be inherently easier to use by robots. A shelf or a dishwasher designed so that arthritic fingers can put and remove plates and glasses without pain or breakage, will almost certainly lend itself to robotic hands as well.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Bah yourself. Could your hypothetical robot maid allow kittens to ride around on its/her back?

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Tragically, I cannot have kitties living with me any more, so I am willing to forgo kitty transport as a feature of my house-cleaning robot.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

However, because it intersects the topic of discussion and one of our mutual interests, here is a short clip of a cat on roomba:

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

In the cat frame of reference, the dog was coming too close, so it had to be swatted.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Don't you know it would be a Siamese.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Hey! I have two siamese cats. More loving (and loudly attention-whoring) cats would be hard to find.

I'm glad that's a traditional (apple head) siamese, not one of the more modern "rat faced" kind.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Hey! I grew up with several successive pairs of siamese. I share your admiration for them, but they do have an attitude -- one that God tells me She meant only for alopecious plains apes.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Bast is just toying with you.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The areas I'd be looking into for unforeseen advances are more bio and neuro, not physics. Physics may be just about played out. Although there are some big open problems left (for example: dark matter, dark energy, neutrino masses, unification of gravity and QM), it's not clear how any of them lead to practical applications.

I wonder how long it's going to be before a generally loss of faith in naively blissful futurism is going to affect budgets for space and fusion programs, and research in general. Not that this implies a nightmarish future, of course.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Naively blissful fuuturism is long dead in the US... since at least the Oil Crisis.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was a wave of it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as exemplified by the Whole Earth Review issue on space colonies. It imagined itself to be smartass adult futurism, but there was a lot of uncritical gee-whiz in there anyway. Arguably, a dim echo of what came before, but I was affected by it.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there were a few death rattles, but that's all.

Stewart Brand being Stewart Brand, I'd be cautious using him as an example of anything... Gawd how I miss WER.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

We might also get excellent things we haven't imagined. I certainly wasn't expecting search engines to be so good.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I was surprised how fast mammalian cloning became routine.

And when I get my DNA sequenced, I'll know I'm living in the future.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Within 12-18 months if you're well-off and have reason to pay for it, within 3-6 years for most people. It'll be standard on the NHS in the UK for everyone before the decade is over (assuming the Tories don't abolish the NHS first).

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to the social medicine countries running roughshod over the US in pulling correlations out of all that genetic data.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

No worries... the US will get a comprehensive set of genetic records via the criminal justice system. And we can do analysis without listening to those irritating medical ethicists!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was thinking corporate HR departments.

[(Anonymous)]

I found this sentence very telling:

"The belief that we can escape our Earthly bounds (and problems) impairs our commitment to take positive corrective action to address problems here on Earth."

I really don't think most people are committed to space exploration in the hope of 'escaping' a dying Earth. IMO, most people that support space programs partly see it as helping us to understand Earth better, so that we can 'manage' it more intelligently.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people have the idea that other people want to escape to another planet when Earth is used up. And the idea also comes up a lot in science fiction, never very convincingly.

That said, a particular subset of libertarian-ish space fans quite definitely have the goal of leaving and letting the idiot societies on Earth tear themselves apart. It's the same impulse as seasteading and Freedom States.

[(Anonymous)]

Not a very large group, I'd think: certainly far smaller than those who expect to escape the Earth and responsibility for it by being Raptured. :)

Bruce

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

They may be small but they are vocal.

(and probably related to all those SF stories where the Free Men of Space are Free! and in Space! while Earth is an overcrowded hive of welfare states and Asiatic despotisms)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

More cynically, technological progress is used as a distraction. "Yes, there is injustice, but in the techno-utopian future everyone will be better off, so you just be quiet."

A generation of (at best) no growth in incomes has put the kibbosh on this, I think.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I have often wondered cynically if the chief reason for inflation is to disguise the degree to which most people have been stagnating or getting poorer. Not to mention the proliferation of what are essentially negative interest rates.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

On the bright side, the difficulties in the first world can be substantially traced to competition finally coming in from the lesser developed world. Overall, globally, things have been getting better. I wonder how optimistic things are right now in Chinese (or Indian, or African) future-oriented fiction.