Its 2014: Why don't we have jetpacks and flying cars?

[K. A. Pital]

At what historical times was the solar system so saturated in probes that there were several returning useful data from the same planet at once for an extended period

Oh, there was no such time. But I wonder why the Moon isn't saturated. Have we learned all there is to learn? Why not try sending autonomous robots with a service lifetime of several years to do some prep work on exploring a potential moonbase site?

[Broomstick]

Maybe not all there is to learn, but I think the ROI is low for any space exploration right now. As for a moon base - what, exactly, will be achieved by that? More science? Does that science require a human presence to occur or can it be done by robots? Is there anything on the moon that would generate profit to either offset or justify the cost of a moon base?

Don't get me wrong - I would happy to see (eventually) a self-sufficient colony on the moon, would would be a first step to making more out there beyond the Earth and moving out into the universe. The problem is always who is going to pay for it?

[K. A. Pital]

I never said a human-inhabited base. Robots are good enough to have a drone base where ships can dock and unload more drones. Drones can be designed to allow self-repair from Earth controlled by an operator.

[Broomstick]

Fair enough... but there still needs to be some sort of incentive. SCIENCE! works for me, but apparently not for the rest of the world.

[K. A. Pital]

Fair enough... but there still needs to be some sort of incentive. SCIENCE! works for me, but apparently not for the rest of the world.

How about exploring the lunar soil for mineable substances?

[Sea Skimmer]

Curiosity is only Mars though. Are we no longer interested in Venus, Mercury, Ceres, asteroid belt, moons of Jupiter? Even the Moon currently has just one tiny Chinese robot, even though with a seconds-only communications lag it could already have a sizeable exploration robot group.

To do what with? The moon is a rock. Its absurdly unlikely to have life, or tell is anything all that useful about the origin of the universe which have become our two main focuses in exploration. That's one of the reasons why we've been putting so much money into advanced space telescopes for example. The price of the James Webb telescope could have funded several rovers to mars or a bunch of small probes, but none of them would have had a chance to radically improve our understanding of the universe like Webb will.

I never said a human-inhabited base. Robots are good enough to have a drone base where ships can dock and unload more drones. Drones can be designed to allow self-repair from Earth controlled by an operator.

The only self repair you'll be doing in space right now would be to replace large components with other large components , which is not a very economical approach to take. You might as well just send another vehicle. I think you vastly underestimate how difficult these things are to build and assemble in a reliable fashion. Mining the moon is not a reasonable goal with present technology even if far more money were being spent.

[K. A. Pital]

The price of the James Webb telescope could have funded several rovers to mars or a bunch of small probes, but none of them would have had a chance to radically improve our understanding of the universe like Webb will.

A neutrino detector on Earth may be even more useful in that regard. But rocks have a lot to tell. Geology has brought us lots of benefits here on Earth, exogeology should be the next step.

The only self repair you'll be doing in space right now would be to replace large components with other large components , which is not a very economical approach to take. You might as well just send another vehicle. I think you vastly underestimate how difficult these things are to build and assemble in a reliable fashion. Mining the moon is not a reasonable goal with present technology even if far more money were being spent.

Mining no; exploring it for future mining is. Costs of launching stuff into orbit are bound to fall as we get closer to running some SSTOs or reusable rockets.

[Broomstick]

If someone could work out the details I bet there's some money to be made launching commercial rockets from something like SpaceShipTwo - have the tourist ride pay for the boost to sub-orbital but above most of the atmosphere, launch your space venture from that platform, giving the tourists one more thing to oo-and-ah over (in between bouts of nausea from zero-g). Less rocket needed and more payload for the space ventures, and the ride up to sub-orbital is "free" in that the tourists are already paying to go up there.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

If someone could work out the details I bet there's some money to be made launching commercial rockets from something like SpaceShipTwo - have the tourist ride pay for the boost to sub-orbital but above most of the atmosphere, launch your space venture from that platform, giving the tourists one more thing to oo-and-ah over (in between bouts of nausea from zero-g). Less rocket needed and more payload for the space ventures, and the ride up to sub-orbital is "free" in that the tourists are already paying to go up there.

SpaceShipTwo has no cargo carrying capacity of its own. The airplane (White Knight Two) that gets it up to launch altitude, however, is a different story. Virgin Galactic is already developing a rocket (Launcher One) that would be launched from a White Knight Two airplane that could throw 100 kg into low-Earth orbit for $10 million.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Pegasus rocket has been available for air launch since 1990 using a L-1101 as the launch plane.

Air launch has appeal for small payloads, but you would certainly not want to mix it with space tourism on the same flight. Aside from the shear weight penalty that would impose, the safety standards for manned anything are much higher then that for a mere cargo launch. SpaceShipTwo is years delayed and massively over budget because Rutan apparently just didn't realize how complex it would be to do that. Deploying a boosted payload from a suborbital rocket which also has people on it is going to be too risky.

In fact though for a while a NASA project existed to make the Orbital Sciences air launch radically more effective, by having it drop a hypersonic rocket plane called X-34, two of which were actually built, but the project was cancelled before either made a powered test flight for various reason. X-34 would have then fired a small rocket at its apogee to deploy a payload to orbit. Very cheap in principle once fully developed, but painfully expensive to develop and rather payload limited. Money then went towards NASA X-37 which is a rocket plane launched directly from a booster rocket on the ground, and that has now morphed into the operational X-37B for the DoD.

This concept remains appealing, but its really going to take an air breathing scramjet to make it work well. Rockets are kinda meh.

In general air launch also just has the problem that without a custom air launch plane the maximum possible payloads are just not that big (oh do we have endless paper plans for massive custom planes, with say six GE90s for power), and small satellites can already be bundled with bigger ones for lower cost launches. This happens all the time. Also low earth orbit is LOW. If you want to go explore space you need a lot more boost just to get to the moon, let alone anywhere else in the solar system. That turns into much more weight.

Mining no; exploring it for future mining is. Costs of launching stuff into orbit are bound to fall as we get closer to running some SSTOs or reusable rockets.

So spending the money on lower launch costs now and find random minerals later when it will be cheaper to gather that data makes more sense. This is somewhat close to what is actually happening.

[Simon_Jester]

At what historical times was the solar system so saturated in probes that there were several returning useful data from the same planet at once for an extended period

Oh, there was no such time. But I wonder why the Moon isn't saturated. Have we learned all there is to learn? Why not try sending autonomous robots with a service lifetime of several years to do some prep work on exploring a potential moonbase site?

This would be sensible if anyone were specifically planning to plunk down the money for the moonbase any time soon. But can we please try to adhere to some sense of actual scheduling and common sense? And not blame unmanned planetary science for the fact that nobody's committed hundreds of billions to massive expansion of the manned program?

[Zaune]

How about exploring the lunar soil for mineable substances?

The surface samples returned by the Apollo astronauts weren't terribly promising from what I understand, and supposedly the energy-cost figures look better for snagging an asteroid and bringing it into near-Earth orbit.

[Irbis]

You just answered your own question. How many TV shows in the 50's would have predicted an Iphone

iPad:



Space Odyssey: 2001, first version written in 1951.

the internet

Telephote, as described by Jules Verne, in 1891.

home gaming consoles that serve as the central focus of the modern living room?

The Star Diaries, by Stanisław Lem, written in 1957.

Good enough?

In the 50's, they focused on the fantastic.

And maybe that's why the stories told then are timeless and can still evoke wonder today while most of 'pragmatic' stories created today are earthbound drivel no one will remember in 2 decades, much less in 2060s.

[Terralthra]

the internet

Telephote, as described by Jules Verne, in 1891.

Curious - have you actually read "In The Year 2889"? What Verne describes is more like a videophone using mirrors, not anything approaching the internet. It was missing the key point of the internet, that being that it's a network. You could make a case that Mark Twain's "From the 'London Times' of 1904" was close, but really, to get any sense of what the internet is like today, the closest you'd get is possibly "The Naked Sun" by Asimov, or various novels from the late 70s and early 80s, which I could list if you care.

[Irbis]

Curious - have you actually read "In The Year 2889"? What Verne describes is more like a videophone using mirrors, not anything approaching the internet. It was missing the key point of the internet, that being that it's a network. You could make a case that Mark Twain's "From the 'London Times' of 1904" was close, but really, to get any sense of what the internet is like today, the closest you'd get is possibly "The Naked Sun" by Asimov, or various novels from the late 70s and early 80s, which I could list if you care.

I did. He envisioned internet as connecting to one big server, but that in itself doesn't disqualify the prediction, IMHO. All that we do today with internet - watch movies, read news, listen to music, leave comments in various places, it there. He especially sold me on noticing people would flock to opinions they liked, while ignoring the rest of the information, all in the theoretically same place.

Yes, technical details are wrong (though I'd debate if they really are - major clouds created by likes of Amazon and Google might cause emergence of huge hubs like JV described) but the essence of its everyday use are there, I feel. If you treat his littérateurs as metaphor for servers, you have all the pieces to make it.

As for list, I'd be grateful, just not sure how many I'd read or would even have access to, western novels from before 80s didn't really appear in my part of the world until recently.

[slebetman]

E.M Forrester's "The Machine Stops" (1909) describes the youtube/twitter/facebook/blog community fairly well. The central story requires that the entire planet is networked (communications-wise as well as applications/data).

From the standpoint of someone being born int the last 50 years or so, the idea of a global network may seem new. But remember, the world was already networked by the late 1800s. By 1900 you could phone (or at least telegraph) from any city to any other city in the world. At that point it didn't require imagination to think about a networked planet, it only required you to notice, really notice the work done by communications engineers. Also remember, we started by sending data, not voice, over the wire as telegrams. So again it didn't require any imagination to think about data networks.

It did require a bit of creativity to jump to the idea of sending videos through the network especially since TV itself was invented after The Machine Stops was written.

[Sea Skimmer]

You could not phone from any city to any city in 1900. While Morse code telegraph lines could cross the Atlantic and other oceans, phone calls could not until the first suitable cable was laid in 1956. Very limited radiophone connections began in 1927 but was more or less only for business use because of the cost and limited number of channels in operation. I don't believe more then a few other radiophone links existed at the time either, so you couldn't say, call Tokyo from London though the technology could have been implemented for enough money. Human delivered telegrams sent via morse cable and morse radio were the main means of long distance communication.

We simply could not build cable systems good enough to carry an audio signal over those kind of underwater distances. The 1950s cable improvements also went into building the AT&T Long Lines system in the US, which was pretty much the direct technological predecessor for the internet and actually performed internet like functions for the US SAGE and Missile Master air defense computer networks.

Even allowing that the early phone networks were indeed networks, in 1900 all switching was still manual which is well, kinda not so advanced? Nothing was shared, everything worked off humans manually creating hardwired connections for every discreet call. Impressive that it worked so well. Automatic switches began to appear around 1905 IIRC.

[Simon_Jester]

Well yes, but by the same token there was a huge difference between V2 rockets and starships- which didn't stop people inspired by the first from making vaguely insightful stories of the second.

People began to predict, in broad, "in the future our lives will be very much interconnected by communication infrastructure" long before they got any of the details right.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yes, though I feel one can easily go too far in giving credibility to the foresight of such predictions, though we also get some measure of convergence when people try to make predictions come true even if it doesn't actually work or make much sense. Rule of cool in action. People tend to predict that the future will have bigger, better versions of what we already have as I think someone already said. They do very poorly meanwhile at predicting new things, or which things it actually won't make sense to push further as with say floating or flying cities. I doubt anyone in 1900 for example would have predicted that the most advanced creations of humanity would have no moving parts what so ever by the year 2000, as became possible with a computer system using all solid state components. Even biology involves significant physical movement, though I suppose you can argue so do billions of electrons. But its still orders of magnitude different. They would have been far more inclined to think a device with millions of small moving switches was the utter height of progress.

Oh sure, if we just focus on outcomes, then this doesn't matter, but its the how that's mattered to all human development. If people were good at predicting that we'd well, for lack of any other way to put to concisely, life would be completely and utterly different. Also we might actually have our flying cars by now.

[slebetman]

People tend to predict that the future will have bigger, better versions of what we already have as I think someone already said. They do very poorly meanwhile at predicting new things, or which things it actually won't make sense to push further as with say floating or flying cities.

Exactly my point. That E.M. Forrester can so very accurately write about the blogosphere in 1909 shows that unlike other ideas in science fiction, the "idea" of the internet is nothing new and indeed takes little imagination to correctly predict based on extrapolating current technology in 1909.

Anyway, The Machine Stops proves that at least one author wrote about the internet well before 1950. I was just guessing at what inspired him and how he managed to predict internet culture.