AOG, Madrid
Today it is 50 years since Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin climbed into his space ship and was launched into space, thereby kickstarting the space race between two superpowers which ended with the first man in the moon in 1969.
It took Gagarin just 108 minutes to orbit Earth and he returned as the World's very first space man.
I think that the world henceforth, and even during my childhood, looked to a promising future.
Space travel, colonies on the Moon, terraforming, traveling to Mars and beyond.
It all looked splendid.
Problem is, it never happened.
I rememebr as a child being told about the future I would live in.
About flying cars, hovering craft, day trips to Space, to the bottom of the ocean, supercomputers this and supercomputers that.
And yes, we even had supersonic flight courtesy of the Anglo-French Concorde.
Until we didn't.
Heck, remember the world of the Jetson's? Now that was futuristic and foreseeable!
Unfortunately, it seems that the future we were being sold does exist, but only in cyberspace. Not in outer space. Or Earth.
You need only pick up a video game, or watch a Sci-Fi movie to glimpse at that future, where you should be living had all the predictions come true.
It would appear that we do know how to furnish and dress that future; we just don't know how to make it happen.
Yes, I know we've had many advances and technical revolutions lately.
The Internet towers above most of these, but it was conjured up back in the 1960s.
What else? Yes, cell phones, personal computers, microwave ovens, DVDs, Plasma, LED, LCD television, 3D everything, but little else.
Granted, we live in a more advanced state of development (though at what cost to the planet!) than we did 30 years ago, or even 20. Or 10.
But if you take a look around you, nothing much has changed. Cars still don't fly. We won't send a manned aircraft to Mars until 20..who knows when! (so expensive you see).
Supersonic flight is but a memory to us (though young people have no memory of it), and there are no colonies on the Moon. At least not Earth colonies.
So...what does the new future hold? It would appear that we have absolutely no clue. Nor do we know what it will look like.
Yes, thank you thank you all you futurologists with your massive projections of our current time into our distant future where things look pretty much the same except for their future-looking design cues.
But if you really are wondering, here's a link to an article in the British press (The Independent) concerning the year 2020. That's only 8-9 years from now.
Do you think it will really be like that?
How about these products? Are they part of the future you envision?
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I was given a copy of a book titled:
The World of the Future: Future Cities.
I loved it. I read it and reread it. It was my personal Bible.
I even began to draw and design objects to add on to what was already there.
I think that is where my love for design started. I wanted to design part of the future.
Today, this book has no equal.
Nothing is being published to resemble it. I think it is because we have lost our taste for things like that.
Yes, we like progress, but progress turned out to look like nothing we were shown as kids.
It may still pleasantly surprise us though.
I wonder if it would surprise Gagarin to see that we went little further than what he did...50 years ago?
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David Brin
Achilles7
Farleftside
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Jeve (aka John and Steve)
john blumenthal
Salon.com
Comments
Had we foregone the dubious pleasure of watching our spaceships land on a runway instead of splashing down in the ocean, we would be mile ahead because of the insanely high costs of building and maintaining the shuttles themselves.
The Russians have been plodding along with their old-fashioned capsule technology, which for the foreseeable future, will be the vehicles on which our equipment, supplies and astronauts will be hitching rides....until we finally get our own capsule fleet ready.
The enormous costs involved in maintaining the impossibly complicated shuttles, along with the terrible cost in human lives that would probably have been averted had we been using capsules instead of shuttles, argues strongly against that silly technology.
The shuttle is merely an example of how we have mis-allocated our financial resources by squandering them on the wrong answers to the wrong questions.
There's no question that we should have had usable electric vehicles 20 years ago with ranges and speeds comparable to IC engines....but we didn't invest the research capital required to solve the battery problems when the answer was simple: don't use batteries.
The real problem is the failure of vision.
BTW, someone once proposed that we power vehicles with compressed air, or fly wheels, or hydrogen gas....all of which are essentially conversion of electrical power. No one will ever pursue these options because there's no government funding for the research and because the strain on the electric grid will crash the whole grid.
Condundrums.
Imagine that...
good shopping web
free ship ---- some surprised for you
We were neck and neck, and suffered the same problems. I would like to see a more in-depth statistical comparison of US and Soviet deaths and lost rockets, both in terms of percentages and absolute numbers. Fascinating discussion
I have to say I'm surprised by all the chatter about rockets and hardly anything about how our present looks nothing like what our future was meant to look like right about....now!
2001 a Space Odyssey.....2011 and all we have is the iPad.
Humm...
Good post. Rated.
Great piece.
The design aspect is still actually quite there! As you said, just not the way we expected. The power of a brand like Apple is in no small part due to their focus on design. Take a look at the Steve Job's patent estate and you see a large number of his patents are _design_ patents rather than just all utility patents as one might expect from a true techno-geek.
The form factors on so much of what we have coupled with the technology that allows our shapes to be more "designable" (rather than the size and shape of the circuitry dictating the design or limiting it in some way) speaks volumes to the primal impact of a "cool shape" and design.
Oh yes, and one last bit about "supersonic flight", it is still quite with us in the form of military planes. So fret not, many children will still be quite mindful of supersonic aviation!
As for supersonic flight, I think children outside of the US don't think of warplanes first off as their mode of reference (although many do of course). Most Western countries don't idolize their armed forces like we do in the US.
Personally, how fast an F16 goes when it is about to kill someone or bomb somewhere, although impressive, still strikes me as slightly barbaric and of little use in my day-to-day life, unless of course I'm living in a war-zone, which I am not.
I rather get from London to Sydney in 4 hours than think I can't, but a supersonic fighter can (or rather, could, if they held enough fuel). Perhaps the future I was talking about never happened because we spent too much in armament and not enough on everything else? Just a thought.