Modern video games.
If you sent, say, a huge RPG or simulation game back in time, or even Minecraft, anyone who understood computation would drop their jaw. What a computer can render 90 times a second still kinda drops my jaw, when I think about it.
Ability to speak to a computer in free form, in dozens of languages, and have it understand you, is fucking mind blowing.
Having better Internet almost anywhere, in your pocket - compared to the wired Internet even 20, not 50 years ago.
this even blows my mind from a 2020 nerd perspective.
Voluntarily being surveilled and profiled 24/7.
Immediately accessible on demand free pornography.
I hope we’ve outpaced the imagination of somebody from 50 freaking years ago. Imagine how the 1970s would look to somebody from the 1920s.
Any smartphone is the obvious one.
But, the first black hole was confirmed in 1971. The fact that we’ve taken a picture of one would be incredible, not to mention directly imaging planets in other solar systems.
“Cordless” isn’t much of a word anymore because everything runs on batteries. Battery tech itself has come a long way.
People forget that all batteries, even the boring stuff like alkaline batteries, have advanced big time since the 1970s.
Flashlights have also advanced dramatically. Flashlights in the 70s and 80s sucked ass compared to the ones we have today.
On that note, would you imagine in the 70’s that we’ll have LEDs everywhere and that they’ll practically replace most other sources of light? This is, like, insane tech for the time.
We got most of the tech from the jetsons ppl could envision in the early 1960s (video calls, smartphones, smart watches, smart homes), but still don’t have flying cars, cloud cities, robot maids, and moving sidewalks going everywhere.
flying cars are not going to happen. they’re a menace as they are, we don’t need to give people 6dof. they’re also not really futuristic, it’s just the car brained American vision of the future.
I have a robot maid, it just only vacuums and mops. They have them with an arm that can pick up light objects too, they are just expensive.
They are working on robot maids that basically are controlled by humans and see and record EVERYTHING in your house. Not a good idea.
Turns out Rosie worked for the NSA the entire time
The Patch was hypothesized in 1988 and first documented in 1997, by a passing yacht racer. Research on the patch began in earnest in 2009.
Estimates on the size are still nebulous, as it continues to expand and shift. But I doubt anyone in the 1970s was predicting a patch of trash twice the size of Texas would appear in the Pacific Ocean over the next 50 years.
- there’s now scientists working on myco-remediation creating controlled fungi that can eat plastics and polymers. 🤓
What happens if this fungi comes in contact with humans full of microplastics?
This was actually renamed to the Great American Garbage Patch
Also wish more effort and attention went into countries coming together to clean this up, and simultaneously stop any new trash from entering into our waters.
Trump renamed something again?!
ITT: People not understanding the title.
How does anyone read “wildest dreams” and answer with bad things? So many comments here are about things that were just unimaginable in a bad way, which isn’t at all what the question is about.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin… And I still marvel everyday about where we are today, compared to last year 😁 And I’m here since the internet began, and I had to drive to neighbor-city, be interviewed, fill out forms, join a nonprofit, just to have access to it.
I’m in awe every time I look at my e.g. phone. A thing that is a factor of like a hundred thousand or more in terms of speed, resolution, storage, in comparison to my first computer. And I carry it around. And it can connect to the net at unbelievable speeds. Without a cable.
…yet websites often load slower than back then, thanks to lazy devs, the use of 5838229 frameworks or scripts noone needs and also tracking and the likes.
I’d have to imagine, if they were also into art, that they’d absolutely flip put over the tools for digital art, 3D modeling, and 3D printing. I mean, you can make a miniature 3D model for a project, make some textures to slap on it so you can get an idea of how you want it to look, print it, and then paint it to look like your textured model. All from your house, no less.
Though, for animation nerds, definitely the jump in animation quality. I wasn’t alive back then, but when I look back at cartoons from then, I notice a few of cheap things occasionally used like solid colour backgrounds, stiff character movement, and repeated animations in certain areas to save on budget. Plus, the stories being told are a lot better, IMO, in general… despite some of the crud we get alongside the cream of the crop.
To a 1970s American? They’d get a kick out these:
- Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
- Those gas prices are going no where but up.
- Anyway we decided that our all cars will be F350s.
And just gets us to the end of the millennium.
I think they’d find 4k OLED TVs impressive too. Maybe generative AI. A lot of other things like Bitcoin, eh, whatever.
1992 born but I’ve said to my mom crazy how nothings changed. Updated to work the same as before but other than that attempts to change everything is a major flaw.
I was born in the early 80s. Things HAVE changed big time. A lot of things that we do not see on a daily basis that have changed majorly. Medical tech is one. most people do not work in the medical field and do not pay much attention to it (I am one of them!) but the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in medicine is staggering.
Like transportation hasn’t changed though. It’s all update to function exactly the same.
Not everything has stayed the same but a few things of our daily lives that we thought were going to be more extravagant or technology driven aren’t and now some of the things that have technologocal advances we wonder why the fuck they need them, like toasters. Why the fuck does a toaster need Bluetooth?
There’s things that are slightly futuristic, like lightbulbs that don’t really burn out and barely need power to run, or antidepressants that don’t completely fuck you up. But yeah, in the 1970s they’d kind of maxxed out what’s physically possible with a lot of technologies, while they were still projecting linear growth like they’d seen over previous decades.
Now I’m curious how high gas prices got in the 70’s oil crises, in 2026 dollars. Uhhh… looks like it was comparable to now, actually.
Energy Crisis 2.0
Ah, ah, ah, “we” decided?
