A super computer at the size of your hand. Yet, I’m using one to type this comment right now (I’m of course talking about the smartphone)
Still having no public health care.
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.
