Successful Science Fiction Prophecies

I'll buy the cellular phones, but my PersonalDigitalAssistant won't tell me anything about the presence of humanoid lifeforms behind that rock. It could if the humanoid was BlueTooth-equipped. My PDA can tell me the next show time of Rollerball at the mall, which is more important on this planet. Actually, wouldn't those little pad-looking things that Yeoman Rand was always having Kirk sign be closer to a PDA? In StarTrekTheNextGeneration the Padds were actually the same form factor of a modern PDA--of course that's 'cause they stole that idea from XeroxParc...

I'm with LarryNiven: I'm surprised organ banks (and increased use of capital punishment to supply them) haven't happened. Driving a car carelessly has built-in capital punishment.

NealStephenson in SnowCrash (I think) described a safety device for riding motorcycles - instead of wearing a helmet, you have an inflatable collar around your neck. In case of a crash, it inflates instantaneously and protects you, rather like an airbag. A few years ago, I read that a Japanese company came up with a similar device, albeit to protect construction workers falling off buildings. -- BurkhardKloss

Actually SnowCrash is rife with good near-term extrapolations like that. Another that he had were eyeglasses that were monitors -- instead of looking into a monitor tiny RGB solid-state lasers at the edge of the glasses would paint the picture onto your retina. I just read last week in SlashDot that there's a company that's now doing that, albeit with RGB LED's instead of diode lasers... -- KyleBrown

When NealStephenson wrote SnowCrash, Georgia Tech had already been working on a prototype of that technology for some time.

I've read most of the stuff cited above and a lot more besides. I got turned on to the "classics" at about the age of eleven at my local Jr. High School. My mother used to give me the hardest time for "wasting my mind reading that fantasy." These days -- 35 years later -- I never turn down the opportunity to rub her nose in the fact that I was reading all that "fantasy" about things like microwave ovens, cell phones, PDAs, embedded defibrillators, reusable spacecraft, communications satellites, lasers...I could go on and on. Heh. I guess that's what started me on the road to becoming an embedded systems engineer. I always wanted to build neat stuff like I read about as a kid. -- MartySchrader

See Also: FulfilledScienceFictionProphecies, TechnologyDisappointments, FailedScienceFictionProphecies, PredictionsFromFortyYearsAgo

CategoryScienceFiction

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