The TV show "The Jetsons" epitomized the optimistic futurism of the 1960s.
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We get it. You feel like all the science fiction of yesteryear promised you a future of flying cars and hoverboards, and none of it has come to pass. Sure, we haveSegways and iPads, but it's small consolation when you wake up every day to a world without "Blade Runner" skylines. But these are only 1980s visions of the future. Back in the '50s and '60s, our expectations for the 21st century were even loftier. With science by our side, nothing seemed out of the question.
Just consider "Magic Highway USA." With an hour's worth of stunning animation, this May 1958 episode of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" awed television audiences with depictions of automated global highways, underwater road systems and antigravity cars [source: Sterling].
A year earlier, Disney's "Mars and Beyond" showed viewers what humanity's future on Mars might entail and even featured segments with famed German-American rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun. It all seemed possible -- and much of it still is.
In this article we'll look at 10 future inventions we've been waiting for all our lives. Which ones are just around the corner, and which ones are mere relics of our post-World War II dreams?
Google Co-founder Larry Page stands next to the Volkswagen Touareg Stanley, a robotic car, in 2006.
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes
10: The Driverless Car
You're quite the enigma, modern driver. You want the freedom and individuality that comes with the use of a personal automobile. Yet you constantly multitask with activities best left to passengers aboard a bus or train. You eat, drink, read, text, talk on the phone, trim your nails and even apply makeup. In short, you crave the driverless car.
Clearly humans are often the most dangerous part of an automobile. That's why scientists have been working on automated highway technology for decades. In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Transportation sponsored the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC), which successfully demonstrated the potential of radar, magnetic and visual sensors that allowed test vehicles to navigate a specially prepared length of highway. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also underwrote an autonomous vehicle research and development program, culminating in its 2007 Urban Challenge. This event saw robotics teams from across the country compete for more than $3 million in prize money through the development and testing of automated urban vehicles.
Oddly, one of the current leaders in robotic car technology is online services giant Google, which changed how people find information online and now has ambitions to change how people get from one physical place to another as well. Since the mid 2000s, Google scientists and engineers have been working to develop autonomous vehicles that utilize artificial intelligence software and Google Maps to navigate. Google's driverless car prototypes reportedly have driven 200,000 miles (321,868 kilometers) in tests on California roadways. Amazingly, Google's cars have never been involved in an accident while in robotic mode, though in August 2011 one of the prototypes was in a five-car collision near Google's Silicon Valley headquarters while a human driver was at the wheel. Google still awaits federal and state regulatory approval to engage in more extensive tests, and it's still unclear when -- or rather, if -- ordinary folks will be able to buy a car that drives itself [source: Crawford].
Don't look for these models at your local car dealership.
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9: The Flying Car
The dream of the flying car simply won't go away. Glenn Curtiss rolled outAutoplane in 1917, the first attempt at such a vehicle, and the design trend continues to this day. Terrafugia's 2010 Transition is one of the more recent prototypes, but the basic design still breaks down to a vehicle that functions as both an automobile and an airplane.
But let's face it: The popular dream of flying cars far exceeds the notion of driving onto an airfield and taxiing out for takeoff. From "Blade Runner" to the pages of "Popular Mechanics," the concept is as much about floating cars and highways in the sky. It all lands us slap-dab in the middle of hoverboard country, and we're forced to contemplate the bugbear that isantigravity technology.
While the ability to manipulate antigravity would transform transportation immensely, the subject is largely taboo in research circles due to numerous hoaxes and unfounded claims. This doesn't mean serious minds aren't interested. Between 1996 and 2002, NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project explored the possibilities of antigravity. Needless to say, we're still waiting on the flying cars and hoverboards. For now at least, they remain outside the reach of human technology.
Will future cities exist underwater?
© iStockphoto.com/3Djml
8: The Underwater City
The ocean presented early humans with a vast mystery. What worlds and fabulous creatures exist in the deep? Today, our understanding has expanded, but the world's waters still offer us an abundance of mystery and awe. We dream less about mermaid cities and sunken Atlantis and instead imagine underwater metropolises and seafloor colonies.
This zeal was especially strong in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf project and the United States Navy's Sealab saw the dream of undersea living realized. Through three stages of field tests on the ocean floor, both programs proved that humans can live and work for extended periods of time underwater. The test subjects tended underwater gardens, tackled underwater construction projects and lived the life of an aquanaut.
Half a century later, the underwater cities still aren't here. Sure, we have unrealized designs such as Giancarlo Zema's semisubmerged Trilobis 65 dwelling and the proposed underwater Dubai skyscraper Hydropolis, but very few underwater habitats. The bottom line is that while humans can live underwater, it's not an easy or cheap life. It's also not necessary.
Circumstances haven't forced humans to consider underwater living seriously, and when it comes to oceanic exploration, unmanned submersibles and automated seafloor stations offer a better value proposition. The National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative, for example, calls for a worldwide network of automated observation stations and autonomous underwater vehicles.
We still dream of robot maids.
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7: Robot Maids
The most obvious answer to a complaint about the lack of robot maids is of course, "Hey, buddy, go buy a Roomba." Because while they don't really resemble George Jetson's robotic maid Rosie, modern bots do carry out a host of floor vacuuming, tile scrubbing and pool cleaning chores.
Of course, the vision of the computerized maid goes beyond mere automated dust busting. What we've been waiting for is a true robotic domestic servant capable of safely navigating a human living environment to carry out everything from cleaning the toilet to cooking pancakes. Roboticists continue to prove that few tasks lay outside the reach of a properly engineered machine. Companies flock to Japan's International Food Machinery and Technology Exhibition each year to demonstrate that if we like to eat it, a robot can probably make it.
In order to actually move through our kitchens and interact with us, robots will need to be capable of social learning. A truly social bot will need to be able to learn from humans and emulate their actions. It will need to evaluate environmental stimuli with a discriminating eye. In short, a true robotic maid would need to be autonomous. Leading robotics labs around the world continue to make progress in this field, but for now you'll have to settle for that Roomba.
Members of the all-male six man crew of the 520-day Mars500 mission in June 2010, before they began the grueling simulation of a flight to the red planet
Photo courtesy ESA
6: Ticket to Mars
The date was July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 landed the first human beings on the moon. It was the farthest we had ever traveled from the Earth and the first time humans ever stood on another object in our solar system and stared back in wonder at the world they called home. From there, it only seemed a natural progression that humans would venture toMars as well.
As early as 1946, the aforementioned German-American rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun sketched out Marsprojekt, which called for no fewer than 70 astronautsaboard a fleet of 10 Mars-bound spacecraft [source: Wade]. As ambitious as this sounds, the project marked the first technically comprehensive design for a manned expedition to the red planet. It was far from the last, however, as both the United States and the Russian space programs continued to cook up manned Mars expedition studies throughout the rest of the 20th century.
But dreaming of colonizing Mars is a lot easier than actually conquering the technical challenges to sending astronauts there, which include shielding them from radiation exposure and overcoming the health worries that long-term exposure to microgravity in space might cause. In 2010, President Barack Obama set a goal of launching a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s, long after he leaves office. We'll see if that actually ever happens [source: Matson].
Which would you prefer -- a hamburger or a spoonful of pills?
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5: Food-in-a-pill
Since the 1800s, futurists have been dreaming about creating miniaturized, 100-percent synthetic food from chemicals, so it could be consumed in tablet or capsule form. Some envisioned it as a way to free women from the drudgery of cooking or spare animals from slaughter, while others saw it as a way to feed the planet's growing population without overtaxing farm soil or other natural resources [source:Belasco]. A 1936 Popular Science Monthly article predicted that "modern alchemists" in food laboratories eventually would create "food pills that would contain everything necessary for life -- a feat that would render man forever independent of natural resources for his nourishment, and banish fear of crop failure and famine" [source: Rosner].
It's an idea that has persisted over the years in science-fiction fantasies. The problem is that unless someone figures out a way to alter the laws of physics, getting your daily nutrition from a capsule or tablet is pretty much impossible. Think of it this way: The typical human needs to ingest about 2,000 calories each day, and a gram of fat -- the most efficient way to provide them -- contains about nine calories. Thus, to meet your daily caloric requirement, you'd have to ingest 450 or so standard-sized capsules of fat, which would weigh roughly half a pound. And you still wouldn't be getting all the other nutrients -- protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fiber -- that you need to be healthy [source: Biba]. Besides, eating nothing but a pill for breakfast, lunch and dinner wouldn't exactly be living large. People like to eat because food tastes good. Pills generally don't.
Will we each have our own jet pack someday?
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4: Personal Jetpacks
If you've ever seen the classic James Bond flick "Thunderball," you probably remember that great action scene in which 007 makes his escape from some bad guys by slipping on a rocket-equipped backpack and blasting off into the sky [source: Parker]. Jetpacks didn't originate in some screenwriter's overactive imagination, though. They were first dreamed up by German scientists during World War II, and after the war, the Pentagon dreamed of developing its own version [source: Kaku].
In the 1950s, at Bell Aerosystems in New York, a visionary engineer named Wendell F. Moore created his own version of the concept, a 125-pound (56.7-kilogram) "rocket belt" powered by a canister of liquid nitrogen. And in 1961, President John F. Kennedy was on hand to watch a successful demonstration of the device at Fort Bragg, N.C. [source: Americanrocketman.com]. An Associated Press article from the time reported that "a practical, working rocket belt, torn from the pages of science fiction, has made a reality of mankind's age-old dream of flying with the birds" [source:Benton]. But the U.S. military eventually gave up on jetpacks as a practical mode of battlefield transportation, in part because flyers could only carry enough fuel to stay aloft for less than half a minute [source: Americanrocketman.com].
In 2011, a remote-controlled prototype of a jetpack made by a New Zealand company called Martin Aircraft actually demonstrated the ability to reach an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) and cruise at 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour), and stayed aloft for 30 minutes [source: Mulroy]. However, according to the company's Web site, the gadgets are not yet being offered for sale [source: Martinjetpack.com].
3: The Air-conditioned Suit
The first air conditioning unit was developed by Willis Carrier in 1902, and within a couple of decades, summertime crowds were escaping the heat by flocking to movie theaters equipped with the new technology [source: Bucknell.edu]. But air conditioning had a drawback: It required people to stay indoors to stay cool. Wouldn't it be better if you could wear air conditioning on your body, so you could stroll down the street on the hottest day in July without breaking a sweat?
Futurists dreamed of just that, and in 1951, Popular Science touted the idea of an air-conditioned suit cooled through ducts built into an insulated lining, which would be cooled by a small refrigeration unit attached to the body [source: Popular Science]. (Inexplicably, the magazine envisioned that it would be useful to airplane pilots, even though they probably have more of a need to stay warm in the chill of high altitudes.) In 1953, for example, an Iowa newspaper columnist cheerfully predicted that in the future "Zipper suits" with built-in air conditioning units would keep the body cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Such an outfit would eliminate the need for large wardrobes. "When one traveled he would simply tuck a couple of pair of socks in the pockets of his all-weather suit, set the thermostat for 68 degrees and depart," the journalist wrote [source: Sioux Center News].
In 1993, an inventor actually patented a "wearable air conditioner" with water-filled coils built into the fabric that would be cooled by chemical reactions [source: Freepatentsonline]. But such attire never made it onto clothing store racks, possibly because of how much a water-filled suit might weigh, or how difficult it would be to power a wearable air conditioner. Perhaps the closest anyone's come was a Japanese company that, in the late 2000s, marketed a shirt with a small built-in fan that could be powered by plugging it into a computer's USB port [source: Chen].
Risk of radiation exposure has made atomic-powered homes a tough sell.
VisionsofAmerica/Joe Sohm/Getty Images
2: Atomic-powered Homes
In the 1950s, when the U.S. government first approved the creation of nuclear plants for generating electricity, forward-thinking Americans fantasized about a future in which small personal nuclear reactors would be commonplace gadgets. In 1955, Robert E. Ferry, general manager of the Institute of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, gave a speech in which he predicted that individual homes would be heated and cooled by small reactors within three to six years.
The system Ferry envisioned would use a tiny portable reactor about twice the size of an automobile battery, which he predicted would cost about $1,500 to install in a house. The homeowner would adjust the temperature by manipulating a set of controlling graphite rods, smaller but similar to those used in power plant reactors. Not only would the "A-Boiler" keep a house warm in winter and cool in summer without running up utility bills, but it also would provide unlimited amounts of hot water and melt the snow from sidewalks and driveways. Atomic power would be cheap and efficient, and according to Frank L. Phillips, the nuclear engineer who consulted on the blueprint, the technology already existed to create a practical home reactor, and the only thing holding it back was "inadequate supplies of fissionable materials" [source: The New York Times].
But in their eagerness to be ultramodern, the A-power's boosters overlooked a few things, such as the risk of radiation exposure. So far, their vision has yet to be realized.
American actors Gary Lockwood (left) and Keir Dullea in a scene from "2001: A Space Odyssey"
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1: A Computer That's Smarter Than a Human
Amid all the phantasmagoric special effects and puzzling symbolism of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey," the one detail that sticks in everyone's memory -- that is, other than the big black obelisk, and the inexplicable giant fetus floating in space -- was the HAL 9000 computer that ran most of the spaceship Discovery One's operations. Not only did HAL speak and possess a humanlike personality, but it actually was superior to humans, because it never made mistakes. Or at least it never admitted to them, preferring instead to murder the crew to cover things up. When one of the astronauts figures out what's going on and begins to disconnect HAL's memory, the computer tries to talk him out of it. "Dave, I don't know why you are doing this to me," HAL protests, in its creepily flat-affect voice. "I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission" [source:Kubrick and Clarke].
But when the year 2001 actually rolled around, what inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil calls "strong AI" -- that is, a machine that possesses self-awareness and is equal or superior to humans in intellectual ability -- was still closer to science fiction than reality. In a 2005 essay, Kurzweil, who estimates that a computer would need to be capable of performing 10 quadrillion calculations per second to match all the regions of thehuman brain, predicted that threshold would be reached by 2020 [source: Kurzweil]. But others, such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, have expressed doubts about whether machines ever will be able to even approximate human intelligence. "The brain works in a completely different fashion than computers do," Allen said in a recent Forbes interview. He also noted that neuroscientists still don't really know enough about the brain yet to hope to duplicate it. "You can't create an artificial intelligence," Allen insisted, "unless you know how the real thing works" [source: Herper].
Lamb, Robert, and Patrick Kiger. "10 Future Inventions Everyone\u0027s Been Waiting For" 12 January 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/inventions/5-future-inventions-everyones-been-waiting-for.htm> 05 June 2012.
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