Andy Mancini
04-09-2002, 01:24 PM
In the past few days, there have been a lot of posts about some "hot button" topics: some lady in Europe is pregnant with a clone, the morality of downloading mp3s, an Englishman becomes the one of the first cyborgs, etc. After reading these posts, I have come to one conclusion: we are lving science fiction right now. To illustrate my point, take a look at 1992, which is exactly ten years ago. In 1992:
- Cloning was a topic talked about by the likes of Stephen King, not Larry King.
- A home satellite dish was a huge white thing that had to be implanted into a yard.
- When people thought CGI, they immediately thought of the video for "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.
- The World Wide Web that we know today didn't exist yet.
- If you wanted a song that you didn't have on an album, you would have to record it onto a cassette tape.
- If you wanted a "high quality" video output, laserdisc was the way to go.
- Cell phones, then known as "car phones", were big, bulky and impractical.
- If you wanted a WWF pay per view, you had to order it from the cable company.
- "Biological terrorism" was when the overweight guy in the room passed gas.
- Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were in movies like "Star Trek".
- If you wanted to record two things on the television at once, you needed two VCRs and two televisions.
- I would not be writing this post because the class I am currently in (Java), doesn't exist yet.
I know that there aren't any Terimator-equse robots, hordes of teenagers with real working tails and cat ears, and noboby is flying the mech of you choice (Gundam, EVA, Voltron) yet. But still, how do we know in that in ten years this won't happen? Just food for thought from a person writing a post during the teacher's "smoke break".
- Cloning was a topic talked about by the likes of Stephen King, not Larry King.
- A home satellite dish was a huge white thing that had to be implanted into a yard.
- When people thought CGI, they immediately thought of the video for "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.
- The World Wide Web that we know today didn't exist yet.
- If you wanted a song that you didn't have on an album, you would have to record it onto a cassette tape.
- If you wanted a "high quality" video output, laserdisc was the way to go.
- Cell phones, then known as "car phones", were big, bulky and impractical.
- If you wanted a WWF pay per view, you had to order it from the cable company.
- "Biological terrorism" was when the overweight guy in the room passed gas.
- Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were in movies like "Star Trek".
- If you wanted to record two things on the television at once, you needed two VCRs and two televisions.
- I would not be writing this post because the class I am currently in (Java), doesn't exist yet.
I know that there aren't any Terimator-equse robots, hordes of teenagers with real working tails and cat ears, and noboby is flying the mech of you choice (Gundam, EVA, Voltron) yet. But still, how do we know in that in ten years this won't happen? Just food for thought from a person writing a post during the teacher's "smoke break".