What happened to the technology of the future?

hell happened to the future? Yeah, because you know, we were talking about fun ideas for podcasts, and we decided we want to do something really fun, like you know all those you know, the articles and the the text avery cartoons, cartoons about the House of the Future and the Dog of the Future and you know Tomorrow and the Jetsons and all the cool stuff we were gonna have.

You know, what the heck happened to that? Also? I have a theory, Yeah, I have a theory that the future exists on a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum you have the Jetson's where it's the happy future with the you know, helpful robots and the flying cars. And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got George Orwell's nightmarish dystopia where everything is very um locked down and and all the technology is used to keep the proletariat in line. And that's the spectrum of the future.

And I kind of want to see by the end of this podcast where we think we are on that spectrum, Like are we closer to the Orwell or are we closer to the shiny happy Jetsons. You know, honestly, I have to say, um, and this is just a personal side that I you know, like on the Wegia board, when you start wondering whether somebody is moving the thing around intentionally, I have the feeling you're going to steer this direction in one part, you know way, But I'm

not going to get there. I will say that. I will say there is a middle ground. It's called the terminator. So the terminator is in between Orwellian and Jetsons. It's actually I think closer to Jetson's because it requires sentient robots. All right, then we'll speaking of robots. Yeah, let's say, okay, we'll go straight to robots. So where where's my personal robot. Where's my robot? Butler? You know you want Rosie? I want well, you know, I'll settle for Rosie. That's just

that's true. Yeah, it's truly nice. Yeah, where's Rosie? Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think the closest thing we might have is maybe Asumo Azamo is pretty close. Asumo is Honda's robot. It was the neatest thing about Osumo recently is that it learned to run before it before it could just walk really fast. Running is defined as the moment when you're propelling yourself forward and both feet leave contact with the ground for at least to

split second. Yeah, Asimo can is pretty impressive. Yeah, I was. By the way, that was one of my first articles here was how asthma works. You know I knew that. Yeah that was before you were here. Yes, but I I you know, I've been told many times article you ever, I still have the video CD at my desk and I occasionally watch it because it brings a smile to my face. Yeah, as the most not much of a butler, but he is a pretty cool robot. He's not Yes,

he can't conduct. He can conduct. He did conduct an orchestra um, but he can't make decisions. He can't do really anything on his own. You have to pre program a lot of information in Asimo for him to work. He can recognize certain obstacles that are in his path and plan for them and move out of the way, and he can climb stairs and things like that, but he can't write. But he can't. He can't decide on things on his own. He can't make up his mind, right,

So there's there's lack of sentions. We can talk about other robots too, I mean, there's the room Bore. There are these helpful little robots that can do things like simple tasks. But again we're not It's kind kind of a far cry from Rosie. Yeah, although you know Rosie vacuum too. Um. You know what I was. I was thinking about the robotic critters like Ibo, Sony's Dog and Pleio Plio. Yeah, really cool. Who you know it may

not think, but it is pretty scary. I don't advocate you do this, but if you really want to, if you're really twisted enough to do this, go online to YouTube and there are videos of people torturing Cleo and it streams and it's really awful. It's sad and I don't I don't know exactly why they threw that in there, but it is really depressing. We'll stay staying on the robots and trying to move away from well, actually this

isn't moving away from depressing at all. But um, android army robots are those we don't have any of those. If you will, UM, we don't really have this. We do have military robot that's true, but they look more like kind of manage your tanks. Really, you're welcome, thank you, the manage your tanks. Uh. They tend to be used

mainly for reconnaissance or rescue missions. Um. You send them into areas that you know are are dangerous either there perhaps land mines or other explosive devices, or the area you're sending it in as structurally unsound. You wouldn't want to necessarily send a human being in there, So you see a robot and instead it's a lot easier to replace a robot. Um, it's just money, right, it's just money. In parts, it's so much better to use a robot

in those cases. But again, we're talking about robots that don't really have a lot of autonomous functionality. They can't really make decisions on their own. Now you can program them where you could program a sentry robot where it essentially fires on anything that comes in its field of vision. But again, that's not really making a decision. It's just recognize a target and fire at it. True. I mean,

that's what the unmanned aerial vehicles do. They're in missions in uh in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's actually a group of people here in the United States who are operating those those they're not robots, I guess technically, they're more like remote controlled airplanes. They are remote controlled airplanes, but I mean they've got the cameras on them and somebody's moving them. And that's essentially what

these other devices are doing. The bomb squad robots and the military robots that go in and test for land mines and stuff like that, their own thing. Yea far far away from autonomous robots. Some people would say that's a good thing, because you know, terminator bad in general. Okay, okay, okay, flying cars, flying cars. Where's our flying car? Michael Jackson was supposed to buy one back in the eighties. Do you remember hearing that story? You never heard that story?

Heard other stories about Michael was not one of the ones I heard that. One of the stories about Michael Jackson one of the you know, I mean it's a little crazy, but not like so, one of the stories about Michael Jackson was that he was into sit buying a flying car. There was this a couple of different inventors at the time. We were talking about the possibility of a flying car. It's just around the corner. This is the nineties, and Michael Jackson said he wanted to

be the first person to buy that. Um, you know, that's not surprising. You've got celebrities who buy the first something of whatever, like Schwarzenegger bought the first civilian hum V. So it does happen. And Stevie wonder about the first UH book reader for the board that was off the top of your head. Um, so anyway, yeah, it's not unusual. But the problem is that the flying cars just haven't

really I hesitated to use the words surfaced. Well, we have an article called how flying Cars Will Work by Kevin Bonsor, and you can look at that. There are flying cars they used basically they basically used fans, giant fans kind of giant hover craft. Really is what they end up being. Yeah, and uh, it's not a not a back to the future. I'll flying car not so much. You're you're you're hovering. You're not really flying, I'd say, But you know, George Jetson makes it look so easy.

And that's the problem is with the flying cars is the one that we all eventually come to when we start thinking about how nice it would be when you take your flying car to work and you're the only one in the air, and if everyone has flying cars, everyone's in the air, that's right. How do you legislate that? How do you control that? What happens when one of them gives out? When your neighbor is flying over your house? Yeah, the entire sky becomes the road. There's no there's no

single pathway to follow. That's one of the things about you know, car travel makes it easier to handle than than flight is because you know you've got you've got very limited places where people can go. You can legislate that, you can control control that. How do you control it

when everyone's got their own mindage or airplane? Apparently where we're going we do need roads, apparently, So I mean, if nothing else, we probably need computer controlled vehicles to take the human element out of it, because just thinking about everyone owning their own flying cars kind of frightening. There is there are some that are out there, the M two G Valantern. Have you heard about this. It looks like a little flying saucer um and I've seen

videos of it and it's it's pretty neat. And they're talking about the possibility of manufacturing things on a mass scale. It all depends on how many people order them, so it's kind of a catch twenty two. They can't make them cheaper until people start buying them, but people aren't buying them because they're not cheap. So that's probably where we're you know, we're kind of gonna be stuck on this. I think I think we're just going to see those as kind of, you know, novelty vehicles, not not like

your regular kind of vehicle. I got another one for you, Okay, go ahead shoot weather control because you know, in the future we're going to control the weather. There's been some attempts. I tried it another article we have on the site right.

They tried to seed clouds to try and make it rain, so that it would rain in distant locations in China so that the rain would not eventually make its way to Beijing where the Olympics were being held, right right, Yeah, I don't know how did that work out, and I didn't follow up on it, so I actually don't know. We'll have to look into that and see if they were actually successful. No, grant, this is very primitive weather control.

It is. It's sort of semi successful from what I understand that the point is to uh seed clouds with silver iodide, and essentially what it does, if you know a little bit about how rain works, um, the moisture in the air and the clouds gets so heavy that it can't stay up in the clouds anymore and falls down its rain. Well, the point is to give the water molecule something to condense on so as they go ahead, so you make it rain earlier, yeah exactly, and try

and get to rain out before it hits whatever. And I mean this idea does have some merit, you could think. Little. The problem is that it requires that there will be moisture in the air already, right, So you can't just say like, oh, we can solve the drought problem. Now. You kind of need clouds with moisture in them above the drought area before you can actually cause it to rain. Yeah. So yeah, we're still ways off on the weather control to um lunar base. How are we doing with that

lunar base? Well, surprisingly, well, we don't have one. That's that's the short answer. Shucks, but we're gonna have one. Awesome. I know that NASA is really interested in it. NASA is really interested in it, and and part of the reason that President George W. Bush was interested enough to say, hey, let's do this and actually get the ball sort of semi rolling, is that they want to use it as sort of a jumping off point to get to Mars. Yeah, it would be kind of a rest stop on the

way to any other distant location. So when you get just past the Moon, you could say you should have gone when we're back at the moon, right exactly, like, look, we were just at the Moon, why didn't you go within Um. Yeah, it's kind of the truck stop of the universe, or at least the Solar system. Um. And yeah, there's there are NASA does have plans to return to

the Moon. There's actually an amazing video on NASA's sites, very inspirational about about using the Moon as a base for that kind of thing, and and just a you know, a base in general, using it for everything from astronomy to other scientific experiments. And um, and it's we got to see this video here at How Stuff Works in person. We had someone from NASA come to How Stuff Works and show this video. This might have been before you joined. I'm not sure, I think, um it was. It was fascinating.

The man from NASA showed us the video and it was really really inspirational. And it is available on NASA's site. I highly recommend people check it out, um, because it gets you excited about the space program, which is you know, not not only is it not a small task, it's also vitally important for NASA's funding. They have to get this kind of excitement, um, in order to get the interest from Congress to get the funding they need to

to do these these projects. That's why you start seeing these private projects pop up too, like the X Prize Foundation Google. That's true. You know, they have a contest for people teams to send up a lunar rover up. So this would be a robotic rover, not a not a manned mission root. You say, yes, a robot rover to the moon, to um to prove that private companies could do this just as well as a government group could. And India just launched its first unmanned mission to the moon.

So um, so there is a renewed interest. So a lunar a lunar community is not outside the realm of believability, and it will still be a couple of decades off probably, but so we're not there yet, but we're still heading there. At least we haven't gotten off track. And you know you mentioned tech savery cartoons at the beginning. I went back and watched one, The Car of Tomorrow. Now we should we should stress the these cartoons were meant just as kind of poking fun at the idea of what

the future would look like. Well, that's that's that's true, because this was it was actually sort of a reaction to all the articles about you know, what's going to happen in you know, nineteen fifties, American's gonna happen in the year two thousand one, right, So these were these were meant specifically to poke fun and that they were just meant for laughs. They were not meant to be taken seriously, and yet there are a couple of them

that have come true, at least or in the prototype stage. Yeah, there was there was one car. One of the cars was a a a car that could have rotating tires to solve the parallel parking problem, right, so that you would you would be driving and then your your tires would rotate so that they were now perpendicular and you would just slide in sideways directly into the parallel parking spot. I was gonna say, aren't all car tires rotating, well,

rotating you mean the other right? Exactly? Not not just yes, they could change change the axis there. They didn't want to break it to you that, right, Hey, guess what we have that? Well, there's a prototype, now, there was. It's actually a car concept. It's not even a proto prototype.

It's called the NASA car concept. And the idea here is that the tires would move so that you're no longer facing forward, they actually face to the left and right, so that you could roll immediately to your right and parallel park without having to do that nasty little shuffle maneuver. Yeah, I hate that actually, Yeah, So I mean that's that was one that was just men as a joke in this tex Savery cartoon, and yet someone's really working on

a way of potentially addressing ANA. And there's another one. There was a folding car where when you get to where you're going, it folds up into a tiny little square and you put in your pocket. Okay, so we're not really going to that level. I mean, there's some other issues that we would have to address before that, but like repealing the laws of physics exactly, that would be a big one. But there's the idea of the city car from M. I. T. Which is a folding car.

It's not men as a personal vehicle. You you would kind of rent it for your time where you're at the car while you're in the city. Rather so you'r you go to the city, you rent this little car and you drive it around. When you return it, it folds into a line, kind of like the way shopping carts fold up to each other. So you would actually come up and you take the one on the end.

Obviously when you rented one, you take whichever one was on the end, drive it around, drive it into the little docking station and it would fold up with the rest. So again, you know, not as far fetched as tech Savery thought, probably, And there was another one. There was a boat car, a car that was part car apart boat that could drive through nasty nasty weather. We could talk about the the scuba car. We've got an article on that. It's a car that's a submarine car, go underwater.

So again tech Savery, you know what, not that far off, strangely enough. Yeah, you know, he wasn't the only uh animator who was interested in the future. There are quite a few Disney pieces on that. As a matter of fact, it was a big thing tomorrow Land, you know, in disney Land, in Walt Disney World. Um, in Disney The Moon, which is opening next year. UM okay, seriously, no, it's in the future. I'm gonna start planning my trip. It's

in a giant dome. Anyway. Uh. There was an episode of Disneyland, which was the show Disneyland UM called Magic Highway USA. And UM, I actually watched this before I was pulled down for copyright infringement, called The Road Ahead, and it talked about color coded expressways and cars that you could basically get in and it would take you

to where you're going. And um, long time, how Stuff Works podcast listeners might remember I brought this up on a Stuff You Should Know episode in which Josh Clark and I talked about his article will there be a new kind of taxi cab in the future? Well, Personal rapid transport is actually a form of this, and what it would do is, uh, it's it's like a little car that you get in. Doesn't look like a little car.

It looks very futuristic, surprise, surprise, but it's on a track and you say, okay, I want to go to and you give it the dress for work. Well, you're the little car gets on the track and it's coordinated with all the other cars. Uh. So it basically knows not to go too fast or too slow, and it takes you to where you're going. When you get out, you you leave it, and that's it's not really your once say personal, it's not yours, but it's basically just you and it takes you where you want to go.

And it would require a lot of infrastructure because you can imagine, because it would have to be a track going to everybody's house and every every location. But it's kind of like the Minority Report. I remember there were vehicles in the Minority report. They were very much like that. They would even go up and down buildings. Yeah. Yeah, but uh, and it's being tested out in a couple of places, and that's pretty cool. And apparently it's very

cost efficient as far as building out the infrastructure. It's less than than building light. Right, So when it comes to where the hell is my future? At least the car stuff is falling into line pretty well. Yeah, some floating cities not so much. No, No, I read about this a few years ago. Uh. The idea was proposed by a man named Norman Nixon of the Freedom Ship, which was an enormous ship. It could hold fifty thou people and it was a floating community. It's not men

as like a cruise ship or anything like that. You would actually live there and there'll be workspace and and living space and um. Visiting his website, Uh, seems they ran into a few problems. They trusted some people with their money that maybe they should not have trusted. Uh, And they trusted some engineers that maybe they should not have trusted. And at any rate, this dream is still well within the dream phase. Um, it doesn't sound to me like they've made a whole lot of progress. They're

still determined to try and make it work. But I think it's gonna be another few decades before we hear anything firm about the freedom Ship. If if it doesn't just disappear altogether. Well, the freedom Ship does sound exciting and new. I'd like to come aboard. They're expecting me. I have one more, but I wanted to ask if you had any before I did my final one. Okay, well, I was thinking of a couple. Okay, yeah, let's go ahead,

quick ones. I'll make them quick. Um. You know, there was this this thing that was proposed a couple of hundred years ago called the Mundaneum by Paul Outlet, and it would store it would basically be a giant catalog of information stored on on you know, essentially punched cards catalog cards. Uh, not really punch cards like in the later on. Although Van eva Bush, who was one of the government's top scientists in the United States for a long time, worked with the UH, the Atomic Bomb Project,

and a lot of other different projects. He had this idea of a machine called the memex or me max I guess um and uh it would be like you could scan things in documents in and save them all on microfilms. You could have like a giant reader on your desk and you could pull up information from anywhere. I think I see where this is going. I mean, have you heard anything like this, Well, it's what we pretty much do our research on now, huh And actually, well,

except for their expectations, do you research on paper tree killer? No? No, no, of course. Uh you all by now who are downloaded this podcast on the internet, you know what I'm talking about. But there you go. There's an instance in which we've actually surpassed uh, both of these um scientists expectations. And I'm sure that both of them would have if they had lived to see it, would have been very pleased.

Actually if any of her Bush lived into the Internet age, but only very slightly, um, so, you know, he would probably be pretty darn impressed. What's going on? And uh, of course you know there's the uh Monsanto House the Future to mention another Disney term. Of course, we have the uh you know, different modern furniture, you know, but really that's not. Automation has made some progress, though not to the point where arms come out of the wall

and and make your dinner for you. Yeah, I'm waiting for the little mechanic arms to come shave me in the morning. Instead, we just have like temperature control and lights and things like that. Yeah, we still in the future. Ish, I think that, you know, the little arms were more cartoony. Maybe I'm still holding out hope. Okay, Well here's my final one. Here's how I know that the future really did fail us. Okay, Okay, it's because in the ES we did not manage to shoot Kahn off into space

in exile aboard the Botany Bay. Okay, Khan is not out there, so Kirk cannot encounter Khan and then put him on Steady Alpha five and imprison him there and then encounter him again later in Star Trek to the Wrath of Cohn, which we all know was the best of the Star Trek movies. Next Generation included. Okay, maybe I said switch back to stuff you should know. Maybe there's a slot. I'm just saying. Con alright, then, boy, Future, you really you really let me down there? All right? Well,

you know what, I have nothing I can say that better. Well, how about we go back. I'll tell you about that futuristic technology that really exists. I'm talking about liquid body armor. It's super neat stuff. I mean, we're talking about non Newtonian fluids here. So these are fluids that when you make an impact, they don't behave like a normal liquid where you know you would just hit it in your hand,

just goes through. They actually stiffen up and they distribute the force so that you can take a shot like literally take a shot from a from a gun and it distributes the force so that doesn't kill you, which is pretty much what body armor is supposed to do right right, except most of it isn't made out of corn starching water. That's true. But you can read about the stuff that is beat out of liquid in our

article about how liquid body armor works. That's written by Tracy Wilson, one of our good friends here, a talented writer, and how stuff Works live right now at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again soon. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you