Voluntarily being surveilled and profiled 24/7.
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.
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.
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?!
- 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?
Then you get a cleansing and then you go to the er and call yourself a dumbass and then hope to god the intravenous antifungal work.
No, honestly I don’t know but you can buy a syringe of liquid culture that contains a strain of a plastic eating mushroom and the warning on the site is to not store it in a plastic fridge. You could find the plastic pile and then toss a jar of that culture on it and then toss your boat because it’s probably been hit with the liquid culture.
“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.
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.
Still having no public health care.
Today’s is worst than 1970’s
Immediately accessible on demand free pornography.
So you’re stealing Playboy magazines from the newsstand? Or…?
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.
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.
Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.
And yet i am this close to wanting him jailed
Well not him, I guess, just the designers of all those devices that have a blue laser like led in it shining in my eyes at 4 AM in the morning. Fuck all those digital clocks, TVs, etc.
It’s also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it’s changed the field of photochemistry
I remember when the only color laser pointer was red. Now you have all the colors of the rainbow.
And damn powerful. So powerful you get almost every time wayyy more than allowed/advertised.
so that’s the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?
You can blame The Weeknd
Two income households that still can’t afford a single-family home.
I think a 1970s American would get a kick out these:
- Global warming is real and worse than you think and no it’s not going to be addressed.
- Those gas prices are going no where but up.
- Anyway we decided that all cars will be F350s.
- I hope you like pocket electronics because those are literally the only things that will seem truly futuristic to you. Everything else? Pretty much the same. Yep. We don’t even live longer.
I think they’d find 4k OLED TVs impressive too. Maybe generative AI. A lot of other things like Bitcoin, eh, whatever.
Energy Crisis 2.0
Ah, ah, ah, “we” decided?
1992 born but I’ve said to my mom crazy how nothings changed. Updated to work the same as before but other than that attempts to change everything is a major flaw.
I was born in the early 80s. Things HAVE changed big time. A lot of things that we do not see on a daily basis that have changed majorly. Medical tech is one. most people do not work in the medical field and do not pay much attention to it (I am one of them!) but the sheer amount of stuff that has changed in medicine is staggering.
Like transportation hasn’t changed though. It’s all update to function exactly the same.
Not everything has stayed the same but a few things of our daily lives that we thought were going to be more extravagant or technology driven aren’t and now some of the things that have technologocal advances we wonder why the fuck they need them, like toasters. Why the fuck does a toaster need Bluetooth?
Personally, I’d go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.
Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people’s homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.
4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.
Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.
The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.
I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I’m currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.
I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.
I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
SDR (Software Defined Radio)
Its insane how many things you can do/listen to with a simple cheap USB stick.
