What is something considered impossible when you were a kid but is now known to be completely possible or even inevitable?
What is something considered impossible when you were a kid but is now known to be completely possible or even inevitable?
In my pocket I carry a library of Alexandria, an infinite Walk-man, a camera and a camcorder with effectively infinite film, a personal navigator... You get the idea, the list goes on. 80s me would have thought this was impossible, even if I am a bit disappointed about the flying car and hoverboard situation.
Not to steal the other comment but yeah a swiss army knife of a device that pays for things, browses the internet without running up the phone bill (and I can browse AND talk on the phone at the same time), has games and music, is a flashlight, etc.
But most importantly a name change. I thought it was impossible or extremely hard but it wasn't. Just write, pay $65, pay $12, send the documents to wherever, and that's it.
The mortality of my parents. My mind is often stuck in the future of what ifs; but this is an inevitable event that will come sooner or later and it terrifies me. I do my best to cherish the time I'm fortunate to have with them while channeling energy into my own kids. I know it's the natural cycle of things, but still... Life is hard man.
Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.
Protein folding
Directly measuring gravity waves, the first measurement using LIGO was back in 2016 and they've observed almost a hundred so far. The observations are being used to create newer generations of gravity wave detectors.
Nuclear War.
I though leaders were cool headed and rational, that they would never destroy the world.
Then I learned about Cuban Missile Crisis with Vasily Arkhipov, and the radar false alarm invident with Stanislav Petrov, amongst many more "close call" incidents. Our world almost died.
I mean like: If the many-worlds theory is true, there are probably some universes where WW3 happend and most of life is dead. Probably every 9 out of 10 universes, we died. We are alive because of luck. (I mean, we wont exist to be able to perceive a dead universe anyways).
But that can happen again. Its not over.
The "Doomsday Clock" is a prediction by scientists of existential risk to humanity, and these scientists are predicting an even more tense doomsday risk than ever before, even more so than the height of the Cold War.
(I actually had a dream/nightmare of see a nuke go off outside my window. Maybe its a vision of another timeline, or the future... 🤷♂️)
Being single
A computer program winning a Go tournament.
In chess, human grandmasters routinely beat the best computers, but changing that was simply a matter of faster processors and larger memory, problems solvable by the application of sufficient quantities of money. In principle the game was already solved, and within a few decades, would be solved in practice as well.
Go was considered a much harder problem. Programs of similar complexity to a decent chess program couldn't even look at a finished game between go pros and reliably say who won, let alone get there itself. Well, guess what?
Swallowing gum.
WW3
I've realised, over time, that we got to be species number 1 through near statistically impossible odds that is only achievable by being the most brutally effective in the game of evolution.
And millions of years of nature doesn't just go away when you're declared the winner. It is in our nature to dominate through all means possible, else we wouldn't be here. It's not so much that we want war, we need it; our nature is founded on it. When there is nothing left on the planet to defeat, we turn on ourselves to scratch the itch.
The catch is the other half of our nature is focused on domination of the species. We protect each other for the greater good as much as we kill for the greater good. That's our human nature; that's how we got here. So after a war we feel awful and promise to never do it again, but then the itch of being number 1 reappears and there's nothing else to scratch it with because we conquered everything else.
Our known history affirms that the end-game of evolution is a never ending cycle of masturbating to awful shit, feeling ashamed, and just doing it again once the shame is overridden by the urge. "Never again" we say, every fucking time.
Edit: That's why I also love the self-proclaimed "lefties" camp always misappropriating the philosophical Paradox of Tolerance on here—like it's not misappropriately used by the other camps. Ironically all just proving the paradox true. Camp vs camp. Tribe vs tribe. The itches and scratches, Oblivious to human nature doing as it does best. To progress is to win by all means possible. This is our way.
Edit Edit: And no I'm not picking on you kids specifically. Look at Tall Poppy Syndrome, Soapboxes, why communism never works, why capitalism never works; all the other ideologies we think up to break the cycle and try fast forward our evolution in vain. They all end with with someone or something taking power for a brief moment, before they're targetted to be cut down by the nature of others trying to instill their idea, how they want it, how they insist all others will want and should have it. Power.
Going to Mars.
Self driving cars.
We are on the early stages currently; ignore what Tesla/musk says; in 10 - 20 years full level 5 autonomy will be common place.
In the 80's the Cray 1 supercomputer was made, now I have so much more computer power in my pocket its frankly ridiculous. And it's runs on milliwatts rather than kilowatts.
Achieving a world record in this day and age, which I have at least one of.
I don't know if people were really talking much about this kinda stuff back then, but a PC like device that wasn't a laptop that allowed you to play full-on PC titles at home, either hooked to a TV or on its own, or on the move. Especially a device that also allows you to do normal computer things outside of playing games.
Again, not including laptop since I personally don't know any people who actually used their laptops for playing games while in a moving vehicle. There probably are plenty of people who did it or do it, but I don't know any.