The Future!

I little while ago I wrote a post about re-reading the Rama series of books. I'm a fairly quick reader, but I tend to take long breaks at random times. This means that in the long run, it can take me a long time to read a book if I walk away from it for awhile. So, this week, I decided to pry myself away from the shitty news cycle and finished up the second book and started the third. It starts about nine months after the previous books when the main character has her baby and an alien space ship. She also remembers some things from the past nine much, such as recording a video for her daughter she will never see again that is left on Earth and then rewinding the tape......in the 2200's.

This made me giggle a little. Tape still has it's uses, but it's mostly for long term storage. Not a record to be send by radio waves type use. The Rama books do pretty good on this front. They are more about explaining the advanced nature of the alien ship than they are about human technology, so there aren't too many cases of this. But, we've all watched Sci-Fi. Even sometimes the future has stuff that's older than ever. We laugh at how the original Star Wars trilogy has technology that looks older than ours and even older than the prequels.

But maybe that's for the best. There are days when I would give a leg to go back to a text only screen like in an X-wing instead of having to bring up task manager multiple times a day to restart Windows Explorer because my taskbar has turned into a white box. I could make the argument of AI being worse than just searching, but as with most/all technology, it's how you use it. Notebook LM from Google is pretty sweet because it only references the files you give it. So I can give it all the notes from my D&D campaign and it will answer questions regarding it.

Meanwhile, if I ask ChatGPT to give me a summary of a recording, it adds stuff from previous conversations that have nothing to do with the previous session.

So, maybe recording onto tape to send a video back to Earth isn't that bad. It's extra weight for a spaceship to haul to orbit, which is probably the strongest thing against it, but it would still work. Sliding doors in Star Trek are great, but what if the ship takes a hit in combat and the frame goes out of whack? Suddenly your door that slides into the wall sucks. Sure, a regular door can still get stuck, but I feel they'd be easier to force open. And if you built them like a ship on the seas (Which Battlestar Galactica did), then you'd probably be good.

We can argue all day whether a new technology is good or bad and it generally comes down to opinion or how it's used, but what are some of the best cases you can make for sticking with the old? Comment that as I go fix my brand new John Deere tractor.