Weekend Geekery

Alex · 05-20-2007, 08:55 PM

You can buy a jetpack. There was a guy on NPR a couple weeks ago (can't remember if it was All Things Considered or the local interview show) who wrote a book about the great SciFi inventions promised when he was a kid that hadn't been invented yet.

When he started looking around it turned out most of them had been invented and just weren't economically viable for mass consumption or on a large scale. Smell-o-vision (turns out nobody wanted it), jetpacks (too inefficient), and teleportation (only works at the quantum level and considering how it works nobody would subject themselves to it anyway) were three of the things he talked about specifically.

Turns out there's a reason it was called science fiction and not economics fiction.

05-20-2007, 08:55 PM	#1
Alex . Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 13,354	You can buy a jetpack. There was a guy on NPR a couple weeks ago (can't remember if it was All Things Considered or the local interview show) who wrote a book about the great SciFi inventions promised when he was a kid that hadn't been invented yet. When he started looking around it turned out most of them had been invented and just weren't economically viable for mass consumption or on a large scale. Smell-o-vision (turns out nobody wanted it), jetpacks (too inefficient), and teleportation (only works at the quantum level and considering how it works nobody would subject themselves to it anyway) were three of the things he talked about specifically. Turns out there's a reason it was called science fiction and not economics fiction.
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