{"id":578,"date":"2010-10-13T15:23:36","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T14:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=578"},"modified":"2010-10-13T15:23:36","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T14:23:36","slug":"you-know-what-we-are-living-in-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=578","title":{"rendered":"You know what? We ARE living in the future."},"content":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while I have conversations with friends about the lack of futuristic things in our every day lives. By conversations, I mean rants – “Where’s my flying car? Where’s my robot? Where’s my [science fiction staple]?” The kind of thing that the “Damn Scientists<\/a>” t-shirt at Threadless covers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I know other people get these frustrations. You know what though? Every once in a while something comes around which makes you take a step back and realise that we are in the future. Right now, I’m thinking of the miners in Chile. The mine collapses, and 33 men are trapped 700ft underground without anyone knowing they’re alive. Main shaft’s blocked, and that’s where the story could end horrifically. Left alone in the dark, trapped, and with no means of contacting the outside world. Slowly starving to death. That’s what could<\/strong> have happened. Instead we’re seeing the men raised to the surface today in the Phoenix capsules 70 days after they were trapped.For a sense of scale, the Gherkin in London is just under 600ft high.<\/p>\n

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Think about what’s had to happen to make this possible. This roughly 2ft hole’s had to be drilled to hit an exact space 700ft below the surface, tiny errors at the start and they could have missed. The capsule’s got to run smoothly up and down this hole, and the men have had to be kept alive and healthy throughout this time. The mining expert went down just before 4am UK time this morning, and we had live video<\/strong> of him arriving at the bottom.<\/p>\n

Think about this – we can reach people 700ft underground in time to save them, and we can beam pictures halfway around the world as it happens from both ends of the rescue.<\/p>\n

Take a step back, look at what’s around and think about how it would appear to a classic sci-fi writer in the 60s or 70s. There’s elements we have now that are a step change from what was around then. The obvious one’s computing power and availability, but think around the implications in automation as well. We have technology building technology, with people only providing the guidance. I might not have a flying car or a jetpack, but I think there’s definitely elements of the classic sci-fi in my every day life and in the world at large.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Willis_building_skyline.jpg<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while I have conversations with friends about the lack of futuristic things in our every day lives. By conversations, I mean rants – “Where’s my flying car? Where’s my robot? Where’s my [science fiction staple]?” The kind of thing that the “Damn Scientists” t-shirt at Threadless covers. I know other people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[440,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pAkBY-9k","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":105,"url":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=105","url_meta":{"origin":578,"position":0},"title":"Why yes, this certainly needs a remake.","author":"MattWPBS","date":"July 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I managed to miss the originally, but Cloverfield director Matt Reeves is remaking a European film I quite enjoyed. He's remaking Let The Right One In.Let's just have a quote from that article. An executive at Overture Films asked him to take a look at a then-unreleased Swedish horror film,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Films"","block_context":{"text":"Films","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?cat=37"},"img":{"alt_text":"Let Me In poster. ","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cache.gawker.com\/assets\/images\/io9\/2009\/07\/letmein.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":583,"url":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=583","url_meta":{"origin":578,"position":1},"title":"Seeing as last Tuesday was National Coming Out Day…","author":"MattWPBS","date":"October 17, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm not coming out as gay, let's get that out of the way first. But in the same sort of spirit, I am coming out as someone who suffers from depression. Some of my friends know this already, I'm not overly secretive about it, but it's not something I tend\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ramblings"","block_context":{"text":"Ramblings","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?cat=440"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":300,"url":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=300","url_meta":{"origin":578,"position":2},"title":"iPlayer: 13th August 2009","author":"MattWPBS","date":"August 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Some recommendations from Monday onwards. Monday 10th August 09:00: MI6: A Century In The Shadows: New Enemies Recommended this previously. Number 3 in the series. Talks about the run up to the Iraq war and the like. BBC page. iPlayer link. 13:30: Round Britain Quiz Ok, this is an absolute\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "iPlayer Recommendations"","block_context":{"text":"iPlayer Recommendations","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?cat=54"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/media.livenation.co.uk\/fido\/\/publishing\/news\/i\/m\/c\/Radio4-new-logo-with-frequency.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":798,"url":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=798","url_meta":{"origin":578,"position":3},"title":"Sir Christopher Lee, actor, spy, knight, metal singer…?!","author":"MattWPBS","date":"September 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"List of things I knew about Sir Christopher Lee already: He's obviously a damn good actor, you only have to look at the range of things he's done from Dracula back in 1958, the supremely disturbing Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, through to current work like the Lord Of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music"","block_context":{"text":"Music","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?cat=129"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattwpbs.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Christopher_Lee_charlemagne.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":854,"url":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?p=854","url_meta":{"origin":578,"position":4},"title":"Facebook, the social network that is no longer social.","author":"MattWPBS","date":"October 26, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Over the last month or so I've seen a few articles going around about the most recent changes Facebook has made to it's fan pages, and especially to who sees the updates. There's two good articles about it on the New York Observer (Broken On Purpose) and on Dangerous Minds\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Technology"","block_context":{"text":"Technology","link":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/?cat=57"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattwpbs.com\/wpinst\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/8560618867_8abba5bf16_k.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattwpbs.com\/wpinst\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/8560618867_8abba5bf16_k.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattwpbs.com\/wpinst\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/8560618867_8abba5bf16_k.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mattwpbs.com\/wpinst\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/8560618867_8abba5bf16_k.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattwpbs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}