It's not that I don't like it, I couldn't care less. But as an example, let's see, how about, almost a hundred years of straight heterosexual cisgender couples sucking face in the vast majority of movies and TV shows ever produced? Or the vast majority of romantic literature? I can think of many more.
You know, even with the super advanced tech of Star Trek, I still think I'd want a bit more between me and death than an energy barrier. I don't trust technology. I like redundancy.
I get the same feeling when I see SpaceX's Starship do the "flip and burn" landing maneuver.
Back in the day, I had just envisioned storage media getting more and more dense, to the point where we might be using some kinda holographic cube or some shit in the future to store petabytes of data.
I never thought of the entire world just constantly streaming and downloading everything around the planet on demand. The state of Internet bandwidth in those days made it hard to imagine.
Some time ago, the industry seemed to have standardized on a cheap-ass all in one platter/motor/stylus assembly that's just dropped into every modern record player now. I think I started seeing that thing everywhere in the late 80s. They did the same to tape players. It's now just an entire chassis containing the play head, motor, etc where they just make a shell to go around it and a circuit board to drive it/amplify it.
In Star Trek, some cetaceans are sentient. They may have had first contact with others long before humans and forged some kind of relationship with the alien entity(s). The probe was coming to either check up and make sure their friends still exist, or avenge their extinction (I'm sure if they were in touch, they were telling them all about the atrocities we were inflicting on their species.). It came ready to wipe us out, and contact with an actual whale changed its mind. The whales may have told it to back down as well, after they had their mind meld conversations with Spock and decided to help when he may have told them that humans of the future had completely changed their ways.
unless we're wrong about the whole speed of light thing
Technically, if we could reach relativistic speeds close to the speed of light, the trip could be very short for the crew. Just don't expect to ever be able to see anyone you knew back home ever again. We can do just fine on sub-FTL tech if the crew accepts the consequences. We can use very high ISP continuous propulsion methods like the Orion nuclear bomblet and pusher plate concept, or beefed up ion engines, or lasers pushing a solar sail, etc.
It depends on the industry. I install electronic security systems, and I'm on construction sites quite a lot. 95% of the white guys there are MAGA fans, and often talk shit about the very same Latino workers that are working alongside them hanging drywall. They won't do it openly. They'll wait until they're in a group of only white dudes or scribble slurs on the walls of the portable toilets.
It sickens me sometimes how they'll punch down on someone while not being that much better off than them.
On his War Room podcast on Friday, Bannon referred to tech leaders like Musk as “on the spectrum” and incapable of taking criticism.
“The nerds don’t take criticism,” he said. “They’re kind of, you know, they’re a little bit all on the spectrum, right? They don’t know– they’re not deep in social skills.”
The 4chan basement neckbeards vs. the traditional old racist rednecks. As someone on the spectrum myself, this is going to be both fun and cringey to watch.
Was 19 still living at home when my Dad switched us to something called "@home" broadband, which became Comcast a couple years later. I do remember being blown away by seeing images load almost instantly on a web page.
That was also the last year I remember using Netscape Navigator as a daily driver. It was IE for the next four years until I switched to Firefox, and have been using that ever since. Yes, IE blows, but Navigator was starting to become a bloated mess as it started to suffer from feature creep trying to win people back.
It's not that I don't like it, I couldn't care less. But as an example, let's see, how about, almost a hundred years of straight heterosexual cisgender couples sucking face in the vast majority of movies and TV shows ever produced? Or the vast majority of romantic literature? I can think of many more.