5 Science Fiction Technologies We’re Still Waiting On

We live in a marvelous age. The future. Flying machines are ubiquitous. You can communicate in real-time or near-real-time with almost anyone on the planet. We have a freakin’ space station, for cryin’ out loud. For a SF writer, it gets harder and harder to find those science things that are “indistinguishable from magic”. Harder, but not impossible. There are still wonders we don’t yet have.

Interstellar Interplanetary Space Travel

We’ve sent some probes beyond low Earth orbit, but with the exception of a few manned missions to Luna 40+ years ago, humans are still as Earth-bound as they’ve been since we and chimps decided to go on our own evolutionary paths. While we have some tentative plans on the drawing board to visit some close neighbors (Luna, an asteroid, and eventually (maybe) Mars), we don’t currently have the ability or, perhaps, the will.

There are a lot of technologies that have to develop for manned space travel to have any practical expression. Space is both hostile to us and mind-blowingly huge. We’ll probably be waiting for a while.

Massive-scale Atomic Manipulation

Stuff like matter-transfer (e.g. the Star Trek transporter) or, more practically, matter-rearrangement (e.g. the Star Trek replicators) represent a grail for manufacturing, food production, and transportation. While this stuff is really nifty, we’ve only just made the first baby steps in regards to quantum entanglement. There’s still a very very long way to go.

Anti-gravity

Stories have used anti-gravity devices for moving all sorts of things: from furniture, to buildings, to planets, to spaceships. If you go with the proposition that gravity and anti-gravity can co-exist and not mutually (and explosively) annihilate each other, then this would be a really nifty thing to have at your disposal. This would be a game-changer in so many ways.

Our Robot Successors

There have been incremental advances in robotics over the past few decades. For the most part, they are still in the appliance realm. Modern robots lack the self-sufficiency necessary to make them truly SF-worthy. At least, not yet. There are many advances necessary in artificial muscles and artificial intelligence necessary for us to worry about our potential replacements. True artificial intelligence will still be about 10-years away for a while yet. In the short-term, the focus needs to focus on advancement in kinesthetic materials and algorithms. A big part of this is pushing the state-of-the-art beyond cables and bulky electromagnets.

My Ascension To Emperor Overlord of All Human Endeavors

Kidding. That’s not really one. (Or is it?)

Endless Energy

So much of the SF world is powered. The energy is clean, cheap, and seemingly endless. I think it’s fair to say that we’re nowhere near this. The one-time promise of fusion seems to be fading with the current avenues of research. It takes too much, and is too finicky, to make many very excited anymore. Being that so much attention is focused on finding new energy sources, there may be some out-of-the-blue developments sooner than later.