HG Wells wrote War Of The Worlds in 1897. He described it:

“in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light… it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam.”

This is a remarkably precocious depiction of a laser weapon. It was only about 80 years since before there was a operational laser on a weapon platform, at the time it was the ABL, or Airborne Laser. The ABL is a giant Boeing 700-400 airframe with a laser emitter on the nose and a massive battery configuration occupying most of the fuselage. Today we have weaponzied lasers beyond optical tracking deployed throughout the world. These are lasers that can track an incoming airborne missile and ignite it on the way to target. They are getting better and better and will continue to do until the lasers we use will be more interesting than the Ray Guns imagined in Hollywood. Although a Star Trek Phaser with variable power settings and the ability to disintegrate objects is probably a ways away. That said the interval of time between the prediction and the realization is shortening with every new science fiction novel and with each exploding advance in technology.

The interval of time between the Tricorder, Star Trek’s portable computational device, and the first PDA, the Palm TX is about 25 years. The next generation of Star Trek, which was aptly named Star Trek, the Next Generation, featured more hand held computational devices. All of them look like a booger compared to a Mini iPad.

Sure we don’t have our flying cars yet, because flying cars propose a much nigger problem. Not lift and fuel or anything like that, but traffic. Flying cars would have to fly in lanes that would obviate any advantage to flying above the traffic to get anywhere else. Also cars crashing from out of the sky into things and people on the ground would be catastrophic. But the technology for flying cars has been around since the imagination of flying cars.

The point here is that I see a shorter path to the futures imagined in new science fictions than I have seen previously. The things we imagine are getting closer and closer and the reason is that technology is growing so robust that the leaps of imagination are being bridged within a single generation.

Take the Internet. Few people really predicted this configuration clearly, although there were a few science fiction examples of an intelligence or data matrix quite like the Internet. William Gibson predicted a living neura-interface where people connect to computer networks. The Internet is only about 12,000 days old. It is the largest machine in the world and has never contracted nor stopped growing since its inception. Today, bots comprise 60% of Internet traffic. So automated programs, flitting around browsers like RNA flits around protoplasm. So not only is the Internet expanding at a tremendous rate, it is producing it’s own industrial drones: bots and tracking software.

Ray Kurzweil predicts that there will come a time when humans and computational machines will be symbiotic. He sees a day when driven by computational devices, technology will change so rapidly that we will need computers to exist on a more basic level than services provided. I wonder if he believes, as I do that the real strangeness in the future will come with people who harvest the DNA of other organisms. People will live long lives, see in the dark, have incredible strength, resist illnesses, all from the genetic fruit of other organisms.

Heraclitus said the only permanent thing is change. How true. I think of another platitude: one cannot step in the same river twice. Soon we won’t step into the same world twice.

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