The gathering storm

[CptnMus]

Nope. Mostly because every news article reporting scientific discoveries is sensational nonsense. If you were to go back ten years and take a sweep of what news media was reporting we'd have soon we'd be living in a world of flying cars, household robots and ten thousand cures for cancer. Or for another perspective every time you see a sensationalist news story track down the original scientific paper (this can be tricky if they don't name it, try searching for the scientists they mention and find their recent publications if so) and read through. Almost always the real story is much more fascinating but much more limited.

The news has a tendency to report very early successes as imminently finished. In reality the vast majority of scientific research falters along the way and much of it never succeeds.

That's why I try and stick with "reliable" *just hurt myself laughing* media sources, the ones that take a more realistic/ long view. I get excited because things we thought would not be possible are being made possible. And a lot of those things that were predicted to exist by now never came about (generally), not because we could not do them, but because it would just be a ludicrous waste of energy or we have discovered something better in the meantime. Flying cars and hover boards, cool yes but what do we actually gain?

That's why there are prototypes of these devices (not the hover board that I know of but a flying bike like the Starwars ROTJ speeder bike http://gizmodo.com/5936580/they-finally-...eeder-bike and that was 3 years back) but no real serious money being invested, its a toy at the end of the day, there are much more efficient ways of getting into/about on any terrain and they are being invested in (mechs, AI drones etc).

And did anyone recently see the true 3d projection story recently, seriously exploding air molecules with lasers to create a spark sprite, crude but so simple and yet no one thought to do it, 2 fairly simply (and well established) technologies combine and suddenly people are smacking their foreheads and going "of course".

Most probably will not lead to colour holograms or holodecks (stand amidst tiny laser explosions, ye-eeah....) but its still conjuring illusions out of thin air as far as I'm concerned (no fog or any surface required). Think of the potential for active shielding for space vessels (woo segue), a formulated grid scatter of low energy intersecting beams that effectively 'print' a shield in front of the ship to deal with molecular garbage, more powerful lasers could allow it to deal with even macro particles like dust, add to this a basic ablative ice shield...

And I guess I get most excited because I know the greatest discoveries are made in seemingly unconnected incremental steps, reputable public news sources do tend to be distorted or exaggerated but they are rarely an outright lie(rarely ) so as you stated there is a less sensational but more exciting fact behind the fantasy and that's what gets me going.