Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com Yellow Welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. My name is Chris Pelett. I'm an
Speaker 1: editor here and How Stuff Works. Sitting next to me,
Speaker 1: as usual is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hello, from the
Speaker 1: World of Tomorrow. Oh no, you know, actually it reminds
Speaker 1: me of a line from Spaceballs. Even in the future
Speaker 1: nothing works, right, So we're gonna talk about what the
Speaker 1: hell happened to the future? Yeah, because you know, we
Speaker 1: were talking about fun ideas for podcasts, and we decided
Speaker 1: we want to do something really fun, like you know
Speaker 1: all those you know, the articles and the the text
Speaker 1: avery cartoons, cartoons about the House of the Future and
Speaker 1: the Dog of the Future and you know Tomorrow and
Speaker 1: the Jetsons and all the cool stuff we were gonna have.
Speaker 1: You know, what the heck happened to that? Also? I
Speaker 1: have a theory, Yeah, I have a theory that the
Speaker 1: future exists on a spectrum, and on one end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum you have the Jetson's where it's the happy
Speaker 1: future with the you know, helpful robots and the flying cars.
Speaker 1: And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got
Speaker 1: George Orwell's nightmarish dystopia where everything is very um locked
Speaker 1: down and and all the technology is used to keep
Speaker 1: the proletariat in line. And that's the spectrum of the future.
Speaker 1: And I kind of want to see by the end
Speaker 1: of this podcast where we think we are on that spectrum,
Speaker 1: Like are we closer to the Orwell or are we
Speaker 1: closer to the shiny happy Jetsons. You know, honestly, I
Speaker 1: have to say, um, and this is just a personal
Speaker 1: side that I you know, like on the Wegia board,
Speaker 1: when you start wondering whether somebody is moving the thing
Speaker 1: around intentionally, I have the feeling you're going to steer
Speaker 1: this direction in one part, you know way, But I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get there. I will say that. I
Speaker 1: will say there is a middle ground. It's called the terminator.
Speaker 1: So the terminator is in between Orwellian and Jetsons. It's
Speaker 1: actually I think closer to Jetson's because it requires sentient robots.
Speaker 1: All right, then we'll speaking of robots. Yeah, let's say, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll go straight to robots. So where where's my personal robot.
Speaker 1: Where's my robot? Butler? You know you want Rosie? I
Speaker 1: want well, you know, I'll settle for Rosie. That's just
Speaker 1: that's true. Yeah, it's truly nice. Yeah, where's Rosie? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You know, I think the closest thing
Speaker 1: we might have is maybe Asumo Azamo is pretty close.
Speaker 1: Asumo is Honda's robot. It was the neatest thing about
Speaker 1: Osumo recently is that it learned to run before it
Speaker 1: before it could just walk really fast. Running is defined
Speaker 1: as the moment when you're propelling yourself forward and both
Speaker 1: feet leave contact with the ground for at least to
Speaker 1: split second. Yeah, Asimo can is pretty impressive. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: By the way, that was one of my first articles
Speaker 1: here was how asthma works. You know I knew that.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was before you were here. Yes, but I
Speaker 1: I you know, I've been told many times article you ever,
Speaker 1: I still have the video CD at my desk and
Speaker 1: I occasionally watch it because it brings a smile to
Speaker 1: my face. Yeah, as the most not much of a butler,
Speaker 1: but he is a pretty cool robot. He's not Yes,
Speaker 1: he can't conduct. He can conduct. He did conduct an
Speaker 1: orchestra um, but he can't make decisions. He can't do
Speaker 1: really anything on his own. You have to pre program
Speaker 1: a lot of information in Asimo for him to work.
Speaker 1: He can recognize certain obstacles that are in his path
Speaker 1: and plan for them and move out of the way,
Speaker 1: and he can climb stairs and things like that, but
Speaker 1: he can't write. But he can't. He can't decide on
Speaker 1: things on his own. He can't make up his mind, right,
Speaker 1: So there's there's lack of sentions. We can talk about
Speaker 1: other robots too, I mean, there's the room Bore. There
Speaker 1: are these helpful little robots that can do things like
Speaker 1: simple tasks. But again we're not It's kind kind of
Speaker 1: a far cry from Rosie. Yeah, although you know Rosie
Speaker 1: vacuum too. Um. You know what I was. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about the robotic critters like Ibo, Sony's Dog and
Speaker 1: Pleio Plio. Yeah, really cool. Who you know it may
Speaker 1: not think, but it is pretty scary. I don't advocate
Speaker 1: you do this, but if you really want to, if
Speaker 1: you're really twisted enough to do this, go online to
Speaker 1: YouTube and there are videos of people torturing Cleo and
Speaker 1: it streams and it's really awful. It's sad and I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know exactly why they threw that in there,
Speaker 1: but it is really depressing. We'll stay staying on the
Speaker 1: robots and trying to move away from well, actually this
Speaker 1: isn't moving away from depressing at all. But um, android
Speaker 1: army robots are those we don't have any of those.
Speaker 1: If you will, UM, we don't really have this. We
Speaker 1: do have military robot that's true, but they look more
Speaker 1: like kind of manage your tanks. Really, you're welcome, thank you,
Speaker 1: the manage your tanks. Uh. They tend to be used
Speaker 1: mainly for reconnaissance or rescue missions. Um. You send them
Speaker 1: into areas that you know are are dangerous either there
Speaker 1: perhaps land mines or other explosive devices, or the area
Speaker 1: you're sending it in as structurally unsound. You wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to necessarily send a human being in there, So you
Speaker 1: see a robot and instead it's a lot easier to
Speaker 1: replace a robot. Um, it's just money, right, it's just money.
Speaker 1: In parts, it's so much better to use a robot
Speaker 1: in those cases. But again, we're talking about robots that
Speaker 1: don't really have a lot of autonomous functionality. They can't
Speaker 1: really make decisions on their own. Now you can program
Speaker 1: them where you could program a sentry robot where it
Speaker 1: essentially fires on anything that comes in its field of vision.
Speaker 1: But again, that's not really making a decision. It's just
Speaker 1: recognize a target and fire at it. True. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what the unmanned aerial vehicles do. They're in missions
Speaker 1: in uh in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: There's actually a group of people here in the United
Speaker 1: States who are operating those those they're not robots, I
Speaker 1: guess technically, they're more like remote controlled airplanes. They are
Speaker 1: remote controlled airplanes, but I mean they've got the cameras
Speaker 1: on them and somebody's moving them. And that's essentially what
Speaker 1: these other devices are doing. The bomb squad robots and
Speaker 1: the military robots that go in and test for land
Speaker 1: mines and stuff like that, their own thing. Yea far
Speaker 1: far away from autonomous robots. Some people would say that's
Speaker 1: a good thing, because you know, terminator bad in general. Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: flying cars, flying cars. Where's our flying car? Michael Jackson
Speaker 1: was supposed to buy one back in the eighties. Do
Speaker 1: you remember hearing that story? You never heard that story?
Speaker 1: Heard other stories about Michael was not one of the
Speaker 1: ones I heard that. One of the stories about Michael
Speaker 1: Jackson one of the you know, I mean it's a
Speaker 1: little crazy, but not like so, one of the stories
Speaker 1: about Michael Jackson was that he was into sit buying
Speaker 1: a flying car. There was this a couple of different
Speaker 1: inventors at the time. We were talking about the possibility
Speaker 1: of a flying car. It's just around the corner. This
Speaker 1: is the nineties, and Michael Jackson said he wanted to
Speaker 1: be the first person to buy that. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: that's not surprising. You've got celebrities who buy the first
Speaker 1: something of whatever, like Schwarzenegger bought the first civilian hum V.
Speaker 1: So it does happen. And Stevie wonder about the first
Speaker 1: UH book reader for the board that was off the
Speaker 1: top of your head. Um, so anyway, yeah, it's not unusual.
Speaker 1: But the problem is that the flying cars just haven't
Speaker 1: really I hesitated to use the words surfaced. Well, we
Speaker 1: have an article called how flying Cars Will Work by
Speaker 1: Kevin Bonsor, and you can look at that. There are
Speaker 1: flying cars they used basically they basically used fans, giant
Speaker 1: fans kind of giant hover craft. Really is what they
Speaker 1: end up being. Yeah, and uh, it's not a not
Speaker 1: a back to the future. I'll flying car not so much.
Speaker 1: You're you're you're hovering. You're not really flying, I'd say,
Speaker 1: But you know, George Jetson makes it look so easy.
Speaker 1: And that's the problem is with the flying cars is
Speaker 1: the one that we all eventually come to when we
Speaker 1: start thinking about how nice it would be when you
Speaker 1: take your flying car to work and you're the only
Speaker 1: one in the air, and if everyone has flying cars,
Speaker 1: everyone's in the air, that's right. How do you legislate that?
Speaker 1: How do you control that? What happens when one of
Speaker 1: them gives out? When your neighbor is flying over your house? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the entire sky becomes the road. There's no there's no
Speaker 1: single pathway to follow. That's one of the things about
Speaker 1: you know, car travel makes it easier to handle than
Speaker 1: than flight is because you know you've got you've got
Speaker 1: very limited places where people can go. You can legislate that,
Speaker 1: you can control control that. How do you control it
Speaker 1: when everyone's got their own mindage or airplane? Apparently where
Speaker 1: we're going we do need roads, apparently, So I mean,
Speaker 1: if nothing else, we probably need computer controlled vehicles to
Speaker 1: take the human element out of it, because just thinking
Speaker 1: about everyone owning their own flying cars kind of frightening.
Speaker 1: There is there are some that are out there, the
Speaker 1: M two G Valantern. Have you heard about this. It
Speaker 1: looks like a little flying saucer um and I've seen
Speaker 1: videos of it and it's it's pretty neat. And they're
Speaker 1: talking about the possibility of manufacturing things on a mass scale.
Speaker 1: It all depends on how many people order them, so
Speaker 1: it's kind of a catch twenty two. They can't make
Speaker 1: them cheaper until people start buying them, but people aren't
Speaker 1: buying them because they're not cheap. So that's probably where
Speaker 1: we're you know, we're kind of gonna be stuck on this.
Speaker 1: I think I think we're just going to see those
Speaker 1: as kind of, you know, novelty vehicles, not not like
Speaker 1: your regular kind of vehicle. I got another one for you, Okay,
Speaker 1: go ahead shoot weather control because you know, in the
Speaker 1: future we're going to control the weather. There's been some attempts.
Speaker 1: I tried it another article we have on the site right.
Speaker 1: They tried to seed clouds to try and make it rain,
Speaker 1: so that it would rain in distant locations in China
Speaker 1: so that the rain would not eventually make its way
Speaker 1: to Beijing where the Olympics were being held, right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know how did that work out, and I
Speaker 1: didn't follow up on it, so I actually don't know.
Speaker 1: We'll have to look into that and see if they
Speaker 1: were actually successful. No, grant, this is very primitive weather control.
Speaker 1: It is. It's sort of semi successful from what I
Speaker 1: understand that the point is to uh seed clouds with
Speaker 1: silver iodide, and essentially what it does, if you know
Speaker 1: a little bit about how rain works, um, the moisture
Speaker 1: in the air and the clouds gets so heavy that
Speaker 1: it can't stay up in the clouds anymore and falls
Speaker 1: down its rain. Well, the point is to give the
Speaker 1: water molecule something to condense on so as they go ahead,
Speaker 1: so you make it rain earlier, yeah exactly, and try
Speaker 1: and get to rain out before it hits whatever. And
Speaker 1: I mean this idea does have some merit, you could think. Little.
Speaker 1: The problem is that it requires that there will be
Speaker 1: moisture in the air already, right, So you can't just
Speaker 1: say like, oh, we can solve the drought problem. Now.
Speaker 1: You kind of need clouds with moisture in them above
Speaker 1: the drought area before you can actually cause it to rain. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're still ways off on the weather control
Speaker 1: to um lunar base. How are we doing with that
Speaker 1: lunar base? Well, surprisingly, well, we don't have one. That's
Speaker 1: that's the short answer. Shucks, but we're gonna have one. Awesome.
Speaker 1: I know that NASA is really interested in it. NASA
Speaker 1: is really interested in it, and and part of the
Speaker 1: reason that President George W. Bush was interested enough to say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's do this and actually get the ball sort of
Speaker 1: semi rolling, is that they want to use it as
Speaker 1: sort of a jumping off point to get to Mars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be kind of a rest stop on the
Speaker 1: way to any other distant location. So when you get
Speaker 1: just past the Moon, you could say you should have
Speaker 1: gone when we're back at the moon, right exactly, like, look,
Speaker 1: we were just at the Moon, why didn't you go
Speaker 1: within Um. Yeah, it's kind of the truck stop of
Speaker 1: the universe, or at least the Solar system. Um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there are NASA does have plans to return to
Speaker 1: the Moon. There's actually an amazing video on NASA's sites,
Speaker 1: very inspirational about about using the Moon as a base
Speaker 1: for that kind of thing, and and just a you know,
Speaker 1: a base in general, using it for everything from astronomy
Speaker 1: to other scientific experiments. And um, and it's we got
Speaker 1: to see this video here at How Stuff Works in person.
Speaker 1: We had someone from NASA come to How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: and show this video. This might have been before you joined.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, I think, um it was. It was fascinating.
Speaker 1: The man from NASA showed us the video and it
Speaker 1: was really really inspirational. And it is available on NASA's site.
Speaker 1: I highly recommend people check it out, um, because it
Speaker 1: gets you excited about the space program, which is you know,
Speaker 1: not not only is it not a small task, it's
Speaker 1: also vitally important for NASA's funding. They have to get
Speaker 1: this kind of excitement, um, in order to get the
Speaker 1: interest from Congress to get the funding they need to
Speaker 1: to do these these projects. That's why you start seeing
Speaker 1: these private projects pop up too, like the X Prize
Speaker 1: Foundation Google. That's true. You know, they have a contest
Speaker 1: for people teams to send up a lunar rover up.
Speaker 1: So this would be a robotic rover, not a not
Speaker 1: a manned mission root. You say, yes, a robot rover
Speaker 1: to the moon, to um to prove that private companies
Speaker 1: could do this just as well as a government group could.
Speaker 1: And India just launched its first unmanned mission to the moon.
Speaker 1: So um, so there is a renewed interest. So a
Speaker 1: lunar a lunar community is not outside the realm of believability,
Speaker 1: and it will still be a couple of decades off probably,
Speaker 1: but so we're not there yet, but we're still heading there.
Speaker 1: At least we haven't gotten off track. And you know
Speaker 1: you mentioned tech savery cartoons at the beginning. I went
Speaker 1: back and watched one, The Car of Tomorrow. Now we
Speaker 1: should we should stress the these cartoons were meant just
Speaker 1: as kind of poking fun at the idea of what
Speaker 1: the future would look like. Well, that's that's that's true,
Speaker 1: because this was it was actually sort of a reaction
Speaker 1: to all the articles about you know, what's going to
Speaker 1: happen in you know, nineteen fifties, American's gonna happen in
Speaker 1: the year two thousand one, right, So these were these
Speaker 1: were meant specifically to poke fun and that they were
Speaker 1: just meant for laughs. They were not meant to be
Speaker 1: taken seriously, and yet there are a couple of them
Speaker 1: that have come true, at least or in the prototype stage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was there was one car. One of the cars
Speaker 1: was a a a car that could have rotating tires
Speaker 1: to solve the parallel parking problem, right, so that you
Speaker 1: would you would be driving and then your your tires
Speaker 1: would rotate so that they were now perpendicular and you
Speaker 1: would just slide in sideways directly into the parallel parking spot.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, aren't all car tires rotating, well,
Speaker 1: rotating you mean the other right? Exactly? Not not just yes,
Speaker 1: they could change change the axis there. They didn't want
Speaker 1: to break it to you that, right, Hey, guess what
Speaker 1: we have that? Well, there's a prototype, now, there was.
Speaker 1: It's actually a car concept. It's not even a proto prototype.
Speaker 1: It's called the NASA car concept. And the idea here
Speaker 1: is that the tires would move so that you're no
Speaker 1: longer facing forward, they actually face to the left and right,
Speaker 1: so that you could roll immediately to your right and
Speaker 1: parallel park without having to do that nasty little shuffle maneuver. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hate that actually, Yeah, So I mean that's that
Speaker 1: was one that was just men as a joke in
Speaker 1: this tex Savery cartoon, and yet someone's really working on
Speaker 1: a way of potentially addressing ANA. And there's another one.
Speaker 1: There was a folding car where when you get to
Speaker 1: where you're going, it folds up into a tiny little
Speaker 1: square and you put in your pocket. Okay, so we're
Speaker 1: not really going to that level. I mean, there's some
Speaker 1: other issues that we would have to address before that,
Speaker 1: but like repealing the laws of physics exactly, that would
Speaker 1: be a big one. But there's the idea of the
Speaker 1: city car from M. I. T. Which is a folding car.
Speaker 1: It's not men as a personal vehicle. You you would
Speaker 1: kind of rent it for your time where you're at
Speaker 1: the car while you're in the city. Rather so you'r
Speaker 1: you go to the city, you rent this little car
Speaker 1: and you drive it around. When you return it, it
Speaker 1: folds into a line, kind of like the way shopping
Speaker 1: carts fold up to each other. So you would actually
Speaker 1: come up and you take the one on the end.
Speaker 1: Obviously when you rented one, you take whichever one was
Speaker 1: on the end, drive it around, drive it into the
Speaker 1: little docking station and it would fold up with the rest.
Speaker 1: So again, you know, not as far fetched as tech
Speaker 1: Savery thought, probably, And there was another one. There was
Speaker 1: a boat car, a car that was part car apart
Speaker 1: boat that could drive through nasty nasty weather. We could
Speaker 1: talk about the the scuba car. We've got an article
Speaker 1: on that. It's a car that's a submarine car, go underwater.
Speaker 1: So again tech Savery, you know what, not that far off,
Speaker 1: strangely enough. Yeah, you know, he wasn't the only uh
Speaker 1: animator who was interested in the future. There are quite
Speaker 1: a few Disney pieces on that. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: it was a big thing tomorrow Land, you know, in
Speaker 1: disney Land, in Walt Disney World. Um, in Disney The Moon,
Speaker 1: which is opening next year. UM okay, seriously, no, it's
Speaker 1: in the future. I'm gonna start planning my trip. It's
Speaker 1: in a giant dome. Anyway. Uh. There was an episode
Speaker 1: of Disneyland, which was the show Disneyland UM called Magic
Speaker 1: Highway USA. And UM, I actually watched this before I
Speaker 1: was pulled down for copyright infringement, called The Road Ahead,
Speaker 1: and it talked about color coded expressways and cars that
Speaker 1: you could basically get in and it would take you
Speaker 1: to where you're going. And um, long time, how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works podcast listeners might remember I brought this up on
Speaker 1: a Stuff You Should Know episode in which Josh Clark
Speaker 1: and I talked about his article will there be a
Speaker 1: new kind of taxi cab in the future? Well, Personal
Speaker 1: rapid transport is actually a form of this, and what
Speaker 1: it would do is, uh, it's it's like a little
Speaker 1: car that you get in. Doesn't look like a little car.
Speaker 1: It looks very futuristic, surprise, surprise, but it's on a
Speaker 1: track and you say, okay, I want to go to
Speaker 1: and you give it the dress for work. Well, you're
Speaker 1: the little car gets on the track and it's coordinated
Speaker 1: with all the other cars. Uh. So it basically knows
Speaker 1: not to go too fast or too slow, and it
Speaker 1: takes you to where you're going. When you get out,
Speaker 1: you you leave it, and that's it's not really your
Speaker 1: once say personal, it's not yours, but it's basically just
Speaker 1: you and it takes you where you want to go.
Speaker 1: And it would require a lot of infrastructure because you
Speaker 1: can imagine, because it would have to be a track
Speaker 1: going to everybody's house and every every location. But it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the Minority Report. I remember there were
Speaker 1: vehicles in the Minority report. They were very much like that.
Speaker 1: They would even go up and down buildings. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but uh, and it's being tested out in a couple
Speaker 1: of places, and that's pretty cool. And apparently it's very
Speaker 1: cost efficient as far as building out the infrastructure. It's
Speaker 1: less than than building light. Right, So when it comes
Speaker 1: to where the hell is my future? At least the
Speaker 1: car stuff is falling into line pretty well. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: floating cities not so much. No, No, I read about
Speaker 1: this a few years ago. Uh. The idea was proposed
Speaker 1: by a man named Norman Nixon of the Freedom Ship,
Speaker 1: which was an enormous ship. It could hold fifty thou
Speaker 1: people and it was a floating community. It's not men
Speaker 1: as like a cruise ship or anything like that. You
Speaker 1: would actually live there and there'll be workspace and and
Speaker 1: living space and um. Visiting his website, Uh, seems they
Speaker 1: ran into a few problems. They trusted some people with
Speaker 1: their money that maybe they should not have trusted. Uh,
Speaker 1: And they trusted some engineers that maybe they should not
Speaker 1: have trusted. And at any rate, this dream is still
Speaker 1: well within the dream phase. Um, it doesn't sound to
Speaker 1: me like they've made a whole lot of progress. They're
Speaker 1: still determined to try and make it work. But I
Speaker 1: think it's gonna be another few decades before we hear
Speaker 1: anything firm about the freedom Ship. If if it doesn't
Speaker 1: just disappear altogether. Well, the freedom Ship does sound exciting
Speaker 1: and new. I'd like to come aboard. They're expecting me.
Speaker 1: I have one more, but I wanted to ask if
Speaker 1: you had any before I did my final one. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I was thinking of a couple. Okay, yeah, let's go ahead,
Speaker 1: quick ones. I'll make them quick. Um. You know, there
Speaker 1: was this this thing that was proposed a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred years ago called the Mundaneum by Paul Outlet, and
Speaker 1: it would store it would basically be a giant catalog
Speaker 1: of information stored on on you know, essentially punched cards
Speaker 1: catalog cards. Uh, not really punch cards like in the
Speaker 1: later on. Although Van eva Bush, who was one of
Speaker 1: the government's top scientists in the United States for a
Speaker 1: long time, worked with the UH, the Atomic Bomb Project,
Speaker 1: and a lot of other different projects. He had this
Speaker 1: idea of a machine called the memex or me max
Speaker 1: I guess um and uh it would be like you
Speaker 1: could scan things in documents in and save them all
Speaker 1: on microfilms. You could have like a giant reader on
Speaker 1: your desk and you could pull up information from anywhere.
Speaker 1: I think I see where this is going. I mean,
Speaker 1: have you heard anything like this, Well, it's what we
Speaker 1: pretty much do our research on now, huh And actually, well,
Speaker 1: except for their expectations, do you research on paper tree killer? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: of course. Uh you all by now who are downloaded
Speaker 1: this podcast on the internet, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: But there you go. There's an instance in which we've
Speaker 1: actually surpassed uh, both of these um scientists expectations. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure that both of them would have if they
Speaker 1: had lived to see it, would have been very pleased.
Speaker 1: Actually if any of her Bush lived into the Internet age,
Speaker 1: but only very slightly, um, so, you know, he would
Speaker 1: probably be pretty darn impressed. What's going on? And uh,
Speaker 1: of course you know there's the uh Monsanto House the
Speaker 1: Future to mention another Disney term. Of course, we have
Speaker 1: the uh you know, different modern furniture, you know, but
Speaker 1: really that's not. Automation has made some progress, though not
Speaker 1: to the point where arms come out of the wall
Speaker 1: and and make your dinner for you. Yeah, I'm waiting
Speaker 1: for the little mechanic arms to come shave me in
Speaker 1: the morning. Instead, we just have like temperature control and
Speaker 1: lights and things like that. Yeah, we still in the future. Ish,
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, the little arms were more cartoony.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm still holding out hope. Okay, Well here's my
Speaker 1: final one. Here's how I know that the future really
Speaker 1: did fail us. Okay, Okay, it's because in the ES
Speaker 1: we did not manage to shoot Kahn off into space
Speaker 1: in exile aboard the Botany Bay. Okay, Khan is not
Speaker 1: out there, so Kirk cannot encounter Khan and then put
Speaker 1: him on Steady Alpha five and imprison him there and
Speaker 1: then encounter him again later in Star Trek to the
Speaker 1: Wrath of Cohn, which we all know was the best
Speaker 1: of the Star Trek movies. Next Generation included. Okay, maybe
Speaker 1: I said switch back to stuff you should know. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's a slot. I'm just saying. Con alright, then, boy, Future,
Speaker 1: you really you really let me down there? All right? Well,
Speaker 1: you know what, I have nothing I can say that better. Well,
Speaker 1: how about we go back. I'll tell you about that
Speaker 1: futuristic technology that really exists. I'm talking about liquid body armor.
Speaker 1: It's super neat stuff. I mean, we're talking about non
Speaker 1: Newtonian fluids here. So these are fluids that when you
Speaker 1: make an impact, they don't behave like a normal liquid
Speaker 1: where you know you would just hit it in your hand,
Speaker 1: just goes through. They actually stiffen up and they distribute
Speaker 1: the force so that you can take a shot like
Speaker 1: literally take a shot from a from a gun and
Speaker 1: it distributes the force so that doesn't kill you, which
Speaker 1: is pretty much what body armor is supposed to do
Speaker 1: right right, except most of it isn't made out of
Speaker 1: corn starching water. That's true. But you can read about
Speaker 1: the stuff that is beat out of liquid in our
Speaker 1: article about how liquid body armor works. That's written by
Speaker 1: Tracy Wilson, one of our good friends here, a talented writer,
Speaker 1: and how stuff Works live right now at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com and we'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think. Send an email to
Speaker 1: podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you
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Speaker 1: you