Wheee, list thingy!brainless_fps_player said:
1. I agree, fingers crossed.
2. I've seen some nation-wide polls, and it seems liberal countries like the Netherlands and Sweden have about 70-90% of the population supporting equal LGBT rights, so it looks promising. But equally advanced countries with strong Christian traditions like Italy and the USA rank much lower, around 40-50%. I guess that might keep increasing with secularization.
3. It has been proven, demonstrated and observed again and again for the last hundred years. Those idiots have just been covering their ears and shouting "LALALALA". There are still many gaps in the theory, but that's why we have science in the first place.
4. Anti-matter might be a bit overrated. At least for a few hundred years. A lot of the energy produced in a matter-antimatter reaction would just be a bunch of neutrinos flying everywhere. Fusion, however, is a much more realistic expectation, and one that would bring practically unlimited energy, and might become possible within our lifetimes. Plus, if we opt for the whole Helium-3 thing, it means we have to go to space to get it, which is neat because we haven't been moving farther than the Moon since the 60s. No kid wants to be an astronaut anymore!
5. Not very futuristic to expect what amounts to magic from technology. As far as we know, fictional tropes like artificial gravity are as plausible in real life as dragons.
6. YEAH! Screw unlimited energy and artificial intelligence, we want VR sex games already!
7. & 8. This is actually what I wanted to bring up since it's a futurist thread: we are already living in a 50%-Star-Trek universe. 50% because we can't replicate physical objects (though there's this thing called stereolitography [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography], which is a fancy way of saying "printer that prints actual stuff"), but all our data is basically free. Every person with an internet connection can download thousands of years of culture, knowledge and entertainment for a small monthly subsciption fee. The problem is that the people creating the data now deserve to be paid, and so we have our (nigh-unenforceable) intellectual property laws that oftentimes make no sense at all. If a person's game/movie/book can be replicated for no expense on hundreds of millions of computers around the world in a few hours, its monetary value cannot be determined by manufacturing expenses, logistics and retailer cost, but purely by "the author's effort". Which is a nebulous concept - if a genius created something that would take a group of developers twice as long to produce, does he deserve to get more money, or less, or can he just name any price?
In essence, unlike Star Trek, when everything on our planet becomes so cheap and easy to reproduce that you're basically conjuring copies like magic, we'll stop paying for material worth and start paying for brands, hype, artistic value, names attached, marketing, packaging, service, convenience, recognition, or even outright lies. I mean, all modern capitalism is based on this; fair trade based on material value hasn't been practiced since the freakin' Bronze Age. When you buy your noodles, 1% of your money covers the cost of their production, and the rest goes to the big "spaghetti italiani di Parma" logo on the pretty blue box. If we hadn't been using this kind of subterfuge as the basis of our economy, nobody would ever get rich, but it looks increasingly obvious now that we can literally see our computer assemble an entire gigantic work of art out of 1s and 0s based on a blueprint.
