The Ubiquitous Future is Everywhere.
My title is the height of redundancy or tautology, but it occurred to me with a simple thought. In many old SF novels, there's casual mention of getting or drinking a beverage in a bulb. This, from the days of glass bottles, or cans that required an opener.
Yes, the pop-top ended an era, and cans got lighter with the switch to aluminum. What's not obvious is how much lighter and how this was done. As recently as 30 years ago, you could stand on an empty drinks can, with a bit of care. Balanced carefully on one foot, you could barely brush the sides of the can, and it would start a series of deformations that could seriously injure a fingertip, not to mention looking stupid by standing on your own hand.
Try that today. I'm pretty sure that anything heavier than a bird would smash an empty pop can flat. So the cans have gotten much thinner and lighter. It would take an impressively strong web to hold six of the old, 3-piece steel cans in a convenient cluster. And there's the other part of the future I'm talking about: modern beverage cans are typically just 2 pieces now. The body and bottom are pressed out of a single disk of aluminum in a process that can only be described as mind-bending when you consider the results. The tops are made separately, and swaged or rolled on, that hasn't changed much.
Why am I prattling in? Because a perceptive soul need only examine this light, 2-piece container and realize that “bulb” would be a perfect description. The only thing stopping you accepting my opinion is the cylindrical shape and the proportions. (I think we'd agree that a bulb is about equally wide and tall.) I'm going to grant myself my premise and just say that with enough beers, we'll agree you could call them drinking bulbs.
So the future is right here, we've grown up with it and become used to it. Using that 30-year me to compare to, that was when I got my first fuel-injected car. The difference in starting these things cannot be overstated in Minnesota. On the coldest days, we would require all 3 cars to get just one started. Credit where it is due, my dad's wreck of a CarryAll (pre-Suburban, founding member of the SUV market) would frequently start under the most ridiculous weathers, but I have pictures of multiple sets of jumper-cables to series-parallel the entire fleet to get the first started. (Noteworthy is my littlest brother in the photo, wearing,his letter-jacket and docksiders. No gloves, hat, scarf, or real coat and all the cars showing frightening coatings of hoar-frost on their skins: clearly -20F or colder) And now we think nothing of our kids dressing as my brother did, hopping in the car for a 20-mile commute to high school.
I've blathered earlier about this slab of Gorilla Glass I'm typing on, we simply accept that every bar-bet can be settled in seconds with a Wikipedia visit. We grouse about the price of gas while we regularly enjoy >100HP engines that return +20 MPG in cars that promise a 90% survival rate in head-ons up to 35mph. While playing shuffled songs from a library of 10,000 albums that fits on a Hello Kitty USB stick. We enjoy computational density in excess of every major human accomplishment up to the 21st century IN THE PALMS OF OUR HANDS. And we enjoy computational density in excess of every human accomplishment up to the 21st centurycombined on our desktops. No, really, count the flops of the bestest business-class desktop of 1999, compare it to the mediocre laptop I'm ignoring right now.
I'll wrap this up with embarrassing hubris. I'd like to suggest a new edition of William Gibson's famous quote, by changing the word at the end: The future is here, it's just just not evenly observed.