Re: Missed It By That Much

On Apr 19, 3:46=A0pm, nebu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Warning: this is a variant of the 'great science fiction
> predictions' thread, which I don't think has been around these parts
> for a couple months at least. =A0
>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 On a recent re-read of Arthur C Clarke's _Imperial
Earth_ =
I
> noticed that Clarke got (characteristically [1]) very correct that in
> The Future we would all have abundant access to phones with multiple
modes=

> of contact, and personal computers with enough storage that their data
> banks become full of stuff in the 'Miscellaneous' folder, and that to
> be out of theoretical instant contact with the bulk of humanity would
> feel almost supernatural. =A0All told, a mighty good prediction for life
> in 2006, even if he was nominally aiming for 2276. =A0
>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 The one oversight: people in his future still have phone
n=
umbers,
> long and superficially random strings of digits needed to contact them.
=
=A0
> (Worse, they have different numbers for different communication modes.)
=
=A0
> You can in his world easily look up people and get the number, and from
> the number get to the person, but he seems to have overlooked that the
> internal need for phone numbers would be tucked into the interior
> databases and people would just look for names, possibly addresses,
> instead.
>
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 So I'm curious in other predictions that are almost
dead-o=
n, but
> that miss just a tiny bit in how things did turn out. =A0

I don't get it. If his story is set in 2276, then as far as we know
today, the "predictions" could be 100% right, 100% wrong, or anything
in between, right?