It's 2011- so where are all the cool gizmos?

It's 2011 - weren't we supposed to be miles ahead of where we're currently at with technology? Photo / Supplied

It's 2011, and as with most post millennium new years, I've been thinking - weren't we supposed to be miles ahead of where we're currently at with technology?

According to the steady diet of sci-fi I grew up on as a kid, weren't we supposed to have vast cities under huge domes, piloting flying cars and wearing skin tight shiny silver suits? What happened?

Since humanity landed on the moon (over forty years ago), it seems like we've either been stagnating or simply going backwards (LOLcats anyone?). We may have iPods and the 'net, but surely we could've done a little better? Here's my take on all the good stuff that should have happened by now.

Hyperspace and warp drives

The Promise: With the Millennium Falcon hyperspace jump scene from Star Wars firmly etched in the memories of many a geek, it's fair to wonder why we've not yet managed to invent a way of quickly travelling to the stars.

The Reality: With trips to our nearest neighbours taking years using conventional rocketry, traversing interstellar space involves distances that are truly astronomical (pun intended, although admittedly bad) distances. As Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy) once said "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." He wasn't kidding.

If the sun were the size of a marble, its distance from the tiny dot that'd be Earth would be about four feet, yet our closest star (Proxima Centauri) would still be 210 miles away. Scaled up, this equates to some truly colossal distances. Voyager may have raced out of our solar system at a staggering 37,000mp/h but would it'd still take 80,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. The closest we've come to technology capable of covering these vast distances quickly came from the 1950's-60's, when Project Orion proposed dropping nuclear warheads out the back of a spaceship and detonating them to push the craft along via a huge metal plate fitted with massive shock absorbers. Experiments using conventional explosives were done to demonstrate its viability but the Orion project ended with the nuclear test ban treaty in the 60's.

Flying Cars

The Promise: It worked for Doc and Marty Mcfly so why don't we all have sleek flying DeLoreans? Today's massive traffic jams only exist because our roads have more traffic then they can carry. Having multiple lanes at different altitude layers could make a huge difference.

The Reality: Unfortunately designing an affordable, usable and safe flying car is still someways off. The vertical take-off and landing Moller SkyCar is as close as we've got, but no flying car design has got beyond the prototype stage, let alone become commercially available enough to rival the price of a family sedan.

Teleportation

The Promise: Teleportation has to appeal to anyone who's flown long-haul and had to eat airline food. De-constructing a person atom by atom and reassembling them in another location could render flying cars obsolete before the SkyCar passes its first crash test.

The Reality: Unlike most of the tech listed here, humanity has recently made some startling breakthroughs in Teleportation, with the Aussies actually managing to teleport a laser in what may have massive implications for quantum computing. Unfortunately teleporting a complex object (such as a human), would require that each atom in would have to be precisely pinpointed, transported and reassembled in exactly the right location. This is likely to remain a near-impossible task for the foreseeable future but the good news here is that you won't have to worry about any flies buzzing around the teleport booth anytime soon.

Robots at home

The Promise: We all loved R2D2 and Wall-e, but we're all still cleaning the toilet and making breakfast. In an ideal post-millennium world, shouldn't we all have a state of the art humanoid robots to take the drudgery out of our existence?

The Reality: Ironically we're oh-so-close and yet so very far away when it comes to robots. Japan's ageing population has seen them taking some seriously amazing steps forwards in robotics for the health care industry. One only has to look to Honda's rather amazing ASIMO humanoid robot to see just how advanced we've become. Unfortunately this costs millions and would still sadly struggle to operate my espresso machine. There are devices like the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, but it's still not even as cool as a genuine shiny protocol droid, even one from Tattooine.

Food Pills

The Promise: Willy Wonka may have invented the 'three course meal chewing gum', and many a sci-fi flick has predicted that we'll all be popping capsules instead of eating normal meals, yet food pills have yet to happen. Superficially, food pills make a whole lot of sense. They'd probably keep a lot better than real food and be far easier to store, but then there's the not-so-small matter of the obesity epidemic. And how good steak is.

The Reality: Unfortunately packing an entire meal into a small capsule or pill simply isn't practical. A healthy diet requires we consume a proper amount of proteins and carbohydrates, and these require a certain amount of physical space that's many times the size of a pill. Even if it were possible to get all the required vitamins and minerals from a pill, there still wouldn't be enough food stuff to allow your body to produce the energy it needs to function.