Ask Lemmy

How about a machine that can fold your laundry after it's washed and dried?

I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.

I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.

AR. Being able to just pop into someone's AR world and walk around as if I was in tge same physical location.

Bikes/Ebikes/motorcycles replacing cars for single-person transport in cities.

Free food.

Fusion energy. Man, we are so close!

Medical Biofoam from halo, we have prototypes already

Alarm clock that reads my brain activity and only wakes me up at the point in my REM cycle, where i'll feel refreshed waking up.

Brain operated electronics.

Eeg headbands detect brainwaves and are used in diagnosing mental illnesses. There is also expensive portable ones for yoga people that track your sleep cycle and give statistics.

You can VERY easily have it change the TV channel or move player in a VR game. In fact there is an old starwars toy where you lift some ball by powering a hairdryer with your brainwaves for like $40.

Finding a way to use organic matter in 3d printing so I can say "Computer...one strawberry milkshake", similar to Picard.

The torment nexus

Terraforming.

The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.

It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.

Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.

Nuclear rocket engines. A bit less ambitious than most of the responses, but most things here seem to either refer to technologies we don't have yet but seem within a century or so of developing, which doesn't fit the question, or vague consequences that one wants that tech to have without it being clear how our current technology gets there. But nuclear rockets definitely fit the question, because we have built and ground tested them before, decades ago even, we just haven't bothered to actually use the things. And they should theoretically make developing things like space industry or manned space exploration beyond the moon more viable, by being more efficient than chemical rockets while giving better thrust than ion engines do. They don't work well for launching from the ground, but since our launch abilities have increased a fair bit in the past decade or so, actually getting the things to space in order to use them should be easier than ever.

Terraform a planet.

Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.

If we can't even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they're gonna bring dead space rocks to life?

At the current rate, wherever humans go, we'll just bring our trashy ways with us...