Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012

I hadn't thought of these individual achievements as being that big until I saw them all together in one place and now I can say that this has truly been a breakthrough year all across the technology sector.<p>Every year we seem to be accelerating our speed of development when it comes to technology, I'm only 19 and in my life I've seen us go from 56kb/s internet to 1gb/s internet, go from the rare NASA launch to regular private company launches (don't forget, SpaceX is not the only private company engaging in these kind of activities, there is also Virgin Galactic in the UK who are breaching the barriers facing them very quickly.) and medical breakthroughs across every sector.<p>We live in the golden age of human history up to now and I would be willing to place a long bet that in 100 years, we will look back on the last 30 years as the dawn of the <i>modern</i> age.

Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane at landfall. That's pretty much the opposite of a SUPERSTORM.<p>Much larger hurricanes have hit New England before. For example, the "Great New England Hurricane of 1938" made landfall on Long Island as a Category 3 storm, killing over 600 people. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 also was Category 3, killing 390 people.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Hurricane_of_1938" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Hurricane_of_1938</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Atlantic_Hurricane#Impact" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Atlantic_Hurricane#Impact</a><p>Imagine if two Category 3 hurricanes impacted the North East within six years today. We'd never hear the end of how Global Warming was destroying the world. But since it happened in the early 20th Century, no one cares.

Rounded corners being worth 1 billion dollars in patent-lawsuits evidently not among them. Pantent-trolling being more profitable the producting neither.<p>Seriously. We have come a <i>so far</i> in technology the last decades. Things we would consider science fiction or maybe even ipmossible ten years ago is every-day stuff now.<p>And our "tech leaders" (and I say that with the most disrespect possible) are now busy engaging in frivilious lawsuit over the shape of the plastic which all this technology is packaged in instead of doing amazing stuff. People claim to "own" rounded corners and flat-screens. Designs already put to market in the 60s.<p>In my books 2012 goes down as the year when tech stopped being about tech and became dominated by anti-competitive lawsuits instead of innovation. The year where no new tech arrived, only new lawsuits.<p>And a sad year it was.

A very important breakthrough is missing in the list : Human Genome sequencing cost dropped to $1000 with processing time of only a day. Just 12 years ago it cost $3 billion dollars and 15 years of work.

How could they forget this prediction of the smartphone by inventor &#38; futurist Nikola Tesla?<p>"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." - Nikola Tesla 1926

Are there any citations for the initial predictions? Or is this just a list of cool technology related things in 2012 that <i>seem</i> like someone might have predicted them? "The World's First Cybernetic Hate Crime Occurs at a McDonalds in France" seems awfully specific for a prediction.

The only one I would quibble with is the one that has nothing to do with technology. Sandy was the largest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, but it was still not as large as the Pacific's Typhoon Tip in 1979. If three decades of accelerating climate change explains Sandy, it doesn't explain Tip, or why its record has yet to be broken.

I'd say that Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature[1] beats the crazy geoengineering businessman with its massive scale. This includes the draining of the Aral Sea, and was followed by attempts to refill it by diverting/reversing several rivers.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformation_of_Nature" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformati...</a>

Hysterical exploitation of the "first true superstorm" meme sticks out like a sore thumb. I stopped reading there, and will be reluctant to visit that site again.

They missed out on the continuing merger of state mass-surveillance and corporate mass-surveillance. That's IMHO one of the biggest stories.

I was really skeptical of this article, but turns out that this is actually a really interesting list. A lot of them are still up-in-the-air as far as end-results and I'd expect at least a couple of them to fall through in the end, but still a really neat collection.

So I notice that Elon Musk was involved with two of those - the Tesla and the Dragon space docking. Congratulations to him.

&#62; Cybernetic Hate Crime<p>Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a thing. And if it were, the thing that happened at McDonald's would not qualify.

The McDonalds affair was not a Cybernetic Hate Crime.

I really hope the one point about communicating with patients in a vegetative state is wrong. Not because it's not a groundbreaking discovery, but the implications are horrifying to me. Imagine all those patients who are left to just lie there their entire lives, and those that like Terri Schiavo that were allowed to starve to death. If they were actual aware of what was going on, that is the most horrifying fate I could imagine.

How are they planning to do the FTL one?

Reading about our <i>positive</i> technological advances makes me feel optimistic about our future. Go science!

What about the Higgs Boson?