Still no flying cars 英文参考文献.docVIP

Comment Still no flying cars Gregory A Petsko Address: Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA. E-mail: petsko@ Published: 27 February 2003 Genome Biology 2003, 4:106 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2003/4/3/106 ? 2003 BioMed Central Ltd Hobbes: Calvin: A new decade is coming up. that would transmit vast amounts of information at enor- mous speeds - this in 1967, when the Internet was not even a gleam in anybody’s eye. And they predicted that parents would be able to choose the sex of their child through artifi- cial insemination, although they missed the magnitude of the ethical dilemmas that reproductive technology brought with it. Yet Calvin’s complaint lingers. Why, after less than two cen- turies of almost incomprehensible technological progress - remember that until the mid-nineteenth century no human had ever traveled faster on land than a horse, and no one had ever traveled through the air or under the water at all - has progress in so many areas seemed to slow almost to a halt. We don’t travel any faster now than we did in the mid-twentieth century; in fact, if you live in a major metropolitan area, the odds are that most of the time, thanks to traffic, you travel slower than you could have done fifty years ago. After a series of costly failures, we are probably further from sending a manned expedition to Mars than we appeared to be in the late 1960s. We’re certainly further from moon colonies: the costs have ballooned beyond expectation. Personal robots exist, but as no more than expensive, largely useless toys. And there are no flying cars. In nearly all the science fiction novels of the mid-twentieth century, and most of the science fiction films, the skies of the twenty-first century were filled with flying cars. Where are the flying cars? Yeah, big deal