I love reading old science fiction books and watching old science fiction movies. Part of the reason why I love these stories is because if they have survived the test of time they contain themes that still resonate today. Themes like empathy for your enemy from Ender's Game, or the danger of creating machines that we don't understand from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the morals of war from Catch-22, or the way George Orwell explores freedom in 1984. There is a whole other reason that I enjoy these stories though; I love to asses whether the technologies that excited readers when these books and movies were made, are the same technologies that we are living with today. We may not be quite there yet, but we sure are getting close.
In Star Trek, La Forge is often seen on what essentially is an iPad. Some Trekkies might point out La Forge's Visor as a more impressive feat of technology (born blind, he can see using the Visor) and we are not quite there yet, however scientists have already found a chemical that has proven to cure blindness in mice.
Our military technology is at a technological high point. We do not yet however have the handheld laser guns that we see in Star Wars or the nuclear blasters from The Foundation. The US Navy is planning to integrate "Direct Energy Weapons"(essentially laser guns) into their ships in the next two years.
George Orwell impresses his readers with a device that turns speaking into writing. Two words: Dragon Dictation. And if it is more impressive for the computer to understand and speak back and perform commands, I don't need to look any farther than Siri which I carry with me everywhere I go. Orwell also speaks about a strip in every house that monitors video and sound and sends it back to some central viewing station where people can be tracked. Thankfully we don't have this but if we wanted to, it would not be even considered technologically impressive to do so. And as far as monitoring these videos, we would not need large amounts of humans (it is not actually clear in the book how these videos are monitored), we have technology that can monitor objects in a video and could for example assess by how much movement is happening or the vicinity of two faces (which would have been helpful to accomplish its goal in that book)
We can communicate with people on the other side of the world instantly. We have access to video footage of the whole world through satellite imagery. Having access to a 3D printer, I could go on Google Sketchup for free and print out any physical object I want, limited only by my imagination and digital design skills. I feel that we must be living in the technological world that so many writers have imagined. Even that theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey is becoming more and more relevant; think about how reliant so many people become on GPS.
There is one technology however that we have not invented, and until we get there, there are many stories that will never reach the level of possibility: we don't have space ships that can navigate space easily and go into warp speed. Until we have this, we will not have humans involved in the type of galactic warfare imagined in Star Wars, and we will not have Hari Seldon counteracting the break up of the Galactic Empire like we see in Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and there will be no Enterprise to "boldly go where no man has ever gone before." Fortunately there is still hope for the arrival of some alien ship to earth so that the great adventures of Arthur Dent could indeed materialize.
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