The year gone by brought us more robots, worries about artificial intelligence, and difficult lessons on space travel. The big question: where's it all taking us?<\/p>\n
NASA has a vision of sending astronauts to Mars aboard a rocket like this. In 2014, its Orion spacecraft took a small test-flight in that direction. NASA\/MSFC <\/p>\n
Every year, we capture a little bit more of the future -- and yet the future insists on staying ever out of reach. <\/p>\n
Consider space travel. Humans have been traveling beyond the atmosphere for more than 50 years now -- but aside from a few overnights on the moon four decades ago, we have yet to venture beyond low Earth orbit. <\/p>\n
Or robots. They help build our cars and clean our kitchen floors, but no one would mistake a Kuka or a Roomba for the replicants in \"Blade Runner.\" Siri, Cortana and Alexa, meanwhile, are bringing some personality to the gadgets in our pockets and our houses. Still, that's a long way from HAL or that lad David from the movie \"A.I. Artificial Intelligence.\" <\/p>\n
Self-driving cars? Still in low gear, and carrying some bureaucratic baggage that prevents them from ditching certain technology of yesteryear, like steering wheels. <\/p>\n
And even when these sci-fi things arrive, will we embrace them? A Pew study earlier this year found that Americans are decidedly undecided. Among the poll respondents, 48 percent said they would like to take a ride in a driverless car, but 50 percent would not. And only 3 percent said they would like to own one. <\/p>\n
\"Despite their general optimism about the long-term impact of technological change,\" Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center wrote in the report, \"Americans express significant reservations about some of these potentially short-term developments\" such as US airspace being opened to personal drones, robot caregivers for the elderly or wearable or implantable computing devices that would feed them information. <\/p>\n
Let's take a look at how much of the future we grasped in 2014 and what we could gain in 2015. <\/p>\n
In 2014, earthlings scored an unprecedented achievement in space exploration when the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a speeding comet, with the potential to learn more about the origins of life. No, Bruce Willis wasn't aboard. Nobody was. But when the 220-pound Philae lander, carried to its destination by the Rosetta orbiter, touched down on comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, some 300 million miles from Earth, the celebration was well-earned. <\/p>\n
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What next for the future tech of 2014?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The year gone by brought us more robots, worries about artificial intelligence, and difficult lessons on space travel. The big question: where's it all taking us? NASA has a vision of sending astronauts to Mars aboard a rocket like this. Continue reading