Interceptor Mega Disk

I am always a slut for these sorts of things. This is how you pirated cartridge games in the 90s: it's basically a flash cart, but since flash storage wasn't cheap yet, it's just RAM. You have to load the game each time, and what's the obvious storage solution for the early 90s?

FLOPPY DISKS!

You can play Sonic off floppy disks. I love it, obviously.

sparkle on, mr freeman..

I saw someone reblog this dismissing it as AI despite the fact they're 1 click away from a search engine. "Rosetta Nebula" is all you'd have to type. Perhaps the biggest travesty with ai images is going to be robbing people of their wonder for what's actually possible in the universe and continuing to shrink their bubble of understanding based on whether they believe it at a glance.

The image has been colorized differently above but the Rosetta Nebula is real and actually looks like that.

it looks less like a human skull than it does Homo heidelbergensis:

Look, it formed a long time ago, it had to work with the reference it had

The the official state astronomical object of Oklahoma since 2019, btw.

MV Agusta Brutale by One Hand Made Cycle.

I love how much of a blindspot for the computer scifi authors had.

So in Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, humanity has developed instant interstellar travel, through what's effectively star gates. China has taken over Australia and "terraformed" it by building an inland sea, we've got weather control technology and stasis fields so that people with terminal diseases can be frozen in time until we figure out how to cure them. Most of the military is women, as changing population dynamics mean men are only like 1/5th of the population.

And at one point in this far off future, the protagonist decides to idly calculate how long it'd take to evacuate all of earth through the warp-gates, so he pulls out his slide-rule.

Instant travel to other planets? Of course. Restructuring an entire continent? Easy. Controlling the entire atmosphere? No problem. Slowing time itself to save people? Absolutely! The army is mostly women, because for some reason not as many men are being born? Yeah, why not!

But digital computers (WHICH ALREADY EXISTED AT THE TIME THIS NOVEL WAS WRITTEN) getting small and cheap enough that a high-schooler could own one and keep it in his backpack?

Well now you've wandered into the realms of fantasy. This is science fiction, we only talk about the possible futures, not silly fantasy stories with magic and dragons and such! No computer will ever be smaller than an a room, and even if you did manage to shrink one enough to be maybe the size of a washing machine, no high-schooler could afford one!