Using technical proposals to analyse how our imagination of future technology has evolved

Summary: Analyzing past entries from the Space Settlement Design Competition can unveil how our visions of future technologies evolve over time, identifying trends in expectations and uncovering innovative ideas previously overlooked.

There's a really cool international competition called the Space Settlement Design Competition, wherein teams of students collaborate to create really detailed designs for future human settlements in space. Think 70-page technical proposals for a luxury space cruise-liner to transport people between Earth & Mars in 2081, or for a research settlement in orbit around Venus in 2087. The competition has been running for 20+ years and receives 100+ entries each year. Here are 20 more proposals and I can help you get even more. There are also a lot of similar competitions.

So, there is a LOT of data here. This data isn't directly useful as actual plans (this is literally rocket science). But, the data does greatly capture what the students envisioned life in the distant future to be like. People are serious about winning the competition and so often put a lot of thought and research into what technologies they thought would become viable by then, and how life would be in the distant future.

It'll be really interesting if someone collated a lot of these proposals and then conducted a detailed analysis on how our imagination of technology in the distant future is evolving. You could answer questions like:

What did people in 2005 think about life in 2050? What did people in 2010 think? In 2020?
Were there any technologies that we anticipated would take a long while to emerge, but which emerged really quickly? Or perhaps things we expected to emerge quickly but are proving really difficult to find? What factors affect how well we predict the future?
What are forms of recreation could we think of?
How did we think our relationships with robots would be like? What kinds of applications did we imagine?

Answering these questions could reveal biases and hidden mechanisms involved in our imagination of the future. It could lead to a very interesting scientific review, or possibly also an insightful newsletter like Pessimists Archive. As you explore, you might also come across some brilliant ideas buried in the files – ideas that one could bring it to life today.

There's probably some existing research on these questions (using sci-fi stores as evidence, for example). This dataset would be different in that a lot more thought and technical consideration went into the content than it would've on other datasets.

Source of Idea:

I myself participated in this competition for over 3 years; I found the work I was doing to be really interesting, and was just wondering if all that work could be useful.

Skills Needed to Execute This Idea:

Data CollectionData AnalysisResearch MethodologyTrend AnalysisTechnical WritingCritical ThinkingStatistical AnalysisProject ManagementCreative Problem SolvingCommunication SkillsInterdisciplinary CollaborationPresentation SkillsHistorical AnalysisLiterature ReviewDatabase Management

Categories:ResearchFuturologyTrends

Hours To Execute (basic)

400 hours to execute minimal version ()

Hours to Execute (full)

300 hours to execute full idea ()

Estd No of Collaborators

10-50 Collaborators ()

Financial Potential

$1M–10M Potential ()

Impact Breadth

Affects 100K-10M people ()

Impact Depth

Significant Impact ()

Impact Positivity

Probably Helpful ()

Impact Duration

Impacts Lasts 3-10 Years ()

Uniqueness

Moderately Unique ()

Implementability

Moderately Difficult to Implement ()

Plausibility

Reasonably Sound ()

Replicability

Easy to Replicate ()

Market Timing

Good Timing ()

Project Type

Research

Project idea submitted by u/aclearbag.