Well, 100 yeats ago they called you nuts if you said there would be folks flyiing around. Like 300 people in a aluminium tube going 500 mph.
If you could project 40 watts to a humans "sweet spot" in a neuro center you could drop them fast. How many laser watts does it take to blind someone? Who knows where we will be in just 50 years?
Railguns and directed energy weapons will be de riguer, as our tech base of knowledge doubles every 8 months or so. We'll have the power source figured out by then.
Again, those of you thinking that a power source will be the hangup, we're not talking about ten years from now. We're talking about a HUNDRED years from now.
I have not forgotten this. What you have forgotten, it seems, is that battery technology is something that has been around, and been developed for over a hundred years already, and we are still not appreciably closer to a battery that can make an electric car more practical and more versatile than an internal combustion engine that we were a century ago when the first generation of electric cars disappeared from the roadways for this very reason.
It's simplistic to say "our tech base of knowledge doubles every 8 months or so, so we'll have the power source figured out by then" because if that statement applied to battery technology, we'd
already have a power source capable of providing the energy for a hand-held energy weapon, and we're clearly nowhere close yet. We haven't got a battery that will give electric cars the range of a gasoline-powered car yet either, despite a century of trying to come up with one. That's why hybrids made their appearance; it was an attempt to compensate for the shortcomings of electric vehicles -- shortcomings imposed by the limits of battery technology.
Remember, it's not enough to have something that will do the job. It has to do the job better, or at least as well, as the thing it's replacing before it takes over from the previous technology. Again, look at electric cars. Sure there are practical ones. Plug in electrics with a 300 mile range that you can plug in to recharge every night when you go to bed, and commute in all day the next day. But can you hop in the things and take a long road trip? Not really, they don't go as far as gas-powered cars. And when your gasoline-engined car's tank runs dry, it takes you five minutes to fill it back up again, not the thirty minutes to several hours it will take you to fully recharge the battery on an electric vehicle. Until electric cars offer drivers the convenience and versatility of internal combustion engine cars, the ICE cars will still be on the road. And I remind you, even after a century of development, this is a nut they still haven't been able to crack, and the sticking point is battery technology.
You won't see energy weapons replacing conventional firearms any time soon for the exact same reason. And before they do, they also have to offer users at least as much convenience and versatility as the current technology does. They may, possibly, develop some sort of battery that will power a laser for a few shots. But if that battery is a so large you have to wear it on your belt and connect it to your weapon with a cable, then it's going to be less convenient, and the weapon will not replace guns. To do that it has to be no larger than a pistol magazine, provide the user with as many shots as a pistol magazine, and be as quick to replace as a pistol magazine, and then on top of all this, it has to do this for no more than the cost of a pistol magazine and the bullets inside it. We have a long, long way to go before we see this.
I follow the Keith Richards diet-meat, cheese, alcohol and cigarettes. Every day when I wake up I check the internet to see how Keith is doing.