2024

I was watching reruns of Deep Space Nine today, I sort of mix it up, Voyager for a while, TNG for a while, and DS9. I just cannot decide which of those I like the best.

One episode I was watching today was when there was a transporter accident and Sisko, Bashir and Jadzia, who were beaming down to some conference at Star Fleet Headquarters, instead beamed through a micro-singularity which was intersecting our section of space-time and arrived a couple of centuries too early.
Now, this was supposed to be a near future Earth, and I don’t remember what I thought the date was when I first saw this in the 90s, but it was 2024. In the 90s, that still seemed like a million years into the future.
It was sort of a fascistic America, where all the poor were herded into ‘sanctuary cities’ which were open-air prisons of a sort, gated ghettoes, future Andersonvilles.
Anyway, Sisko and Bashir got rousted by the cops for sleeping outdoors and thrown into one right away, but Dax managed to meet a famous billionaire who invited her up to his place to use his ‘interface.’
With 2024 just four years away, I’m kind of impressed at those 20th century writers’ grasp of the future.