Today is a very important day in history because today is not only the past of the future, it is also the future of the past.
When I was a wee science fiction loving lad who learned to read with Matthew Looney, I had a lot of ideas about how the future would look. I definitely figured we’d have colonies on Mars by now, flying cars, and personal robots, who looked a lot like Rosie from The Jetsons (btw, did that show have the least imaginative theme song ever?). Also, I was kind of banking on extended
This is something like what I saw
lifespans – like, a little bit more than what they have been extended – like, at least a couple of hundred years because there would be a reasonable hope that at the end of that time they’d be extended again.
Did we get that? Nooooooo. We got cell phones and the internet.
To be fair, even though we don’t have colonies on Mars just yet we’ve seen farther into space than we even knew space went when I was a kid, and gained incredible insight into what space is. We haven’t found any aliens yet, but we’re discovering alien planets like crazy. We don’t have flying cars, but there are tourist flights into space. Not that anybody can afford, but they exist. Pretty much nobody has a personal robot housekeeper, but the Japanese are making great strides in the quest for Cherry 2000, and human beings with bionic parts are beginning to win Olympic events.
As for life extension – well, I still think it would be cool, but I don’t worry about it too much. All you can do is as much as you can with the time that you have.
And, cell phones and the internet, which none of us saw coming, are pretty darned amazing. So, it’s kind of a wash.
But what made me think about this was I was standing outside watching football this afternoon, in the near 0 (centigrade) drizzle, looking at the particularly gloomy panorama of panelaks, and it made me think of the cities of the future (which is now the present) that we saw in the past. There were Geodesic Domes a la Buckminster Fuller, large inflatable structures, and all sorts of Seussian constructions winding around here and there.
When you see geodesic domes today, it’s probably a water reservoir or a power plant, when you see large, inflatable structures, they are probably tennis courts or something, and when you see a winding tube wrapped around a building it’s only a waterslide.
For living and working space, people are sticking with boring, old rectangles.
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Ashley Judd is officially not running for Turtlehead McConnell’s Senate seat. Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted. Good luck to Allison Lundergan Grimes!
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