Good news everybody!
I have it on very good authority that any day now the super science community will begin making all kinds of technological breakthroughs. Science will bring us flying cars, 4-D movies and self-drying clothes.
In fact, Mattel should be only a few short years away from reinventing the 1980s by introducing us to the world’s first hoverboard.
I cannot wait to get my hands on one of those retro-looking bad-boys.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can expect all of these wonderful things – and many more – to not only be introduced, but also become mainstream in less than five years. I couldn’t possibly be more excited.
At least, that’s what Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale and Steven Spielberg have raised me to believe in and hope for. I like their vision of the future. It has awesome toys, time machines, instant fax machines and even televisions where you can watch multiple screens at once (unless your boss calls during dinner to fire you). That future looks exciting. It looks promising.
But as much as I love science fiction, all of my favorite stories keep letting me down.
Unless we get some visitors from Gilese 581 g here in the next few months, we probably won’t be discovering alien life like Arthur C. Clark promised us we would in 2010: Odyssey 2. We certainly didn’t master interplanetary travel by the early 2000, or artificial intelligence by the late 1990s like Isaac Asimov foretold.
On the plus side, we haven’t been attacked by Buggers or prematurely demolished in order to make way for a hyperspatial expressway either. Skynet hasn’t sent Arnold Schwarzenegger clones to wipe us out, Big Brother is not watching us and Keanu Reeves will never know kung-fu.
We are not living in Huxley’s brave new world, although his predictions seem to be increasingly, albeit terrifyingly, accurate.
Instead of all the cool things we’ve been promised, we have iPhones and smart cars and the Tea Party – and I am disappointed.
So until science can get its collective act together and deliver me a hoverboard and introduce me to an iron giant, I will be looking for the nearest Applied Cryogenics laboratory, setting the timer for 1000 years and waiting for a beautiful, purple-haired Cyclops to welcome me to the world of tomorrow.
