Broken Promises of the Future
 

It's well past the year 2000 and I still don't have my personal jet pack. My house isn't made of plastic, in fact it was made in 1927. No one has been to Mars. So far aliens have only visited crazy people, I can't read minds, I've never published (or even written for that matter) a novel, I work for a large corporation, and my computer won't give me the definitive answer to anything - but I can't even crash it by asking it to calculate Pi.

What are some of the things you expected as a kid to be experienceing right now in 2005?

I had always thought after seeing Pathfinder that we would have someone on Mars by now.

For me, it was all about kitchens and houses for that matter - that did all of the cooking and cleaning automatically - sort of a cross between Disneyland, The Jetsons and Sleeper.

I also thought each home would have a robot and that cars would fly. I mean, I can get going pretty fast in my car, but it doesn't fly!

I think the funniest thing for me as a child of the 60's living in 2005 is the growing fascination with ideas from my own childhood - and beyond. Shag (also my age) is capitalizing on this trend in a big way. Even Target is capturing the style of the 60's with clever designs. I'm not sure if comtemporary culture is trying to capture the hopes and dreams that were so stong during that time or what the MO is. But, I think it is fascinating that certain things, once dispised by all in 1975 are cool again. I suppose I now understand the comments made to me while running about in my 1940's attire.


Oh, and the word "Retro" used to mean specifically 40's and 50's. When did the 80's become retro? Maybe a new word is in order? Or, am I just being an old lady? ;)

LOL!

A couple years ago, some of the HS age kids I coach were talking and one said "that's so 90's". Ummm.....I graduated in the 80's. I felt really old.

We were supposed to have a utopian world on the move: clean, efficient, and totally synthetic...a la Tomorrowland '67.

Domed cities. Perfect weather. No pollution.

Better living through technology.

The moon was supposed to be a day trip by now.

I thought I would be well into my next life.:rolleyes:

I suppose I'd better start thinking about retirement crap, eh?

We were supposed to find a big black monolith on the moon. There was supposed to be a mission to Jupiter in which the onboard computer went awry. Then, there was supposed to be this gigantic space baby.

Psst - I think that was just forced perspective - I lawys presumed him to be - well - baby sized.

In the future, everything was supposed to be right-sized and this stupid idea of forced perspective would not exist.

There's a long story here that I'll tell some other time, but as a kid, I always thought the Star Child was huge, and he looked kind of pissed. I thought he was coming back to destroy the earth, and I found him the most terrifying image I had ever seen on a movie screen.

Since he's really pretty much symbolic, the question of whether or not he's baby-sized is pretty academic.

If you recall, when we were kids, the prevalent fascination was turn of the century, Main St USA NOSTALGIA. Anything from 1900-1929 was fair game in decor and fashion. Farrells, Shakey's, Swenson's all playfully reproduced a kinder, gentler past, where soda was 2 cents plain and gentlemen had mustaches. Tiffany lamps, brass fixtures, and turn of the century - style fonts were very prolific in advertising (and in early Jay Ward ads). Films like Bonnie and Clyde, Paper Moon, The Great Gatsby all celebrated this golden era, and TV was cementing the films from the 1930s and 40s as classics in our consciousness, through repetition, if nothing else.

Then George Lucas descended from on high to deliver the baby boomers the 1950s (actually 1962) in American Grafitti, triggering the first true nostalgia explosion, the effects of which are still felt today.

Thank you, George.

And Candy Clark, wherever you are...

If the Starchild was really depicted in proper scale, then his diaper would be the size of the Pacific Ocean.

This in turn would mean that his bare baby bottom would be roughly the size of the moon.

Which is what we are actually seeing every month, as the Starchild completes another revolution.

He's mooning us, the bastard.

Which proves that the moon landing was faked on a soundstage, and the earth is flat.

Thank you.

(Hey, I bet if Karl Rove told this to George, he'd buy it...)

I think that many of the things predicted did come to pass......video phones(cordless, no less); playing board games with kids on the other side of the World( I remember reading this prediction in a Popular Science Mag back in 1975----); Powered Skateboards; Space Station(yeah, it's no L-5 Colony, but there is something at least); and who would have thought just how powerfull our personal computers would be now? I was thumbing thru a copy of Money Mag from 1987 a few weeks ago and after reading some of the ads for computers estimated that the computer I have at home would have cost about $400,000 back in the late 80s.

Now if we can just get those flying cars:)

Hmmm - I suppose there's a flipside to this about what things surprised you - Cell phones - I mean who would need to reach me 24/7? Message Board Communities - who would have thunk I could spend so much time in a virtual world with people I might not ever see in real life? Cable and Satalite TV with hunderds of channels - and nothing to watch. And we made it through the cold war without having a nuclear holocaust

Two words: moving sidewalks.

Yes, we have them in airports, but in the filmstrips of my youth (there, I've gone and done it -- only about three of you know what those are) I was promised MOVING SIDEWALKS. EVERYWHERE. DAMMIT!

Whenever I think broken promises, I think moving sidewalks.

And whenever I ride on the airport versions, I note, disapprovingly, how they stop every 75 feet or so, presumably so we can jump-start the blood in our legs after soooooooooooooooo much inactivity. Weak. :mad:

I thought that we would have many of the gadgets from the original Star Trek series by now. I thought we would have the magic food machines where you just told it what you wanted and it could make anything appear almost instantly. Then again, I thought we might have the three basic staple gadgets; the tricorder, phaser, and communicator. We've come close, I suppose, with the palm pilot, taser, and cell phone, but they don't look as nifty, nor make the same cool sounds.

Also from Star Trek, I realized early on that the drinks in the future were usually a very cool blue color. Much to my relief, the blue drinks do exist, and my experience has been that they usually pack a punch. At least something lived up to the hype.

I suppose I feel the most disappointment for the lack of flying cars though. I thought the Jetsons would accurately reflect the future for some strange reason and we could remove ourselves from the burdens of traffic. I hope we have at least a couple of guys working on that one somewhere. I'm obviously not the only one who wonders what the hell happened to the flying cars. :)

Lol, MBC! I was just about to post that the one thing I really want is a phaser, just like on Star Trek. I'd also like to do the teleport thing, but I suppose I'll have to settle for Disapparating.

Oh, and flying cars? Easy- that went T.U. with the dissolution of the Air Traffic Controllers Union back in the Eighties. ****, they can't handle the traffic they have now.....

http://www.moller.com/

Of course this car has been on at least a dozen covers of Popular Science or Pop Mechanics over that last score of years')

Ooooh, pretty! Wonder if they actually work?

Ok - how about an affordable flying car?

This kind of technology will only come down in price...kinda like DVD Players. Maybe in 5 years you could pick one up at Target for $39.00 ;)

I saw one in a test flight a few years ago on the Discovery Channel.....25 Year veteran Pilot had a hard time keeping it under control :(

Ditto and ditto!!! THe "replicator" that was what I was so hopeful for when I was a kid, for the future! I loved the idea of the replicator. That and flying cars, sigh I feel so let down now!!

According to my mom, many of us should have been standing naked before the Lord by now, talking about how cool the Rapture was. 25 years later and I'm still waiting....

(Maybe it was all a ruse by mom to get me to behave...sucker!)

I think I saw a picture of a film strip contraption once. I was copied by my teacher on a ditto machine.

God I LOVED that smell!

So, do you think message boards are the modern versions of having pen pals?

I saw half of Back to the Future II the other night, and we realized that 2015 is, well, only 10 years away.

So don't worry, we'll have self-fitting/self-drying clothes, hover boards, instant food hydration, dust-repellant paper (forgot that one, didn't you?) AND flying cars really soon.

Oh, and fax machines all over the house.

Robot maids, and an entire population wearing shiny jumpsuits. That's the future, damnit!

I want my air conditioned suit. And I want it to be cute.

Where are my self opening/closing kitchen cabinets that make that oh-so-satisfying humming noise?

And I'm still waiting for reliable and useful voice recognition.

For the forest to be green, each leaf must be green....so if you want everyone to wear shiny jumpsuits, you'll have to get the ball rolling yourself.

No, no, no. They must be issued by the benevolant socialist world government. Shiny jumpsuits, for the good of all people.

I think that, instead of shiney jumpsuits, we got school uniforms.

The thing I'm really looking forward to from that particular future is the release of JAWS 19. ("This time it's REALLY personal") This means that there will have to be fifteen more JAWS movies in the next decade. They better get busy. (Sadly, no matter how terrible they all are, I'd be first in line.)

Oh GOD me too!! That and there was one type of marker that always smelled so good, not the ones that were fruity just a marker smell! Damn this swiss cheese memory of mine what were they called!! :blush:

I know that €uro's OP was referring to the cool 50's and early 60's vision of the future, with rayguns and flying cars and all, but my early sci-fi experience was with the dystopian ideas of Logan's Run, Silent Running and J.G. Ballard. So while I'm sad that space flight isn't like jumping on a plane like in 2001:ASO, I'm also glad that I made it past 30 and the only Carousel I've been to is in a Disney Park...

You've not hear the people talking on the Nextel Walkie Talkies?

But now that i think about it, I don't remember really expecting anything outrageous by this time. Looking around though, I see many places that we have stepped backwards and revisted technologies of the past, for example, watched some PBS show where there are folks making full blown houses out of bales of hay. Almost nostalgic to the pyramid days, except those were mud and straw mixture. But I don't remember ever having a thought that I would have such a powerful computer sitting next to me in my own home, or that I would be able to walk around anywhere and be reachable by phone at anytime(almost).

How about the fact that medical diagnostic tools remincent of tricorders are coming very close to being reality. The technology to gather data about what lies beneath your skin by waving a device over it exists. Now it's just a matter of finding meaningful interpretations of that data.

Sure. Used to have one, in fact. I was including that type of device in the cell phone catagory but the more I think about it, the Nextel two-way radios are probably closer to the communicator than a cell phone.

Moving sidewalks is so broken of a future promise that they've even removed it from the "new" Space Mountain.


As for me, I was certain personal space travel would be available by now.



More important, and not to kill the buzz of this lighthearted thread ... but growing up in the 60's I was sure that 2005 would see no more racism, no more misogny, no more homophobia, no more religion and no more war.

I'm really rather disappointed.

Nah, I'm looking at all the fears and promises - 1984 passed and there's no Big Brother watching my every move (Now it's just my employer ;) )

Magic Markers?
The first time I was exposed to those fruity ones - yecchhh.

Are you sure?(and I don't mean your employer)

Where is the tin foil hat smiley?

I stumbled upon this site tonight and thought it appropriate to add to this thread

So you wait until I'm gone to have a perfectly splendid tinfoil hat thread?! Hrmph! I feel welling inside me a manifesto presenting Corporate America *as* Big Brother. Must be the week spent around my dad.

Considering my recent work experience, I think your manifesto would be well recieved - if not blocked...

Sing along boys and girls -- you know the words! Rise of corporate entity to "person" status...legally, economically, and politically sanctioned supremacy of corporate "people" over flesh and blood people...shift to service economy and away from skilled labor...shift away from employer/employee loyalty...perception that employees are interchangeable and disposable...fracture between concepts of "job" and "career"...proliferation of employee conduct codes that go beyond the workplace, plus methods for monitoring that conduct within and outside the workplace...

That's the condensed version.

You NEED to listen to the DEVO interview from the other thread. NEED. ;)

Frankly, all that's missing is a tightrope walker ;)

I thought I would be older by now