FWS Topics: 10 Things That Didn't Happen Like They Were Promised

Being in my mid-thirties, I'm looking back on what the world was supposed to be like in the year 2013 from the point-of-view of a child who grow up in the 80's. From conception, I think, I've been a science fiction geek and lover of the future. So much so, that I always felt that I was born too early, and hard reality of 2013 has only broadcast that feeling more clearly. Growing up in the 1980's, you felt like technology that was in sci-fi movies was right around the corner. After all, we were the first generation that had computers (the Apple IIs) in our schools, most of our pop music was made with computers (I'm reminded of Gary Numan's 'Are Friends Electric?'), and we hung out at the video game arcades. Adding to this sense of the impending future was the increased American manned space program via the shuttles, Space Camp, and bold plans for future manned space missions. For me, that was the most exciting thing happening at the time, because I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut, and it seemed in the 1980's that the human race was on the edge of being a spacefaring species. During the 1980's, there was a groundswell of culture that was looking towards the future, not the past. I can remember magazines like OMNI, Odyssey Science Magazine, and National Geographic Our Universe along with loads of pretty over-sized books that detailed our future in space and with robots with glorious 1980's concept art. To make matters worse, my elementary school stocked plenty of books about space, robots, and the future, setting me up to believe that a bright future with hoverboards, flying cars, and missions to the red planet were around the corner...how wrong we were.Here is my list of ten things that didn't turn out like the books and visionaries said that they would. This Calvin and Hobbes from 1989 encapsulates my feelings on the matter:

1. DUDE, WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?!

There seems to be an unwritten rule in science fiction that the skies of the future cities would have to be filled with dual-use vehicles, that are at home equally on the road as they are in the sky. This is one piece of technology is often a symbol of the advanced nature of the future time-period, like the Rolls-Royce 'copter from the 1958 Starship Troopers novel, the Doctor Who flying car or 'WhoMobile', the Police Spinner from BLADE RUNNER and so on and on and on. This trend still continues through today, just look at the remake of Total Recall complete with flying cars. Science fiction has been lying to us for generations on the promise of flying cars, even into my generation about the common man having access to the skies with their basic everyday transport, because for all logically reasoning, flying cars WILL NOT be a reality to the common citizen.

Why? With ground based wheeled vehicles, humans do enough property damage and killing themselves by drinking or get confused, or texting (I work in a Trauma ICU)...can you imagine if two flying cars had in-flight collision or engine failure while over a densely populated area? This could mutant every MVA into a shower of airborne kinetic projectiles. Drunk drivers would be transformed into drunk pilots on a more massive scale than the current air transportation system. Instead of traffic signs, or houses, or even parked cars, drunk pilots would plow into building. Another reason would be the technical and mental challenge of transforming drivers into pilots. Even if you dumb down the controls via computers, and equip these flying car with VTOLs, your average driver couldn't become a pilot, and most of the time, they shouldn't be. Then there is the consideration of resources, namely greater fuel demand  and construction of an air traffic control system on a unthinkable scale.

If there are to be a real flying car, it could be similar to uber-expensive Bugatti Veyron...a plaything for the very rich and nearly none of us little people will ever see or drive (FWS has two for Starbuck runs). These future personal VTOL vehicle could resemble the failed ultra-expensive Moller M400 Skycar concept. The  best current example of a flying car from sci-fi is the Terrafugia Transition.


2. MISSION TO MARS and LUNAR BASES
I wouldn't lie...I wanted to be the first man on Mars...to see those vast red sand cold deserts, untouched by man, and to see the vastness with my own eyes. That seem within reach when I was in grade school. Sadly, my math skills, coupled with the lack of national will forced my walk on Mars to be scrubbed. Pity...I wanted to see the Face on Mars! For much of us that grew up in the 1980's, Mars looked like a real possibility, the Space Shuttle missions were seemly common, and plans for Space Station Freedom were on track. From there, it was an easy jump to being back to the Moon, then Lunar outpost, then Mars. Then warp drive. In 1987, I read an official NASA timetable for this very scenario, and now in 2013, we should have been two years away from a Martian landing, and the ship to get us there, would now being constructed at Station Freedom. Today, there is a good sized International Space Station in GSO, robotic rovers are rolling around Mars, and private space companies are a reality, there is even a spaceport in New Mexico....I guess that is something....now, where are my moon boots?

3. DOMESTIC ROBOTS

Nothing says the future more than a robot doing the cleaning or serving you Jack and Cokes while your playing Black Ops: II on Live. For my generation, the likelihood of robotic servants was high, I mean..c'mon...I had an Alphie and the Nitendo R.O.B growing up! More than just those simple machines were being sold at local Radio Shacks and from the Sharper Image catalogs. I can still remember going to the Radio Shack at Eastland Mall in Tulsa, that was stocked with the Omnibot 2000 and the Robie Sr. robots for sale. The sight of these robots created a belief that by the time I had my own home, that robots would attended to the cleaning. Yeah...I just mopped my floors and waiting for them to dry...I guess I'm my wife's robot.
 For the most part, the robot crazy of the 1980's crashed, and these unloved and underused robots could be found on Ebay today. So, what happened? Robot technology was not what it was cracked up to be, most of the robots of the 1980's didn't do much, even the expensive Topo by Androbot Inc, were little more than fancy expensive toys. However, we are just getting close to true personal robot servants of sci-fi with robots like the iRobot Roomba, the Husqvana auto-lawnmower, and the cat-box cleaner, litter robot. With robots like Honda's ASIMO, we can only hope the day is coming when I have a Cylon to do my mopping.

4. LASER GUNS
My first G.I. Joe was Flash from the original 1982 lineup. and if someone had told me in the mid-1980's that our military would still be using the same assault rifle that they had used since Vietnam, I wouldn't have believed them. After all, science fiction of my early years (1982's Megaforce anyone?) and even my G.I Joes were telling me that future wars would be waged with laser rifles.This fantasy perspective has been around the earliest science fiction, War of the Worlds, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, that our future heroes would have laser blasters in their hands. That didn't happen...yet.
The reality is that in the last decade, military lasers can be found on nearly every one of the US soldier's M4s, with the AN/PEQ light aiming system, which is now in its sixth generation. Also, the US Army and Navy are about to deploy defensive DEW systems onboard ship and portable systems for FOBs. The continuing issue with military laser rifles is power and lethality...remember even Flash had a power-pack on his back...wouldn't want to hump that around the mountains of Afghanistan!

5. UNDERWATER COLONIES
The commonly held believe when I was a kid, was that Terra was going to be dangerously overpopulated, and due to the limitations of space travel, humanity would have to turn to underwater colonies for Earth to be room enough. A number of experts cited that we knew more about outer space than the very deep portions of the ocean. Some believed that we would better served to establish an underwater exploration agency, than going to Mars.When I was in high school, science fiction gave us a vision of an underwater colonies...that was NBC's SeaQuest DSV and early, there were movies like the Abyss, Leviathan and Deep Star Six. 

There are plans for floating cities, like what was featured in Black Ops: II, and there  plans for an underwater city near Amsterdam. but the sad reality is that were is no government or private underwater colony or mining platform...my brother works for Shell Oil at their New Orleans HQ, and he has told me as much. The only thing even close to Deep Core are a few ultra-luxury underwater hotel rooms that are, of course, in Dubai. I guess my Porsche personal-submarine will have to wait.    


6. VIDEO PHONES
Another technological hallmark of the incoming future were always the video phones, and they were projected much different by science fiction that what actually occurred. Interestingly enough  this is one of those promised future technologies that actually did come true...sort of. From the Jetsons, to BLADE RUNNER, to ALIENS, to nearly every single science fiction work, there were bulky, hard-wired phone booths, and TV-like home phones that used video along with voice. Since the 1960's, there have been video phones marketed for home use, and all of them met with little or no success. Anyone that own a phone video needed to have a the same system on the opposite end. In all of my years, I've never known anyone with one of these systems, and I knew people that had a 3DO and a Intellvision!

While these expensive and bulky systems never took off, smart digital phones, like the Apple iphone have been able to delivery on the promise of face-to-face video calls on the go, and webcams and Skype give us face-to-face communication at home. On of the interesting things about this video phone technology is their lack of use and why that is. I don't know anyone that uses Skype or webcams (expect for porn),  and I believe that most people still prefer voice communication. After all, with video, you have to look good, and cannot lie about what you really doing. Think about it...how many times have you texted or talked on the phone while on the toilet?
For the most part, science fiction missed the boat on mobile digital smart telephones and their massive impact on the society of today. Even for someone like me that had a cellular phone in 1994, the technology had progressed at an alarming rate, it is almost unbelievable the revolution in mobile phone technology that has occurred since I was in high school in the mid-1990's. Another thing that simply cannot understand about current phone culture is texting. I would have seemed so backwards back in the day.



7. NUCLEAR WAR

For close to three generations of Americans, they grew up under the shadow of full-scale thermonuclear conflict where the few survivors of the nuclear winter blasted world would scour the burned out cities for food and fight off cockroaches and rodents of unusual size. We can be very thankful that World War III never happened, because this delightful little blog wouldn't be here and I hate cockroaches. What replaced an full-scale nuclear exchange between the Warsaw Pact and NATO is something worse, and more real...nuclear terrorism. I do not doubt that one day that some wing-nut with a belief that they are doing something right for their empty belief will get their hands on a loose nuke or dirty radiological material and set it off in a major metropolis...and it will be in my lifetime. So, can I have the Cold War back...?

8. THE CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE

When I was in 4th or 5th grade at Hoover Elementary School in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, my reader had a story by Issac Asimov about two children discovering a real, printed book. 'The Fun They Had', relates how much school and education is different in 2157 than 1987, computers built into every desks, robot teachers, and punch-card homework. I can remember magazines and books talking about a more computerized classroom that could connect to the global community, and elimination of paper-and-pencil work. That seemed completely possible when Hoover got their two Apple II computers. Another element of the future classroom that occurred to me in later years, that these future classrooms of science fiction were more Montessori type models that the dictatorial public schools of my childhood. The sad reality of today's schools does not match up with the vision of sci-fi. I could imagine my child going to a futuristic looking building with all manner of technology....yeah....that didn't happen. Every student now normally has a home computer, and portable computers in their hands with the advent of smart phones, and even in my daughters special needs classroom, they have the interactive Promethean Board.

Some of you might know that I am a 6th-12th grade history teacher (who could never find a teaching job), and while technology has made the leap into the hands of nearly every student, the classroom of the 'future' is much more draconian and terrifying than my years or what most visionaries were predicting. With No Child Left Behind and funding being based on scores on tests, and the continuing slide of the American education system, not to mention school shootings, schools have become less about education, and more about control.

9. VIRTUAL REALITY

In 1982, I witness the magic of TRON, and I could see a future were their virtual worlds to play in...to be someone or something else. With the advancement of video game and computer technology is looked possible. During the 1990's, virtual reality was a hot future technology that stirred the public interest with movies like Lawnmower Man, the short-lived FOX series, VR-5,and Max Headroom along with  the flopped Nintendo Virtual-Boy.

During these days, you could imagine a future were you were the player in a VR simulated world, like a personal holo-deck, or using it in the classroom to experience times past.What happened to that? In someways, we do have VR simulated worlds via the internet. Is not Second Life, World of Warcrack, and Call of Duty, simulated worlds? Minecraft anyone? There is also VR software that helps NASA integrate with their Martian Rovers. The US Military uses VR technology for training, from pilots, to special operations, allowing for soldiers to have an safe experience prior to a live training operation. 

10. CLOTHING of the FUTURE
I can remember when every pulp sci-fi rag, movie, or TV show would project that by the 21st century, we all would be wearing jumpsuits and silver moon-boots. These new future treads would be topped off with wearable computers, head-gear that linked into the telephone/data network, and intelligence sunglasses that adapted to the light conditions. It seems so possible when I was a kid with of those massive high-top air-pump Nikes and Reeboks (I had both!), the 'Hyercolor' T-shirts that reacted to body heat, Gargoyle sunglasses, and when Gore-Tex started to take off. If we examine Back to the Future: II, early 21st century people could buy power-lace Nikes, self-drying, self-adjusting jackets...yeah, that didn't happen...or did it? The closest thing to the jacket that McFly wore are the high-tech weather-resistance hoodie-jackets that are designed to wick moisture internally, resist water on the shell, and be designed for adaption to changing weather conditions (thanks, Global Warming!).

My favorite band: School of Seven Bells 

 In addition to these features, the high-tech hoodies have special places for your smartphone, and mp3 player, allowing you string some earbuds through your jacket. But there is no self-drying feature. When BTTF: II was made, large, self-lacing athletic shoes seem possible, especially when air-pumping shoes in stores (yes...I had both the Nike and Reebok pumps), and there heat-changing dyes, but like much of the futuristic clothing seen in science fiction, they forgot about fashion. While there are freaks like Lady GaGa and Nicki Minaj running around, for the most part, fashion has not changed that much since the 1960's. We still wear leather jackets, Navy pea coats, polos, jeans, cotton sweaters, scarfs, sunglasses, and suits. Sure, small things change, like hair styles, the popularity of colors and brands, there is not a great deal of overall fashion change. A sweater is still a sweater, a leather jacket is still a leather jacket...men are not wearing 'skants' skirt-like Starfleet uniforms.



LINKS:

Here is a crazy article on the 11 things that came true in BTTF:II
http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Predictions_That_Back_to_the_Future_Part_II_Got_Right