the future...whatever

I don't get much time to write with school in full blast, but we do what we can. I was looking at some vintage reels from the day talking about the future. By the year 2000, we'll have flying cars, take vacations on the moon, and have robot servants. Well, they sure missed on all that.

I think the problem with predicting the technology of the future is we use today's standards of life to base what we think tomorrow will be like. The problem being is that all the technological advances that get us closer to those goals also shape the society and creates other issues and goals.

This is a transcript of what might happen in 2000 in a 1961 newspaper.

What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you.

It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.

- Still no cure for cancer

You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space.

- Hmmm

Your house will probably have air walls, and a floating roof, adjustable to the angle of the sun.

- nada

Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

Automatic doors? yes. Everything else is BS

You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

- Answering machines & internet okay, this real

You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

- You can have a big screen tv, and indoor pools, they made video phones and video chats are popular. Mostly stuff for the wealthy, not the average person. No push-button remodeling though...

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

Well, they can't cook, but computers and TV's do seem to 'babysit' the kids to ill-effect.

Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets.

- Wow, they had the good drugs in 1961

Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form.

-Yep, food without nutritional properties are here, we call it McDonald's.

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

- So much for that work week. Those glade plug-ins work nicely.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

-Email and internet. Didin't get the need for paper out of our mind yet.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other.

-Internet! Still have to type manually...

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

- Not yet...

The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.

- keep dreaming

Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains.

- I guess consolidation of services is a foreign concept.

In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour.

-HA!

By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond.

-We're really falling behind schedule here.

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.

-Yeah...

Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100.

-Well, no regrown limbs, but people have been seen to live vitally past 100.


And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists.

It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left!


- Yeah, they were pretty delusional. I want my robot servant.

But there are thing we have now that they never imagined in 1961.

Cell phones
Mp3's
Laptop computers
Video Games
Internet

All these thing make a lot of what they were talking about obsolete. A robot servant could consolidate many things and really simplify life. But think also of the bad things that could happen.