Beyond The Future

When I was little, the Future was the 21st century. Although specifically, this Future was going to start in about 1987 and finish in about 2001. That was because people couldn't really see beyond that date, I think. So the Future was going to be a pretty short time. The 21st century itself wasn't really going to happen, because the world would have come to an end by then.

George Orwell had written "1984" back in 1948, and even though it was fiction, I think a lot of people were convinced that by the time 1984 rolled around, things would be very different and not necessarily "futuristic" in a positive sense. Then Stanley Kubrick made "2001: A Space Odyssey", so that set the bar very high for where we supposed to be by the start of the 21st century.

In the Future, we were all going to be living either in underwater cities, underground cities or in colonies on the moon. The moon was a big part of the Future, particularly after the role it played in the space race of the 1960's and now that it had been "conquered", it only remained to go and start building on it. What were they waiting for? We did indeed wait and expect, but somehow interest, like the moon itself, seemed at some point to wane.

We would have discarded conventional clothing by the late 1980's, and instead have donned shiny one-piece suits without any obvious buttons, zips or poppers. We would have devices that enabled us to talk with anyone, anywhere at any time (our mobile phones). Computers would be our friends, except for the rogue ones, which would try to take over the world, and if we wanted to know the answer to anything at all, we just spoke to our friendly computer and he or she replied in a charming male or female voice (the Internet, which of course doesn't speak).

The one thing I think everyone really expected to happen was that we would be driving cars in the sky. I think a lot of people who grew up in the 1960's are quite disappointed that there are still no flying cars. But at the same time, I think that most people who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's are surprised that we are actually here, now. Because we were still in the Cold War period and everyone fully expected a third world war to be just around the corner, the main reason that the future was so distant was because people really didn't expect it to actually happen. To arrive at the year 2010 was an impossibility in real life, and could only be achieved in science fiction.

So we are now living beyond the Future of the 1960's.