This morning my eyes popped open and I cast aside my comforter, rose out of bed, peered at my calendar, and realized that it’s the Future. Except, it isn’t.

By my reckoning, it’s 2006, and we are long overdue for some serious futuristic payoff. Since most of us were children, we’ve been tickled with bombastic visions of the 21st century and its myriad of life-changing, labor-saving innovations. Well, I’m looking around, and save for a Roomba here and a Robosapien there, this looks like the same old world. The future has broken its promise with us.

I’m not saying we should all be walking around in mylar suits with a big V-stripe across the chest. But where are our commercial spaceflights? Our magnetic skyways? Our people-movers? Our sonic dishwashers?

Old MGM cartoons laid before us - for comic effect but with no less of a sense of expectancy - the Home of Tomorrow, with everyday chores made simpler by automation. Filmstrips demonstrated self-operating appliances that would herald the dawning of a shining new age of ease and progress. (Now there’s a concept that used to be of widespread social concern and has since dropped off our collective radar screen: Progress.) Countless movies and TV shows treated space travel and extraterrestrial colonization as routine elements of future life. Hell, Doc Brown and his DeLorean scheduled the world for holographic cinema and fusion-powered flying cars a scant nine years from now.

Ah, yes, the flying car: the staple of futuristic iconography. Pick up a random issue of Popular Science from any of the last four decades and there’s a good chance you’ll see a concept drawing of a hovering automobile accompanied by a bold declaration like “They’re just around the corner!!” I expected by this time to be gliding around carefree in a giant glossy cough drop of red metal and smoked glass. So where are they?

The truth is that there will never, ever be flying cars. Not because science can’t produce them, because they could probably do it today if they wanted to. It’s just that science knows what a disaster flying cars would be. People can’t even drive in two dimensions; imagine the confused mess if a third were involved! “Sorry I’m late, boss. This jackass was gabbing away on his neuro-phone and merged down without looking, and plowed right into my roof.” There are no minor fender-benders in the air: if you crash…well…you really crash.

That’s to say nothing of the threat they would pose to physical boundaries and personal space by making fences and walls obsolete. Nothing will quite interrupt the jovial tranquility of your weekend barbecue like some drunk asshole crash-landing in your pool with his flying El Camino. And imagine getting lost on your way to grandma’s and finding yourself flanked by a formation of F-22s demanding that you leave restricted airspace or be blown out of the sky. I don’t think even in the future we’ll have airbags good enough for that one.

So, flying cars are out. Still, what about all the other stuff we’ve been promised? The truth of course is that technology has indeed marched and we have made big strides…just not in quite the grandiose and flamboyant ways that people in the bygone century predicted. We have flat TVs, allowing Hollywood drivel to consume less space in our homes, if not in our lives. We have tiny personal telephones and the internet, both of which have eliminated distance as a hurdle to interpersonal communications and allowed us to realize just how little of value we really have to say to one another. Even our cars, to the eyes of someone as recently as the 1980s, probably would look like the rounded lozenges of space-age travel once only dreamed about at World’s Fairs: fast, quiet and cheaply-fueled…er…oops.

Anyway, we’re getting there, and we’re learning that the capital-F Future comes not as an overnight revolution of shiny but impractical modern conveniences, but a series of incremental amenities to a lifestyle that’s already maybe been made a little too easy for our own good. I wouldn’t look good in a mylar suit anyway.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 3:38 pm and is filed under observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.