The Future’s Here

The future was better in the past. We’re in it now–the future, the first little bit of it–and it does not live up to the trailer. Promises were made, Enthusiasts, and all of them were abandoned roadside, or half-assed, or infinitely five years away. (Virtual Reality has been five years away for half-a-century now.) Future, I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. And I’m actually pretty mad, too.

Promises were made.

ROBOTS We do not have robots, at least not ones that can buttle and fuck. There is the Roomba and also those devil-machines that Boston Dynamics builds, but we were assured there would be fully-sentient bipedal androids roaming about by 2018. Instead, we get Russian guys in cosplay.

FLYING CARS But this is a good thing, at least until full-automation is possible. Flying is slightly more difficult than driving, in the way that playing bocce ball is slightly more complex than being a paramecium. Human-guided flying cars are inherently the stupidest of all “future tech.” Imagine a fender-bender. Now imagine a fender-bender 200 feet in the air that causes both vehicles to plummet, flamingly, into the roof of a children’s hospital. Now imagine that happening hundreds of times a day. People cannot be trusted with flars. Also, I do not want to say “flar.” Or “plauto.”

SPACE TRAVEL Now, Younger Enthusiasts, you may not know this, but we went to the moon. A guy named Buzz took a piss in his pants right there in the Sea of Tranquility. Another guy named Alan, well, he played some golf; bunch of other fellows brought a dune buggy with ’em, and they went tear-assing around the moon like they were on vacation. Then we stopped going to the moon, and stopped building giant rockets that could get us there, and we built ourselves a van. That’s what the Space Shuttle was: a van. It was for moving stuff. The Shuttle was like a Ford Transit that exploded once every 75 times you drove it. Now we don’t even have that, and American astronauts must hitch rides with the Russians to get to the ISS.

We were promised more. If not a sprawling resort & casino on the moon, then an Antarctica-style scientific base at the very least. Men were going to Jupiter–Jupiter!–in 2001, and that seemed reasonable. The end of the film was not reasonable in the slightest, but the concept of visiting the rest of the solar system was within our grasp, we thought. Now, a manned mission to Jupiter is rather foolish, as Jupiter is a gas planet and therefore there is no solid surface upon which to golf or do wheelies in a dune buggy, but what about Mars? It’s right next to us, astronomically speaking, but all we do is send up probe after probe. From hurling up dumb, iron satellites into low orbit to landing men on (and bringing them home from) the moon in a decade. First man on Mars could have taken that step in 1981. We just didn’t try.

VIDEO PHONES We do have these, and it is a wonderful invention that I praise. It is possible to see either adorable nephews, or to shake your titties and/or ding-dong at a loved one. The future gets a full point here. Good work with the video phone technology, the future.