All you need to predict the future is
nationwide broadcast television and the harnessing of the atom.
When you meet a person, and you will, who
would have you believe that they are in possession of perceptive
powers greater than a normal human's and can divine future events on
the basis of those powers, your response should be conditional. If
they are outside a meeting place or some other public square and
selling pencils from a little cup, you should buy a couple pencils
and use them in good health. If they are, however, presenting
themselves in any way as a rational person and therefore have no
problem insulting you to your face, you should treat them with all
the same courtesy you would any overgrown pest. Future predictions of
the sort sold by Miss Cleo or your neighborhood tarot reader are
snake oil of the oldest kind. Future predictions based on the
generalized whole of popular sentiment, however, have borne out a
much greater measure of accuracy and foresight than Nostradamus,
whichever religious prophet you choose, and the rest of history's
frauds and charlatans put together.
The world we live in now was imagined
and laid out very clearly and with eerie prescience immediately
following the end of World War II. The atomic weaponry developed to
win the conflict was a result of the Manhattan Project, a program
that was actually concerted effort from reactors in Oak Ridge and
Hanford, a design and production lab in Los Alamos, and US Army
administrative offices in Manhattan. An observer of the bomb's
development and witness to the Trinity test and the bombing of
Nagasaki was William Lawrence, the official correspondent to the
project from the New York Times. It was in Lawrence's dispatches
immediately following the Trinity test in Alamogordo that we were
introduced to the phrase “atomic age,” as Lawrence was no doubt
experiencing the same dumbstruck amazement at the sheer power we had
harnessed to make things disappear made razor sharp and electrifying
due to having been one of 260 people to be the first in history to
see such a thing. The device they detonated was still called “the
gadget,” in a rather naïve attempt to divert attention from a bomb
program by giving it an impossibly on-the-nose codename, even though
any codename would have been too diminutive to properly address the
scope of either our actions or the array of avenues that lay before
us.
Obviously, we knew giant atoms weren't safe to hold. We just didn't know not to drink radium.
America of the 1950's seized on the idea
that atomic power was key the way I seize onto my fourth scotch of
any given evening: with fervent zeal. Having an atomic bomb meant no
rival nation's puny munitions could touch us, harnessing the energy
meant virtually free power nationwide and cars that would never see a
gas pump. The reality was very different, with the cost of
establishing nuclear plants far exceeding any coal plant, increased
knowledge of the possible nightmare involved with accident scenarios,
and the looming threat of Soviet nuclear power leading us to have a
turtle tell our schoolchildren a desk would keep them safe from an
atomic blast. No amount of reality, however, has been shown to
dissuade the American public from forming their own opinions about
things, and what we created was a vision of the future that largely
played out as planned if one allows for a handful of glaring
omissions and errors. We shall begin with what I feel are the two
shining examples of our atomic age predictions, the two I will
demonstrate are perfect representations of our collective ability to
conceive of wildly imaginative ideas that seemed impossibly far off
but which had their roots in real science that was rapidly advancing.
The first and strongest case is made by
Disneyland's Monsanto House of the Future installation. It stood for
a decade, beginning in 1957, and although it has never been recreated
in its original form, every single component of the house is
literally everywhere around us today. Synthetic plastic substances
are so ubiquitous as to go completely unnoticed, microwave ovens are
on the verge of being outdated, virtually any possible enclosure you
can find yourself in has climate control, and some preservational
modifications made to building materials are actually so cheap they
have become the default. “Imagine,” the Monsanto narrator asks of
us regarding a raised telephone panel in the master bathroom,
“push-buttons instead of dials, and no handset to disturb milady's
dressing!” We are too far removed now to be able to imagine the
shock and wonder that seeing an electric light bulb glow for the very
first time must have created, but surely even the most jaded among us
can easily imagine the thrill of watching a cup of water slowly
revolve under a light bulb until it began to boil, or a video feed of
who just rang your doorbell, or a seemingly-solid kitchen countertop
unfold to reveal a dishwasher and other electronic treasures. I can
only guess that the modern creation to compare it with would be a
three-dimensional printer, but the ease and nonchalance with which we
have assimilated what may be a tool to end all tools makes it seem
that our advances in technology and science have come so hard and so
fast in the last century that we can scarcely conjure amazement when
it is deserved. In fact, the pace of turning fantastic hallucinations
into common reality went so quickly (one hesitates to say “well”)
that in only three years Monsanto had to completely refurbish the
interior of the House of Tomorrow, as the only appliance still
out-of-reach was the wall-sized flat screen television we've all
since purchased to keep our pets company.
"It doesn't matter where I hid my husband's head, because Monsanto plastic is so easy to clean!"
While our living conditions were being
plasticized and molded into sexy curves (simultaneously distancing
materials from nature while mimicking natural forms), the web of
highways and freeways that had sprung up during the war offered
travel with incredible ease and a culture that romanticized
everything about the open road. Enter the Ford Nucleon, sole
proprietor of the ugly kind of sexy. This impossible-to-forget
machine was powered by a baby-size nuclear fixed in the rear of the
vehicle, which predated and out-crazied the Pinto by thirteen years
and the less memorable Ford Seattle-ite by four, and was meant to be
the vanguard of a space age coast-to-coast freeway network complete
with atomic recharging stations and satellite-controlled automatic
driving.
I still really want one of these.
Our confidence in quickly finding a way to shield the driver
and passengers from the radiation exposure we couldn't possible
ignore as a consequence was misplaced, sadly, and cars like the
Nucleon never got further than scale models. This didn't stop people
from imagining the wildest things they could in their excitement to
explore the possibilities: telescoping wheel mounts so cars could
drive over each other and thereby double capacity on the roads,
one-touch automatic driving so your driver's chair could rotate
inward and provide easy access to the television and coffee maker,
teleconferencing monitors so the boss could easily reach you, and
(most unlikely of all at the time) a network of satellites providing
road information, monitoring location, and connecting everything
together in a consistently reliable and accurate system.
Imagine, if you can, a global connection network. It kind of looks like the world if you forgot it in the attic.
Finally, we turn our eye to the last
example which concerns us of future prediction by committee: the best
ripoff of a ripoff of all time, The Jetsons. Premiering in
1962, the transplantation of Fred Flintstone into twenty-first
century America was as prescient, in many ways, as our previous
examples of futurism. Because of the show's longevity, however, the
somewhat scattershot approach to future technology required created
the opportunity for many more misses than hits.
Only the car cannot be purchased.
Foremost on everyone's mind when
discussing The Jetsons and unrequited technological yearning
is the flying car. Forgetting for a moment the vehicle in question's
ability to collapse into a briefcase-sized package and be
light enough for such an Ichabod Crane-esque physique as George
Jetson's to carry it easily, such a conveyance doesn't seem like it's
out of our reach. We have hovercrafts, and small-scale quad-rotor
machines that have amazing maneuverability and stability, along with
mind-boggling computer processing power and materials that are both
incredibly light and unbelievably strong. But, as anyone who as
accepted a dinner invitation from me is well aware, having the
components of something and forcing them into close proximity does
not create a meal. The physics involved in making something as heavy
as a car “fail to fall” is currently beyond our comprehension,
and employing small-scale quantum fixation would seem to necessitate
both a convoluted Lynchian nightmare of human-sized snap-together
race car track and our willingness to forget altogether the feeling
of warmth. And, frankly, none of the limitations we're working
through mean anything when compared to a fundamental and obvious
truth about us as a species: we are fucking stupid and dangerous, and
not to be trusted. As of this writing, automobiles have been
available to the general public for (if you set your flag at the
widely-purchased Model T) eighty-seven years, and we are still unable
to accurately process the four cardinal directions that driving
requires of us. The idea that we somehow “deserve” to add two
more directions (which, with the addition of gravitational
resistance, makes them the two most complicated directions) is
childish and dismissible.
I could watch this thing run all day.
One of the most memorable features of
the Jetson home was the design of their apartment block, resembling a
football stadium perched on a flagpole. Their vehicle storage system
(which was evidently unaware that the cars could go into briefcase
mode at all) bears a striking resemblance to the modern car
“vend-o-mats” built by VW to store and retrieve cars
vertically by way of an automated platform. Most interesting to me,
however, was the purpose of putting the entire apartment building on
the end of a long pole. I originally thought it was a solution to
real estate problems: having run out of places on the ground to
build, we naturally moved a hundred feet up and started over. It
wasn't until the soul-destroying Jetsons film of 1990 that the
purpose was explained as a health and safety feature. The air of 2062
was so horribly polluted that when weather forecasts predicted little
to no wind movement, the apartments blocks were elevated to rise
above the gathering smog. It seemed a bit extreme the first time I
heard it, but now you can look at any picture of China's air and
recognize the need for such living conditions.
Beijing or Future Town? Only my respiratory therapist knows for sure.
Not everything predicted by The
Jetsons was as hard to achieve, however. Video conversations were
featured prominently, as were stationary exercise machines that
monitored vital signs. The family's push-button food dispenser was
using essentially a dehydrated protein powder, which can currently be
purchased by the bottle or bucket. No one is, as yet, willing to
install a treadmill on the exterior of their home for their use of
their dog, in spite of how hilarious and feasible it would
undoubtedly be. We have robots which vacuum our homes, and an
enterprising group of people in the Netherlands is currently
preparing for a one-way trip to Mars with the intent of establishing
a colony.
These arguments, I hope, have shown that
our dissatisfaction with the modern age is misplaced and undermining,
and that We are, in fact, living in exactly the future we wanted and
predicted, most likely due to the influence popular culture had on
thousands of children who would grow up to be the scientists that
made our lives possible. I further suggest that our current view of
the future is one of post-war desolation and complete civilizational
collapse, shown in films like The Terminator and Mad Max.
It's not as if we didn't anticipate horrific nuclear consequences
when we looked forward in the fifties, but it was counterbalanced by
an optimism unmatched since, and most notably absent from our current
idea of what lies in store. This seems to me important to note, as I
argue that our cultural desires and predictions prove virtually
inevitable and thus the idea we are writing our own future is not as
trite and simplistic as it would seem.
