Ruminations of an Old Goat

I had originally intended to post a review of the new version of The Prisoner this week. Unfortunately, I haven't found the time to sit down and watch the show. That's not entirely true, as I managed to find time to watch the first three episodes of A&E's Hornblower with the Boy. But I've been trying to get the Boy to watch Hornblower -- which is an excellent series even if it isn't fully faithful to the books -- for a couple of years now. When he finally agreed on Saturday night, all thoughts of The Prisoner vanished. Maybe next week.

Back in the 1960s, when I was a boy, science fiction movies could be set in the far flung future of the 1990s or even all the way into the 21st century! While man hadn't landed on the moon yet, the Apollo program was in full swing and seemed only a matter of time before we'd get there. I assumed we'd have permanent colonies on the moon by the year 2000. I was positive that people would be able to fly around using their own jet packs in the year 2000. But most of all, I was sure I would own a flying car by the year 2000.

It's nearly 2010, a year in which I doubt we'll make contact, and I still don't have a flying car. What happened to the glorious, high-tech world of tomorrow I was promised back in the '60s?

What actually happened was a failure of vision. Not a failure of vision on the part of those who invented and built our current world of tomorrow but on those who dreamed the world of tomorrow 40+ years ago.

We failed because we looked for Big Things that would be Blatantly Obvious for all to see. It wasn't really unreasonable for us to dream that way, considering the 20th century had been filled with Big Inventions that would have shocked and amazed people from the 19th century. The inventions that changed the world couldn't be hidden from sight. Automobiles and airplanes and diesel locomotives and towering skyscrapers dominated the landscape of the 20th century and changed our world in ways those of us born in the latter half of the 20th century just can't imagine.

Electricity powered the world, turning pushing back the darkness with light, fighting summer heat with cool air, washing and drying our clothes and making food preservation so easy that populations no longer have to live close to farm land.

Such big changes made us think the future would hold even bigger changes. But when the changes came, they came in increasingly smaller packages.

When I started college in 1975, Clemson University had an IBM-360, a very powerful mainframe computer for its day. The computer boasted a full sixteen megabytes of memory! We geeks were mighty impressed with that, I can tell you. The mainframe took up a huge, climate controlled room all by itself. But thirty-four years later, I'm typing this column on a laptop computer with 192 times the memory of that mainframe, a faster processor than the mainframe and an interface undreamed of by anyone back then.

Tomorrow, when I drive to work, I'll spend the trip to listening to an audio book comprised of computer files stored on device smaller than a pack of cigarettes. That device has a two inch screen capable of showing a sharper, more vibrant color picture than anything in existence back in the '60s. And the book I'm listening to? I downloaded it at home using this same laptop; no paper catalog, no writing and mailing a check, no waiting four to six weeks for delivery. I bought it and got it all within a matter of minutes.

It dawns on me as I write all of this that virtually everything I've mentioned provides some form of entertainment, even the laptop. As a nation, we have more leisure time than our ancestors could have ever dreamed possible. Our need to entertain ourselves has obviously pushed the development of technology to fill that need. Perhaps it's simply a case of self-absorption on our part, this ever increasing need for entertainment. Perhaps it's simply an aspect of humanity that hasn't applied to the wider population until now. I can't say. But I can say it was the Big Things that helped our ancestors create the economy that allows us these indulgences.

I think I shouldn't have claimed a failure of vision kept us from predicting how the world of tomorrow would develop. It was more of a failure to imagine how our vision would change. Instead of a colony on the moon and missions to Mars, we can carry around dozens of movies and hundreds of CDs on devices that fit in our pockets. We've got the communicators from Star Trek, even if we don't have interstellar space travel. We've got hand-held computers and things simply undreamed of by previous generations.

But I hope there's an alternate universe where the world of tomorrow is the one the boy I was expected to see when he grew up. I'd love to visit that world, if just for a few moments; to see buildings climbing nearly into space, to watch passenger shuttle flights take off for orbiting space stations and to see people flying around using personal jet packs. And maybe to visit a car dealership.

Because I still want my flying car.