The Future Is Old Fashioned

The future is not tomorrow, the future is not now, the future happened ages ago and we are way past that. To clarify, when I talk about the future, I’m not talking about some Orwellian horror, I am talking about the good old Star Trek or Space Odyssey visions of the future. The things that our generation and the generations before us grew up on, wishing for the techie gadgets and sleek space ships to one day be a reality. What we may have missed though is that much of this has actually come true. Not only have so many things predicted in the science fiction of days past come to fruition, but we have far surpassed even the wildest expectations on many of them. Just today NASA held a press conference today (August 12th) about the Voyager-1 leaving the solar system. Man made machines have reached out across 19 billion km of space, and touched down on multiple planets. But this wasn't done with cutting edge technology. The machines, travelling billions of kilometers in space, were built and deployed almost 40 years ago. Technology developed about a decade before Tetris was even created as a video game is speeding through the stars and diving head first into the unknown to uncover the mysteries of space. What about a more mundane aspect of every day life? Today over 50 percent of Americans walk around with a smartphone in their pocket (source). We take for granted carrying around a sleek little box with a screen on it that can communicate with other people on the other side of the world; that can pinpoint your position down to the room you are standing in; that can tell you the weather and traffic in New Jersey or Bangladesh; and that can house an ‘artificial intelligence’ system that can you can talk to and interact with you device through (read: siri). This little box of technology in our pockets holds enough computing power to make the best of science fiction's handheld devices turn green with envy. We walk around with these devices every day and don't think twice about it.

(Source: xkcd.com)

We have autonomous vehicles that have driven the length and breadth (in distance) of the United States on their own, including through Florida and most humans can’t navigate Florida on their own. We have spaceships and a space station. SpaceX has even unveiled plans for the first commercial spaceport. Recently the company Planetary Resources began recruiting for their venture in asteroid mining. There now exists a company whose entire purpose is the mining of asteroids. We have all of this astonishing technology infiltrating our lives every single day, one can only imagine what today's future may possibly hold.

One hundred years ago people could not possibly have imagined what the world we live in today would look like. Our entire way of life is currently based on electricity, a force which was virtually unknown until a mere 400 years ago. Some of you may have been in areas that suffered from major blackouts during Hurricane Sandy last year. When the power went out everything shut down: no work, no media, nothing. Life was virtually put on pause until the energy grid was restored. Yet only a couple hundred years ago the concept of an 'energy grid' would have been just as foreign as flying saucers. In a mere 100 years we have gone from riding horses, to launching space ships and beyond. One can only imagine what the year 2100 would look like.

Inevitably this all leads us to one final question...

Why the heck don't we have sonic screwdrivers yet?