As we near the end of the first decade of the 21st century I find myself wondering: Where are the flying cars?
Do you remember imagining the future as a kid in elementary school? Maybe it was the influence of "The Jetsons" or maybe it was just wild imagination, but we foresaw a future far different from the reality we now live in. Looking back, it seems that we saw the world in the air. We would have flying cars, houses would be on stilts, buildings would be skyscrapers taller than ever, and we would be making regular trips into space. We imagined that there would be colonies on the moon and Mars, and space travel would just be another way of getting around. Computers would do all of our thinking for us, and robots would make our household chores obsolete.
I'm not sure if I feel relieved or cheated.
It's funny, how much the world has changed since the 1970's, yet how much remains the same. Forget flying cars: gasoline and oil continue to rule the world. We don't even have mass-produced electric cars! No robots to help make dinner or do the laundry, but we do have some nice applicances. Unfortunately, they still require a human hand to work. The greatest leaps in technology are things like digital photography and the internet, not ray guns and hand-held scanners that instantly produce a diagnosis when pointed at us. On the other hand, everyone, young and old, has a cell phone and a laptop computer. But, we still see a human doctor who guesses at our condition and we still take medicine for what ails us. The world hasn't been wiped out by AIDS or another virus, and what is destroyed each year by hurricanes and fires is rebuilt. While houses are more efficient and packed with more conveniences than ever before, they are still built of wood and brick. For some reason, doors in the 21st century were always depicted as automatically sliding open and closed, yet we still turn the handle and pull them open. Big yellow buses continue to take children to and from school, and we still pay with money, although it's called a debit card.
And, people still fall in and out of love, even if they are the same sex, and they marry and divorce with regularity. We continue to wage wars, kill one another, commit crimes against one another, and prisons still have cages and iron bars. We still mow grass with lawnmowers, still produce mountains of trash every day, still suffer from heartbreak and sadness, and still experience happiness and joy.
I guess it is true that the more things change, the more they remain the same. I wonder what the next 100 years will bring, or if it will just be more of the same...
