Where’s my hoverboard? Where are my self-tying shoes? And where, oh where, are those dynamic three-dimensional billboards?
These futuristic fantasies should be here by Wednesday, or so claims the “Back to the Future” movie trilogy.
Wednesday is “jump day” from that classic trilogy. In the second movie, released in 1989, Doc, Marty and Jennifer fly to the future to keep Marty’s and Jennifer’s son from going to prison. They flew to Oct. 21, 2015, a day that seemed so far away at the time.
Now it’s the present. The movie’s future seemed pretty jaw-dropping, as most science fiction movies do.
They successfully predicted automated homes and flat-screen TVs everywhere. That hoverboard and self-tying shoes are a little bit far-fetched right now, though. And the only three-dimensional billboards you see are from moving companies, with a box sticking out.
Fortunately, they were also wrong about “Jaws 19” coming out this year.
It’s not the first time science fiction has predicted the future wrong. In “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” Buck Rogers supposedly commanded a NASA spacecraft in deep space before freezing for 504 years. We didn’t really have the technology for a solo trip through the galaxy in 1987. Fortunately, we also didn’t have a nuclear war in November 1987 that forced them to rebuild civilization either.
We’re lucky we didn’t have a future like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” either. We cruised right past that year without a trip to Jupiter and a difficult-to-work-with computer named Hal. You might argue our modern version of that is a difficult-to-work-with computer named Siri, though.
There’s something very human about trying to envision the future. I remember growing up and dreaming of a world with computers mounted in every room. Now I realize how silly that was, as I never envisioned a world where you could carry that computer in your pocket and use it anywhere.
Heck, I wrote this column on a laptop using a mobile hotspot while my wife drove this week. None of those words, including wife, would’ve made any sense to me when I was 8.
You can’t help but wonder what all this technology gets us, though. We have social media for antisocial people. We tweet instead of talk. We like on Facebook instead of calling our friends. We Snapchat instead of actually chatting.
It’s probably a good thing we don’t have flying cars fueled by Mr. Fusion, either. Imagine all those flying cars with someone texting behind the wheel.
And then there’s the news splashed about on a billboard, that the Cubs had won the World Series. It’s always fun to pick on those lovable losers, who haven’t won a World Series since 1908. Producers admitted putting it in as a joke about the perennial loser Cubs.
Now they’re in the National League championship series with a chance to make the World Series. Maybe those hoverboards, self-tying shoes and 3-D billboards aren’t so crazy after all.
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