Future.
Back when I was a kid, I used to read a magazine called Insight - it was basically a guide to everything futuristic, all the latest developments, and with an optimistic eye towards what was to come. Basically, everything pointed towards an atomic-powered utopia, cities with gleaming spires where there was no crime, no poverty, a benevolent world government, everyone travelled using jetpacks or in rocket-powered trains that ran inside vacuum tubes, where spaceflight was as common as getting on a bus, where science was the new God, where people ate pills instead of meals, wore form-fitting jumpsuits (or, if you were a girl, a miniskirt with a huge oval silver belt buckle), had anthropomorphic domestic robots to do the chores, relaxed on plastic sofas and spent their free time exercising and watching their wall-sized televisions. This was the 1970s vision of the 21st century.
Boy, how wrong they were.
Sure, they got some of it right. They predicted the mobile phone and the internet, some medical advances and the wall-sized tellys. Oh, and the domestic robots, although the Roomba is hardly anthropomorphic. But now, nearly ten years into the 21st century, and we’re not really any closer to most of what was predicted. In some ways, we’re closer to some of the dystopian futures predicted by doom-mongering sci-fi authors. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World have never seemed so real and so pertinent.
I can live without the jumpsuits and pills, but where’s this bright new atomic age? Where’s the jetpacks? Where’s the lack of crime? Where did we lose our way?
Nobody’s saying that the 1970s vision of a 21st-century utopia should have been correct, but it was envsioned with a sense of hope and progress on a huge scale, with technological revolution instead of evolution. It was exciting - I couldn’t wait to live in that world. We seem to have lost that vision, that sense of embracing the bigger picture. The quest for endless, clean nuclear energy has stalled, the drive to conquer space seems to have hit a wall, and, most fundamentally, it seems the drive for people to better themselves has diminished.
Maybe it could have happened. Maybe not. But it’s something to strive for, and it seems less and less people are doing the striving these days. We’ve all lost that hope.
