THROWBACK THURSDAY - "5 Things Your Parents Thought Would Exist By Now"

(originally published on May 19, 2010)


The 1950's and 60's was a heyday for Science Fiction. Theaters and television schedules were overflowing with visionary depictions of the future, where everyone wore silver jumpsuits, robots handled household chores, and space travel was a normal part of everyday life. Sadly, none of the things they imagined have come to fruition. Your parents dreamed huge...and failed miserably. Here are five awesomely futuristic things that your parents thought would exist by now:

Flying CarsYour parents' generation was one of great automotive advance and prosperity. In the ancient times when they were growing up, there was an endless supply of oil, the only air pollution that existed came from Uncle Phil's post-dinner fart rampage, and the only thing China could manufacture was fortune cookies and lead-soaked action figures. The automotive industry appeared to be the country's big ticket, and everyone thought for sure that, by the 1980's, cars would be flying around in the air and skyscrapers and shopping malls would tower high above the clouds. What a bunch of f*cking idiots, right?

Why We Don't Have Them: Flying cars do exist. An engineer named Paul Moller has been designing and manufacturing flying car prototypes for about 10 years now, but he still has to work out a few kinks (i.e. - the deafening sound of the engines during takeoff) before the vehicles could have a chance of hitting the consumer market. In other words, your parents have yet another reason to be disappointed in you: your generation is way behind our generation's flying car schedule. Kids these days, right?

TeleportationSci-Fi movies and TV shows had your parents convinced that teleportation would be a common thing by now. As soon as Captain Kirk turned into a glitter tornado and ended up on another planet, people began counting the days until they too could walk into a pantry, get a sparkle shower, and end up in line at the nearest 3-D Drive-In Cineplex. It's the ultimate form of transportation, and it's way cheaper than flying, so where the hell is it?

Why We Don't Have It: While some movies and TV shows taught us the usefulness of teleportation, others illustrated the dangers and complications of such technology: ending up with body parts in the wrong place, turning into a human insect, landing in a much more dangerous setting than you anticipated, and worst of all: allowing teleporting bank robbers to picnic on top of the Sphinx! It seems that teleportation is just too uncontrollable to be unleashed to the general public. Oh, and also: science is no where near figuring out how to disassemble someone on a molecular level and then re-assemble them again.

Colonies on MarsNeil Armstrong walked on the moon in July of 1969, and people at that time were immediately anticipating the Martian Colony that was "probably gonna be opened around November or December." Unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way, and we haven't even been back to the moon since 1972. There is some good news though: it turns out you don't have to actually go to Mars to experience it! You can just get a memory of a Mars vacation implanted into your brain with little to no side effects!

Why We Don't Have It: It turns out that flying through space is really hard, and Mars is really far away. Even if we used nuclear rockets to launch a ship (which we don't), the one-way trip to Mars would take at least 4 months. That's way too long of a trip just to hang out on a desolate, deserted planet, unless of course you're going to help some birth-defected mutant street urchins fight for their right to oxygen. Then it would probably be a pretty cool trip.

LasersWhat the hell happened to us? We're not even supposed to be using bullets anymore! We should be using lasers for everything! The good guys should be shooting blue or green lasers, and the bad guys should be shooting red lasers! It's 2010 and we're still relying on gun powder to annihilate one another? What is this, the stone age?

Why We Don't Have Them Yet: There are definitely lasers that can kill people. The question is: why aren't we killing people with them right now?! As it turns out, we still can't make an awesomely deadly laser without using a ton of energy to do it, so ultimately it's not very affordable. The military is frantically working toward some kind of efficient, cost-effective laser weapon, but it doesn't look like we'll be seeing it for a while, and that pisses us off. We're supposed to be carrying laser guns in our pockets by now, and instead the closest we have is a 3 ton rig that has to be strapped to a Hummer just to blow up a cantaloupe. You're pathetic, Future! Pathetic!

The End of the WorldWhether it was nuclear holocaust from the Russians, or the year 2000 from psychics/computers/Prince, your parents were pretty convinced the end of the world would have already happened by now. We were conditioned for their our childhoods to think that, at any moment, the Commies would hit the button and it would be Game Over. Then, when the Cold War came to a pathetically Seinfeld-esque end, the world turned its Doomsday hopes to the year 2000, which also turned out to be nothing. Just look at how your parents behaved during the'70's and 80's. It's pretty clear that every life choice we made for those two decades was made under the assumption that everyone would all be dead by now.

Why We Don't Have It: Well, the Russians turned out to be bluffing more than we were, and Y2K went from Armageddon to a simple computer re-boot. It makes us wonder, though: if people hadn't spent the last 20 years partying like it was 1999, how much of these dreams could've become a reality? Like getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.



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