Tales of Future Past

[Mammon]

Thought this was an interesting essay.

http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm

It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.

A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we're there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o'clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.

Boy, were we off base. It isn't simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.

Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!

I remember seeing this video a couple months ago of the world fair, and there vision of the future. It seemed so bizarre, stepping into the past but seeing only the future, or what people wanted so badly for the future to be. It's kind of hear-warming and gut-wrenching at the same time. We live in a world that dreams so big, but is held back to much. At least that generation did. I think a lot of my generation dreams of nothing and doesn't belief in going anywhere, well part anyways. The other part has the same dreams as the older generations, just the aesthetics have changed, there is some tripes about being greener in there, but there are still flying cars and robots.

The bar keeps being set at different stages. 60 years ago, the year 2000 was the space age. Now the year 2100 is, or 2300 is... or by 2300 we are all dead because the warming and rising sea released tons of methane and turned our climate into something akin of being jupiter. Or we live in a dystopia ruled by people who believe in everything we dont, or stand for everything we hate. Or aliens have come and wiped our civilization clean, because they stand for everything we hate or are curing us of everything we hate; depends who you ask.

I think the outlooks people have for the future are interesting. The biggest thing I've noticed is how bleaker and darker they seem to be getting. The people who dream of the Atomic Age or Rocket Age were optimistic and looked forward to a bright future to catch them. I'm noticing more people who are afraid of the future more and more. They can't even identify what scares them so much. They seem to be trying to crawl, like children, to the past.

It's interesting, what are your observations?

[ruveyn ben yosef]

It's interesting, what are your observations?

Where are the Flying Cars?

The Future is not what it used to be.

ruveyn

[Clawg]

Where are the Flying Cars?

The Future is not what it used to be.

ruveyn

According to the movies we still have to wait 7 years:

... as they use their time-traveling De Lorean, which is now capable of flight, to travel to a retro-futuristic version of 2015 ...

Well, I think the future will be like 1984, Matrix etc. for a large portion of the population with a minority being aware what is going on. What side will "win" will be determined by philosophy and technology, i.e. what type of technology the individual has access to compared to the technology (statist) governments/cooperations have access to.

Sooner or later artificial life forms will become conscious and claim rights, they will be adapted better to those conditions than we are (except if we are able to significantly enhance our brains with cyborg technology and genetic modification which I have my doubts).

I think more and more people are afraid of a "Terminator"-like scenario (or cyborg and genetic technology in general), they see humanity as something sacred ignoring what makes a human special (his rationality, which also other beings could have in the future, e.g. computers).

[D'kian]

Pesimistic views of the future are nothing new. Just about all religions have a vision of the end of the world, for example. And remember such works as 1984, Farenheit 451 and Brave New World, not to mention Anthem (though Anthem does find a positive way out).

I can see two possible explanations for part of the cuase of the current pesimism.

1) The manifest failure of socialism. Socialism and Communism pretty much offered heaven on Earth. We'd all be prosperous, happy and content. Communism envisioned great industrial achievements. This all failed, while Capitalism forged ahead and delivered many of the things socialism promised (certainly prosperity, liberty and the pursuit of happiness).

While there's nothing wrong with changing one's ideas to reflect reality, it's not an easy thing to do for commited ideologues and intellectuals who were never enamored of reality to begin with. Ergo they counter socialism's failure by imagining even worse things as a result of Capitalism. They're saying, in effect "We may have failed to produce prosperity, but you'll destroy the world!"

2) Many of the promises of the more optimistic eras have gone unfulfilled. Space travel remains expensive and rare (though not as much as in the past and costs are still coming down), there are no flying cars, no video phones on every home and every street corner, no pollution-free cars, no robot slaves to do our bidding, no cure for cancer and, worst of all, no massive amounts of leisure time because machines and computers do so much of our work.

On the other hand many unexpected new technologies have revolutionized our lives. Flight is much more common and much cheaper than it used to be. We have the Internet, cell phones, GPS, computers that boost productivity, digital cameras, much better medical technologies and drugs (no cure for cancer, but we've made headway there too), astonishing materials for leisure (videogames, DVDs, gigantic TVS, cable and satellite TV, MP3 players, etc etc).

Nevertheless some poeple may feel they were lied to and/or cheated. Witness the prevalence of conspiracy theories about some mythical super-efficient car, or one that runs on water, or electric cars, etc etc. To be sure, some of these promises were overblown (in particualr the one about nuclear electricity eventually being too cheap to meter, ugh!), but most were fligths of fancy and nothing more. Many will eventually come true. The Internet, thanks to the fortunes it enabled some men to create, has led to a plethora of private aerospace companies that are bringing down the costs of spaceflight, just to name one example.

Anyway, if you think you were lied to or cheated about optimistic promises past, you'd naturally be wary of future optimistic promises.

I'm more concerned about my first explanation. The left is embracing the Christian dictum about gaining wealth and loosing one's soul. It is pursuing that idea very hard, too.

[Thales]

I think the outlooks people have for the future are interesting. The biggest thing I've noticed is how bleaker and darker they seem to be getting. The people who dream of the Atomic Age or Rocket Age were optimistic and looked forward to a bright future to catch them. I'm noticing more people who are afraid of the future more and more. They can't even identify what scares them so much. They seem to be trying to crawl, like children, to the past.

It's interesting, what are your observations?

You're entirely right. Prior to the 1960s Americans had a much better sense of life and had a much more positive view of the world and the future. They believed great things would happen, because great things were happening. The steam engine, the train, the telegraph, steel, the telephone, the phonograph, the movie projector, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the helicopter, better medicine, the television, and much more were invented in a relatively short space of time. The difference between the way life was in the 1700s and the mid-1900s was stark. There had never been such a fast transformation in human history and America and Europe were at the epicenter of it. Prior to this period of time progress was painfully slow, so that from generation to generation everyone lived with the same basic creature comforts. There was little difference in quality of life. This incredible forward moving progress rightly made people optimistic about what man could do. It was manifest by what he had done when left unshackled to live his life in freedom.

In fact, according to Ayn Rand, in the 1800s men in America (and probably Western Europe) had an even better sense of life.

But then something happened in the 1960s. Radical, America-hating leftists came out of the universities. They heaped scorn upon the country. They gave us multiculturalism, environmentalism and feminism. Philosophical tools of anti-Western and anti-man hatred. Environmentalism is especially pernicious against progress and sees man as a tarnishing blot on nature. These “thinkers” have been continuously at work chipping away at our liberties and values. In the 1970s, environmentalism was rarely heard. The ecology movement was a fringe phenomenon, an oddity. Today it is all consuming in the media. Everything is about the environment.

Let me add an addendum to the sense of life of the 1950s. I think those people were right. The future we are seeing is not nearly what it would have been had we been freer. Organization like the FDA, OSHA, the EPA, and innumerable other regulators and taxers have put the breaks on our rate of progress big time. The more people are regulated and taxed, the less they will be willing to pursue long range ambitious projects. Regulations and taxes are killers, but they are often stealth killers, because nobody can predict what might have been.

[Space Patroller]

This thread is so on the money that it's not funny. You may consider me an emmisary of such a future. Actually one of several of them.

I have always considered science fiction and science fantasy to be the ultimate froms of Romantic art since they focus specifically upon the use of the faculty of Reason. in particular, Ithe senxe of life generated by the early 1950's "space shows: was a perfect match for the philosophical system that Ayn Rand would make

For my purpose here, use the direct entry image. You can always hit the other sites later

BUZZ CORRY WANTS YOU!

http://www.spacepatrol.us/

This site has the apporval of tow of the persons who were very involved with the modern resurrection of interest in Space Patrol: Jean-Noel Bassior

http://spacepatrolbook.com

and Dr Warren Chaney

Edited February 23, 2009 by Space Patroller

[Myself]

I think the outlooks people have for the future are interesting. The biggest thing I've noticed is how bleaker and darker they seem to be getting. The people who dream of the Atomic Age or Rocket Age were optimistic and looked forward to a bright future to catch them. I'm noticing more people who are afraid of the future more and more. They can't even identify what scares them so much. They seem to be trying to crawl, like children, to the past.

You should look up "I'm Scared", a short story by Jack Finney. When you've finished reading it remember that it was published in 1951. The feeling you're describing isn't new and it wasn't new 50 years ago.

Edited February 23, 2009 by Myself