It’s now officially twenty years after the year The Jetsons promised us pollution-free manufacturing, robots, and flying cars, and we still don’t have any. We are now 21 years past when we were promised Moonbase Alpha. We are more than 35 years past when we were promised protection from alien invasion from space kitties by UFO. We’re working on 19 years since I was killed by a drunk driving a city pickup truck. That one actually has nothing to do with the other 3, I just though I would throw that one in. We are 19 years past a promised orbital hotel/transfer point in 2001: A Space Odyssey which also had a moonbase of some kind under construction. And I lost my deposit for the shuttle when Pan Am folded .
The point of this post is we are in The Future, and the future doesn’t look like anything Hollywood has been telling us it should be. So while we need to imagine a New Future minus a bunch of things we had been promised in the Old Future, we have a bunch of things Hollywood missed back then, but overall we are decades behind what was expected in the sci-fi media I was consuming growing up.
I accept some of the blame for this because it was my generation that should have been doing these things, but older generations also dropped the ball when the Moon program was halted in the early ’70s. It was as if Columbus hadn’t found any natives in his first voyage, and nobody came back to America. We seriously dropped the ball on making The Good Future, and got stuck with the Dystopia Lite we’re living in today. I mean seriously, almost nobody wanted this mess except for the 1% making bank off of it. And as they are the ones who had the power to create this mess, and are systematically dismantling the means of winding it back, I think we all know who are mostly responsible for all the neat things we were promised but don’t have now.
And I think I’m going to end on that note to keep this from becoming a rant against the 1%.
Witch on a Bicycle 