The Future

Well, its 2010 and everyone's talking about where's their flying car and robot maid, even me. This year seems so futuristic. But the Jetsons, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon that we base all future expectation on, was made in 1962-1963 based on a future in 2062. So we have a while to wait for our car and maid.

The other image that comes to mind with this milestone of a year is Arthur C. Clark's 2010 the sequel to 2001 in which the US and Soviets send the Discovery 2 to Jupiter to find out what happened to David Bowman and the Discovery 1. The book came out in 1982 and the movie was made in 1984 which does seem like a long time ago. But we haven't sent any maned spaceships to anything further away than the moon. And although we have a space shuttle named Discovery which is about to retire and a International space station we are no where as close to the type of space travel that the movie and book describe. We are still thinking about going to Mars and that's still in the early planning stages. Plus, our relationship with the Solviets is so different today than the early 80's the storyline hardly makes sense now.

And of course we have not colonized the moon or found any large black monoliths. Nor have we found any new life on other planets. So even though 2010 sounds very futuristic I still feel we are in the stone ages.