Our future is still living in the past. We\u2019re all still waiting around for geodesic domes, flying cars and megalopolises \u2013 ideas dreamed up in the 1960s and earlier. Hell, I report science and technology for a living; I spend every day poring over magazines and websites describing discoveries \u201cwith the potential to change\u201d this and that \u201chold the promise of\u201d curing that; but, here I am, still waiting for the future of my (and my parents\u2019) childhood.<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s the problem? Well, I might have already hit on it: We\u2019ve grown so accustomed to how discoveries and innovations are reported \u2013 to that de rigueur enthusiasm \u2013 that we\u2019ve stopped believing in it. Or maybe we\u2019ve hit a version of Toffler\u2019s Future Shock, in which we feel so overwhelmed (yet oddly unimpressed) by the technological golden age in which we live that we simply bob along in the current, unable even to imagine where all of this is headed.<\/p>\n
I mean, people: We have dancing robots. We\u2019ve cracked the human genome. We have pocket-sized devices that put anything that they imagined in the 1960s to shame. We have the Internet, for Pete\u2019s sake. Our response? \u201cMeh.\u201d<\/p>\n
But I think the real reason we don\u2019t lose our grip on the dreams of the past boils down to a simple factor: We are still waiting for the other future, because it is undeniably cool. It\u2019s like the TV show Archer: It\u2019s not set in any particular time; rather, it\u2019s set in the best imaginary time period to be a spy: the clothes of the 50s, the muscle cars of the 60s, the (less heated) Cold War of the 70s, but with the computers of the 80s and the cell phones of the 90s.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what we want from our future: to brim over with the bold imagination that sprung from the most optimistic and, frankly, decadent eras of our nation, but without the awkward downside. Ironically, that\u2019s unlikely to happen, since the downsides were largely what inspired those ideas and drove people to consider them at all: traffic for flying cars, pollution for domed cities, etc. Instead, we\u2019re left with the old future\u2019s spiritual opposite: A burgeoning green industry in search of ways to remove these root problems \u2013 an industry which, let\u2019s face it, no one is exactly giddy about.<\/p>\n
We love green tech intellectually, but we crave flying muscle cars.<\/p>\n
Geographers talk about how we all have mental maps \u2013 ways that we, as individuals, see the world: not as a grid or a road atlas, but as \u201cnear the place where I proposed to my wife\u201d or \u201con my way to work.\u201d It\u2019s a personal and emotionally charged place and, for many of us, whatever isn\u2019t on it simply doesn\u2019t exist. The future is a place, too. L. P. Hartley famously wrote that, \u201cThe past is a foreign country: They do things differently there,\u201d but search the Internet, and you\u2019ll find that many of use prefer to apply his observation to the future.<\/p>\n
And what of that imagined place, that mental map? Do we already live there? If so, would the children that read of conurbations in the clouds and cities beneath the seas think that we still dream big enough? That\u2019s what this blog is all about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our future is still living in the past. We\u2019re all still waiting around for geodesic domes, flying cars and megalopolises \u2013 ideas dreamed up in the 1960s and earlier. Hell, I report science and technology for a living; I spend … Continue reading