A journalist (and would-be “interplanetary adventurer”) looks back at the world he anticipated as a boy, wondering what happened to the future he expected. He Said…
(Nov. 18) — I turned 40 this year and, alas, like many before me who’ve entered middle age, I’ve fallen quite short of my long-term career goal. In my case, that was to become a space-suited technician in a dusty lunar city.
This year also happens to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the first time a human being ever set foot on another world. This event was always in the background during my ’70s-era childhood, that giant leap for mankind a mere first step toward …. what? Huge, circular space stations, gracefully pirouetting in low Earth orbit, like those imagined by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill? Would I be getting there aboard the airliner-cum-rocket ships depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”? As a boy peering through my telescope, I saw not just the blemished face of the moon but my own future self, circa the fantastic-sounding year 2003, instructing my android co-pilot to activate the boosters, now.
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Am I the only one? I don’t think so. For a lot of us who were born before 1985 or so, the 21st century, the idea of the 21st century, had an almost mystical hold on the imagination. The textbooks, documentaries and TV shows of my boyhood held out the aughts as the era when the capital F Future would arrive, a gleaming time of flying cars and jet packs. Robotic body parts that would come in sizes for both Bionic Men and Bionic Women. Cities under domes, looking like God’s own snow globes.
Big changes weren’t in the offing just in the technological realm, either — the very organizing principles of American civilization itself were going to be scrapped and reworked along rational, scientific lines. Armed with their powerful computers, government bureaucrats weren’t just going to tame the market, they were going to replace it, with each of us holding our assigned jobs and receiving an appropriate quantity of goods down at the supermarket managed by Uncle Sam. Just like in Glenn Beck’s worst nightmares, we were all supposed to be socialists now.
That none of this has come to pass has made the year 2009 somehow less, well, future-y to me. Sure, a lot’s happened that would have wowed me back when the coolest person I knew of was Capt. Kirk. Today, I can watch “Star Trek” reruns on streaming video whenever I want, on a laptop one-tenth the size of my cousin’s mammoth, first-generation Apple built back in the late ’70s. They can clone now. Scientists are even on the cusp of coaxing a dinosaur back to life, using genetic material extracted from a fossil, “Jurassic Park”-style.
And yet for all that, the daily tenor of existence hasn’t really changed that much from the time when my father was my age now. Most of us still get into our earthbound, gas-powered cars — which employ technology essentially unchanged in 120 years — and drive to work. And yes, we still have to go to work. A few multimillionaires have paid a fortune for brief, thrilling rides into low Earth orbit, but the job market for astronauts remains pretty tiny.
The big mistake many of those long-ago visionaries made was to assume that the trends of their day would simply continue unabated into the future, and that the culture would not depart from the path it was treading at the time. The creation of Medicare back in the ’60s, for instance, was supposed to beget even more government intervention in the economy — that is, until modern conservatism’s godfather, William F. Buckley, famously yelled “Stop!” The lunar landing of ’69 sure looked like the precursor to the Mars landing of ’79 — that is, until the American taxpayer decided there were far more pressing problems here on Earth.
Still, I have hope. If anyone out there is looking to hire an interplanetary adventurer, please, let me know and I’ll send along a resume. You’ll have to provide the android co-pilot, though.
