I Was Lied To As A Child...

When I was younger, I remember reading books and seeing movies that stated that by the year 2000, we'd be flying in George Jetson cars and robots would be living among us. Trips to the moon and other planets for vacation were to be common and were even going to colonize another world. Pictures of future clothing showed streamlined, plastic looking one piece suits. Movies like a "A Clockwork Orange" showed us a dark future with milk bars and futuristic cars. "Blade Runner" showed us genetically engineered "replicants" that humans would use on other planets and other movies taught us that we would have machines that made any meal we wanted for us. Money would be unnecessary since all purchases would be made in "credits." Your personal credit number would be obtained either from a chip type of card you carried on you or extracted by scanning the barcode and/or chip that had been implanted into every citizen.

Whoa! We are so far off. What happened? How could I have been so deceived?

Some of the technology is there. We have robots, they just cost a fortune. EZ Passes and Speed Passes allow us to pay for items with a wave of our chip encoded key chains at the gas station. Pets are "chipped" with a GPS device so we can find them if they wander. We may not have replicants, but artificial intelligence technology has advanced greatly and scientists have been cloning animals for years. The military has been using hover crafts for years, but we've never evolved to anti-gravity cars or skateboards.

As I watched a documentary about our planned trips to the moon and Mars in the next twenty years, I thought about all the other advances we had been promised and had not been granted. I guess the funding never happened or the general public lost it's romance with futuristic cars once it received portable phones that fit in their pockets without a battery the size of a brick. Has the internet, the ability to download movies and music, cell phones and having so much information at your immediate disposal made us focus on immediate gratification and made us forget the goals we used to dream about as a civilization?

Is there a new dream or have we just replaced it with a egocentric lifestyle and thrown the common goal out the window? Maybe it's just difficult for the average person to dream about living on Mars when our country is at war on several fronts, the economy is in turmoil, people are trying to keep their houses and our children are still scoring below average on school subjects when compared to several other countries. Besides, when you are living paycheck to paycheck, how can you even think of voting for politicians that want to fund space projects that will cost billions of dollars and have a direct impact on the life of you and your loved ones?

I don't know the answer, but I do think that we need to learn how to dream again.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking...