Vintage Future

In the 1960s, The Jetsons were set one hundred years out in 2062. Not a bad looking future, with flying cars and robot maids. In 1973, Soylent Green warned us that pollution, overpopulation, and the greenhouse effect could send the Western world into a new Dark Age in 2022. In 1982, Blade Runner depicted life in the year 2019, a polluted planet being abandoned for off-world colonies, molded by Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Back to the Future II depicted life in 2015, a scant three years away, as a much more pleasant place.

There are no flying cars, no jetpacks, no hoverboards, no robot maids. Of course, we're not eating soylent green, the world isn't entirely polluted and it isn't a police state either, so it isn't all bad.

Back in my day (oh geez...when did that happen?), schools had libraries rather than media centers, with actual books and magazines. What makes more sense as the future of libraries...digitized information or robots getting the book you wanted?

Sometimes the future we imagined wouldn't be better that what we can do now, just different. Cars don't zip through some highway in the sky, but they do have GPS and WiFi built into them. The flying car became the symbol of a future that never was, and one we are likely better off without.

We are not bound by what someone else thought one hundred or fifty or even one year ago. Napoleon Hill said it best: we are what we believe and where we believe we should be. Want to be different or be somewhere else? Change what you believe. The future’s not what it used to be, and that is a good thing.