July 18, 2012

• Weird Tales of the Future (That Never Happened)

  

   Back when I was a kid, during the 50s and 60s, the Future was bright. It was fast, technologically advanced, socially fulfilling, culturally diverse, self sustaining, and right around the corner. The future was always being predicted. You couldn't pass a magazine rack or watch a television program without seeing images of what the future was going to look like. It was an amazing future, and it  was barrelling upon us at atomic speed. I could hardly wait for the future to get here.

  

   American manufacturing reached it's peak in the late 50s, weaned on four years of wartime production building fighter planes, bombers, aircraft carriers, destroyers, tanks, jeeps and all manner and matter of goods on the supply line. Advertising flourished, with hundreds of "new and improved" products, hawked on the new electronic medium of television, and sold in "super" markets which popped up all across the North American continent. New consumers returning from Europe and the Pacific doffed their olive drabs, bought new homes and started new families. There was easy money, rampant entreprenuership, and mass cultural shifts in the society.

  

  Children reared during this hurried vibrant time seemed to be bombarded with much more of everything than their parent's generation, who were always complaining about depressions and wars, but who relished the good times they were finally experiencing. There was no tomorrow brighter than the one on the horizon. Publishing, advertising, film and television all predicted marvels like space travel and colonization, computers and mechanized labor, large televisions which hung on the wall dispensing up to the minute news and entertainment, and robots. The world would soon be populated by socially adept and aware citizens who lived in impossibly high rise city size buildiings equipped with moving sidewalks, and who piloted personal flying transportation.

  

  A postcard from the decade of the 1930s shows "New" New York, with skyscrapers shooting up to the sky. I added the advertisements, which weren't included in that decade's version of the future. 

  

  This is a modified version of a photo showing Walt Disney's planned Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow (EPCOT). The model was featured at the end of the Carousel of Progress ride at Disneyland during my childhood. (I added a couple of Werner von Brauns moon rockets and Sleeping Beauty castle for fun.)

  

  Flying cars weren't on the real horizon, but the ones zipping down the newly paved superhighways and freeways were large, powerful, and had fins which resembled wings. It wasn't a stretch of the imagination for a kid to think that soon they'd be taking off. The only robots I ever encountered as a child were made of plastic and knocked each other's heads off in a toy boxing ring. But there was a scientific field called "robotics" and great strides were being taken by the science, if not the robots themselves, which were usually wheeled and bumped into walls a lot.

  

  Television beamed stories of star treks and time tunnels and sitcom families like the Jetsons had food replicating machines which took the drudgery out of kitchen work. George Jetson was just like dad, except instead of driving forklifts and unloading trucks he pushed buttons. Technology had completely eradicated menial work, and there was a lot more free time available for the family. Heck, they had a robot maid.

  

  Science Fiction writers, most of whom I read during elementary, middle and high school, had been predicting the future for a long time, and a lot of one decade's dreams and foresightedness might become reality in succeeding decades. So much seemed to be happening so fast, that I just knew I'd be folding my flying car into a briefcase before I reached middle age. 

  

  I passed middle age about a decade ago, and I've been wondering what happened to that future they predicted. It never happened.

  

  The Atomic Age was in full mushroom cloud bloom by the time I was born in 1953. The space age actually began at about the time I began reading about it for the first time in the late 50s. Rockets were everywhere. and they seemed to have lots of fuel to burn. Atomic Power was going to solve everyone's problems, both as a power source and deterrent to our enemies. We celebrated by crowning Miss Atom in the desert and we watched our nuclear bombs explode wearing what looked like 3D glasses.

  

  Rockets blew up. And they were nothing like I knew from science fiction movies. They spread a lot of big hulking waste (not to mention spent rocket fuel) around for long before they actually started to work. And fail.

  A rocket's very liftoff from the ground is a controlled explosion. Accidental explosions end the mission early and cause lots of grief.  Man finally stepped foot on the moon, as the 60s approached it's sunset. By mid 70s, so many astronauts had left their footprints all over the moon that nobody cared, and mankind ended up leaving his space trash on the previously untarnished moonscape as he made his quick exit back to the seeming safety of his crumbling home planet. As time passed, and rockets were replaced by space shuttles which still had a unpredictable habit of blowing up, some conspiracy theorists maintained that the entire space program was a sham and had been embellished with cheap special effects in Hollywood movie studios.

  

  The 60s didn't fade into the sunset of reality; they burst in a fireball of generational clashes and battles over an unwanted war. The idealists of the 60s disco danced through the 70s and eventually became the yuppies of the 80s. The future slowed down a bit, and it's vision became a bit more distopian in ithe predictions being made during the 80s. Trickle down economics and the end of the "cold war" between Communism and American Democracy ignited another era of excess profit and bright optimism. Computers started getting smaller and they were manufactured for the masses. We had "electronic" music and could videotape our television shows so we could watch them on our own schedules. The President of the United States was an ex actor succumbing to early onset Alzheimer's Disease, but he played a solid respected leader and soothed the country, even as some pundits became aware that perhaps the future as it had been predicted would never get here, and maybe the bubble of false profits would someday suddenly burst.  The culture of science fiction taught us that the eventual use of robots as our slaves would cause them to ultimately revolt and take over the planet.

  

  As robots were slowly being eked into existence (but engineered to assemble automobiles rather than watch over our children and clean up our houses) electronic computing, usually operating silently in the background of earlier predictions, found itself at the forefront of a new "Age of Information." The robots designed to build Ameriica's cars were put out of work as America bought cheaper smaller cars from Asian manufacturers eager to supply us with smaller, less gas guzzling vehicles at a time when petroleum prices shot higher in the sky than any rocket.

  

  American manufacturing waned. Asian imports flooded the market. Not only automobiles, but clothing, stereo gear, televisions and video games! The old wartime inspired moniker "Made in Japan", which originally had negative connotations, seemed to be stamped on a great many of the products Americans bought and used in the 80s and 90s. Not only Japan, but Korea and China made and sold increasing numbers of products to Americans. Great former manufacturing metropolises in the United States, built by the promise of the future, started to dry up. Tall buildings were vacated. Jobs disappeared. Eventually, aging expensive spacecraft stopped flying, were dismantled, and sent to museums.

  The future didn't resemble itself at all.

  Back in my past, the future gave the Jetsons family lots of free time. Now it's the large mass of humanity who've lost their jobs and homes who have plenty of free time. The timesaving advancements of technology come at such a rapid clip that as soon as we learn how to use a piece of new fangled equipment, it becomes obsolete and we have to learn how to use it's replacement. 

  We should have been renting condominiums on the moon by now. Governmental space agencies have given way to free enterprise. If we have a few million dollars, we can book a commuter flight to the moon! It'll take a couple of decades before the spacecraft is built and ready to take off however.

  Cars can drive themselves, but they still can't fly. There are a couple of enterprising manufacturers offering flying cars, or to be more specific, small aircraft with removeable wings which can be driven on the highway, but they're expensive and bulky.

  

  Food replication machines haven't arrived. We had internet refrigerators back around the turn of the century. They could alert us when our milk was going stale, and perhaps they could sign on to the internet and create a Xanga site! I don't know. They didn't stick around long enough. Microwave ovens will cook our freeze dried food, but nothing will create a meal out of seeming nowhere like in Star Trek or The Jetsons.

  Urban centers are still overcrowded, and larger, taller buildings are still being built all over the world. Some of the tallest building aren't in the U.S. though. They're in countries like China and Dubai.Urban planning seems to have been lost it's plans, and most of America's cities are woefully outdated, dirty, and crime ridden. Any attempt by intellectuals to impose social planning in the U.S. is quickly shot down, and their perpetrators branded communists.

  The Future sputtered, stalled out, and crashed by the side of the road. We do have "the internet", a means of mass communication which should inspire global communication and understanding, but it simply took the place of the printing press and radio. People are still single minded, naive, bull headed, and intolerant. There aren't too many "discussions" on the internet, but there sure are a lot of quarrels and misunderstanding. The age of information is deluged with it, but not with any sane means of trying to put it in it's context or explain it's significance.

  The best place to find that wonderful new future we were promised is in the past. Disneyland closed down the Carousel of Progress long ago. Technological marvels unheard of just a "yesterday" aren't on the drawing boards long enough for the ink to dry. (although there is no ink in a computer CAD program, of course)

  As my generation grows older, more forgetful, and able to see less and less as our eyes fail us, that future which once looked so bright has dimmed considerably. There doesn't seem to be many futurists among the latest generation. And most of the past is instantly available with only a few clicks of the mouse.

  That damn future never arrived, and I'm now nearing the golden sunset of my own life. I take more pleasure in nature than in electronics. I do hope that cloning becomes available soon, however. Perhaps I can just transplant my brain into a better version of me. I'm sure it'll be expensive. At least if I can get me a young body then I can comfortably wait for that damn future to get here.

  

  BIBLIOGRAPHY & REQUIRED READING: Future Past website by David S. Zondy, Gajitz, Weird Science and Future technology site, Robots, part of my Cultural Blender website from 2005, 20 Predictions of the Future (We're Still Waiting For) from Manolith, PaleoFuture Blog, Stuff You Should Know: The Future, from The Smoking Jacket website.

  Most of the images I've presented to accompany this post are composites I created over the weekend with images gathered from around the web. The magazine covers were found by googling images for Popular Science, Weird Tales, etc. I've been planning this entry for about a year. Gathering the images and creating the composites took most of my time over the weekend. I began writing the essay last night, worked on it some this morning, and finished it up at lunch. This is a perfect example of one of my "typical" blog entries, designed like a lavish magazine spread. I hope you enjoy. It was a blast creating this!  MFN/ppf

  EDIT: 7/18/12 7:00am. Thought this entry would get more exposure. Thanks to those who have commented/recommeded. Haven't been able to access Xanga at home much for the last two days. Firefox keeps telling me it's waiting for css.xanga which must mean the stylesheet formatting is acting up, I guess. Seems I can only get on the main page, universal inbox, and on sites created before "themes." When a site does show up, it's a bunch of elements piled up like when javascript isn't working. That future they predicted didn't include computer glitches! MFN/ppf

  July 16, 2012 1:10 PM

  • 9:17 pm
  • 42 Comments