We Were Promised Jet Packs: Lamenting The Future That Never Was

The future. What happened to you? Weren’t we supposed to be communicating via telepathy on Mars while wearing rocket-powered Nikes by now? Which means that somebody—somewhere—has a helluva lot to answer for. All those TV shows that predicted the future, all those World Fairs and exhibitions and films, all those bearded science men in nylon flares and giant side burns telling us the future was going to have moving pavements and robot servants. What did we get? Roombas and moving airport walkways. Yeah, nice one future. Nice one. It’s just all part of the great false-future conspiracy that was propagated by people too blinded by the idea of a new century that they forgot about reality and just let their imaginations run away to the moon.

Well, it’s high time we named and shamed, and had a look at some of those wistful ideas that had us head-over-heels for the future, only to get there and find out it wasn’t to be. It’s like running downstairs Christmas morning only to find cold-hard reality has stolen your new bike and replaced it with a pair of wooly socks.

Personal Jet Packs

Yeah, so what happened to these? Everything was looking fine and dandy around 1960 when the technology made them seem tantalizingly close. You could almost smell the kerosene and feel their powerful burn licking at your heels. So WTF? Did we get lazy? Come on science, don’t let little things like the laws of physics and danger to human life get in the way. Only a cry baby would get defeated by something like that. Buck up your ideas and sort it out. We want our rocket-propelled transportation of tomorrow, and we want it now.

Food Pills

Why are we still having to chew? Can someone explain that, please? By now humanity should’ve evolved a mouth that contains no teeth—and those people who gag when they have to swallow pills? Natural selection would’ve eradicated them from the gene pool.

Organic Robots

You can get organic mayonnaise, why can’t we have organic robots made from synthetic biological materials? Instead we have to make do with a bunch of halfwits who can’t even walk up some stairs. We were supposed to have full blown replicants by now, with the whole “are they human/are they machine?” thing reaching some philosophical zenith that finally plateaued into no one really caring. Hang on, this may’ve already happened except they forgot to tell us. Hmm…

Three Hour Working Days

So, when did the Jetsons stop becoming the televisual equivalent of the oracle at Delphi? Didn’t they only work a back breaking three hours a day three days a week? Got that one wrong, didn’t they. The Victorians didn’t invent leisure time just for the fun of it. Well, they did, but surely they’d want their benefactors to have achieved a better ratio than five days working, two days off. Three words: Spacely Space Sprockets.

Space Elevator

I can only hope that this is being kept secret from me as some kind of birthday surprise. But if not, then shame on us all. If our ancestors could see us now, both feet firmly planted here on earth without an elevator to the heavens, they would laugh in our stupid faces. Even Neanderthal man would’ve had a space elevator by now. It’s embarrassing! Here’s hoping a benevolent alien race doesn’t find us, they’ll take one look at us, turn to each other and go “Yeah, that blue stuff looks neat, but there’s no space elevator. Laaaaame!” And off they’ll go, preferring instead to hang out with some lowly extremophiles. Pathetic.

Rayguns

What? You’re telling me they can put a man on the moon but we can’t have portable lazers that make pew pew noises while firing concentrated beams of light? Too much to ask? Humankind needs to get its priorities straight. Put a hold on the whole giving the world clean water thing, forget about housing the poor, the Euro can go eat one, we need our portable energy weapons and we need them pretty sharpish.

Invisibility Cloak

Of course, invisibility. What, did it work so well that you put the cloak down and now you can’t find it? Oh, it’s in development is it? Well, I’ll tell that to the interstellar fiends with faces like lobsters when they come down to trophy-hunt us with their plasma blades and spear guns and cloaking devices. That’ll put us in good stead, maybe they’ll happily take a rain check on enslaving humankind and come back in a few decades when we’ve finally nailed it. I’m sure they’ll understand.

Underwater Cities

We should all be living under the sea by now, just like the song says. But we’re not, instead we haven’t even finished checking out what’s down there. In fact, we haven’t really started, so you can forget about an underwater kingdom where we mate (somehow) with mer-people and travel through the seas on giant turtles attached to bottle-nose dolphins, singing sea-shanties with talking crabs. Forget it!

Clairvoyant Martian Mutants

I bet the police forces of the world are lamenting the fact that we’ve only managed to send a couple of remote controlled cars to the surface of Mars. I bet they could sorely do with some precogs to help predict all the cyber crime that’s going to increase in the years to come. The good news: at least you won’t get arrested for a crime you’ve yet to commit.

Virtual Vacations

Why physically go to Mars when you can go their virtually? That could be a lame slogan for a company who specialize in virtual vacations, if they’d only pull their socks up and actually create the technology to transform your living room into a rust-covered planet. Or you know, plant a chip in your brain so you don’t know what’s fantasy and what’s reality. Before you know it, you’re leading a bunch of mutated human freedom fighters on a Mars colony in a rebellious bid to give the population fresh air to breathe.