The Futures of the Past

I was excogitating recently about the 1950’s-era visions of the future that we would have supposedly seen as early as the 1970’s. You know them. Art Deco style moon bases replete with shag carpeting and jetpack-laden, silver-leisure-suit-wearing androids delivering space-food which was constructed by our personal home computer–and who can forget the nuclear powered flying ’57 Chevys? I had to ask, though, where is it all? This space-aged wonderland was supposed to have arrived decades ago, leaving us time to enjoy the fruits of science-fiction long enough to get Lost in Space by the late-1990’s and to be Terminated by self-aware machines by the early-2000’s. Instead, the closest thing we have to flying ’57 Chevys are floating ’57 Chevys.  Driven by Cubans on their way from Havana to Miami.

One can’t help but wonder if America had not devolved down the path of New Deal-inspired welfare statism whether we would actually have some of those space-age technologies, but I digress. I thought it would be a neat diversion to look at what some envisioned the future to look like, and compare it to what the future-as-we-know-it looks like.