Brave Humans

People everywhere are asking, now that we’re firmly entrenched in the 21st century, “Dude, where’s my flying car?” There are places online where you can read about the obsession with this query, and re-experience (or for many of us, experience for the first time) the vision of the future that never was, from fifty years ago.

On one such blog, Paleo-Future, I discovered this link to a wonderful Disney animation about futuristic transportation, “The Road Ahead,” from the idealistic and optimistic eyes of 1958. Despite the flippant tone of the title to my post, I find it sad to see the futuristic visions of that era and realize that not only have we not lived up to those visions, we’ve actually made things worse in our attempts to make them reality. A lot of that, I believe, is due to the naiveté of those dreams. For instance, when you watch the clip you’ll see a section on the cars of the future - and how they will be fueled by petroleum products including jet fuel (yet no mention of the solutions to the problems that pollution will cause), followed by being powered by the atom (with no mention of how to create safe atomic energy vehicles), and finally the “sun-powered electro-suspension car.” What they didn’t know was that by the time we got to the flying solar car, we’d have already begun poisoning the planet with the petrol and atomic energy!

Another thing that strikes me about this futuristic vision is that the prediction for what would happen to our cities has actually come to pass. “Decentraliz[ing] our population centers into vast, urban areas” would be the result of miles and miles of super-highways criss-crossing the U.S. And look what we now have: urban sprawl that in some places has decimated downtown areas, producing isolated cul-de-sacs instead of neighborhoods, and self-enclosed gated communities at least twenty minutes by car from the nearest grocery store. Shopping centers now stand where farmland once existed, surrounded by acres of parking lots, congested access roads, and not a pedestrian in sight. Notice on the graphics for that section in the film that there are no sidewalks present. No one is walking! Everyone’s riding a pod car through tubes or sliding along on enclosed moving sidewalks. It looks damn cool, but, again, the prediction didn’t take into account how obese Americans would become with the lack of necessary everyday exercise (and the exorbitant cost of health care that would result). I can speak from personal experience on this: when I lived near Boston and took the train in every day, I was on my feet walking to and from the T and work and bus or parking lot. Two years later, after moving to Columbus, Ohio, a notorious sprawl-ridden metro area, I had gained 10 pounds because I DROVE EVERYWHERE - there is little option for walking to the store, bank, etc. because many of those suburbs don’t even have sidewalks for pedestrians. It’s all about the car and the super-highway, as “The Road Ahead” had predicted.

Apparently in the world of the future, the gender roles and racism of the 1950s don’t change. The man does the driving and works at the office; the woman is a housewife who goes shopping and cares for the kids. Apparently, in the idyllic world of the future, one-income families can afford all the luxuries described in the film. Oh, if only it were true! Not that I’m advocating the strict gender roles of the ’50s, but it would be nice to have some options for one parent to take care of the home while one goes out to earn the Almighty Dollar and still afford to live in the lap of such luxury. And of course, it goes without saying that all the people in this film (and others like it) are white; apparently the vision of the future didn’t include people of color. So, while maintaining an almost manic level of optimism, this vision was far from realistic. No one could foresee the societal upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and how they would change our national consciousness forever.

I suppose I am fascinated (read: obsessed) with this paleo-future stuff because I feel let down that we didn’t do a better job of managing all this optimism and futuristic planning. Although I was born in 1968, the optimism for the future was still alive for me as a child during the 70s, and these kinds of images were still available and somehow seeded into my consciousness. My parents were from the WWII generation, as well, so I suppose that’s another influence. Even the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons from the ’50s I watched as a kid helped to cultivate this futuristic vision, albeit from a comical perspective (remember the giant electro-magnet which was supposed to capture Bugs Bunny who had eaten the iron carrot? The Coyote instead got a cave full of tractors, satellites, rockets, radio towers, and ocean liners, with air raid sirens screaming in the background). Somewhere in my little head I was branded with this idealistic vision of what the future would be, combined with a more modern sense of values and mores. Ironic that 1968 was also the year “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released – a film about the dehumanized future we were building up to, entirely dependent upon computers and machines for our survival.

I am disappointed that our society has become dirtier, uglier, and people seem more disconnected than ever. To some degree, we have fulfilled the vision of the future – it’s just that we’ve fulfilled the darker, seedier outcomes of the technology proposed at that time. We just didn’t realize all of the negative consequences of pursuing those dreams. In a word, it was short-sightedness that ultimately destroyed that optimistic dream of the future. We’ve started to catch up with those predictions, technologically speaking, and looking back, we can see how blind we were to the consequences and limitations of the technology. In a way, ignorance was bliss; without concerns for the environment or our own health, there were no limits to the imagination. But in other ways, we were extremely limited, because the future only belonged to a select few.

I don’t mean to be completely bleak and depressing, or to come down on technology as a force of evil in the world. On the contrary, I have hope that we will turn things around, still, through more conscientious applications of science and technology. Who knows, we may yet have our flying solar cars. In the meantime, we have these artifacts from our past of the future that never was. Perhaps they will inspire other generations to achieve a more humane and technologically viable vision, in the spirit of “new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future.”

Sources:
Paleo-Future
2719 Hyperion