The future difference from the past

There were two stories on Friday, May 29 from two different places that look like they were written to be two sides of an argument. The first one I read is from the CNN website titled "Why our 'amazing' science fiction future fizzled". The other is from the New York Times website titled "Docking Brings Space Station to Full Staff". This picture of the "city of the future" is from here.

The CNN article, seeming to be about the "fizzling" what we thought were going to be amazing advances in the future, is kind of mixed up. It talks for a while about failed innovations like the jet pack. Weren't we all supposed to have them by now? Well, no, we weren't. Some writers at one time or another used them as a plot device in their story. No one promised that we would all have jet packs or that we would even want them. Especially with the price of gas now! Then the CNN article seems to get a little more hopeful. After all, a lot of the things that were "predicted" (remember, they weren't promised) actually were invented but just aren't practical.

To me the CNN article is just one more swipe at science and technology, "If you guys are so smart, where are all these wonderful things?" Well, I'll tell you where they are - in the minds of people who had to make a living. Nothing is free and no one wanted to pay for the future. Instead, customers craved the softest tissue paper on earth. Customers craved bigger, faster cars that burned as much gas as could be pumped out of the ground. Customers craved fast food and pictures of celebrities in bathing suits. We got what we wanted. People didn't want a fantastic future with everyone working together for the benefit of all. We found it more profitable to make weapons and for politicians to scare us into using them.

The other side of the coin came in the New York Times article. It was shorter and not meant to be provocative. It was just a simple report that a Soyuz spacecraft had arrived at the International Space Station bringing three more crew members to the station. That brings the total crew to six and is the full complement that the station was designed to hold. What, to me, is great is that the six crew members represent five countries. The station is more like the future Star Trek predicted than the one favored by most science fiction stories. The space station crew are working together to build something for the use of all the people of Earth. And to make this happen took a tremendous amount of innovation, invention and manufacturing. The truth is, the "future", that is "now", is even more fantastic than anyone could have predicted. We carry around a small, battery powered device and can talk to almost anyone in the world. We have access to more information (and yes, misinformation) on the Internet than we can imagine. The world actually has the capacity to feed itself and we could probably get together and cure many of the diseases that troubled us in the past. But it all depends on where we place our priorities. Shall we spend more of our money on looking for more oil or looking for alternative energy sources? Shall we spend more money suing each other over a fence too close to a property line or breaking down barriers keeping agricultural innovation our of a poor country? There is only so much money and so many talented people to go around. Our future is based on the decisions we make today.