Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 2/27/06

Where’s My Stinking Hovercar?
By, Grey Science

Here we are in 2006, what is coming to be known as half past the dawn on the new millennium, and everyone is wondering where the future is.
Well, not the future exactly, since that is always in existence ahead of us as we are permanently in the present with the past ever behind us.
This is why I don’t get to write much.
Public opinion of late has been very bitter towards the range of technological products presently available to the public. While game consoles and flat screen TVs have proven popular most people do not see this as nearly enough. This, they say, is the Twenty First Century, long sold as the time of all sorts of futuristic inventions, mostly powered by atomic energy and featuring all sorts of wild moving parts.
While atomic energy is somewhat available it is not nearly clean enough, and tends to produce the sorts of things put in garbage cans that no one wants left on their curb.
What everyone really wants to see is flying cars, robot servants making our lives easier, moon bases, futuristic foods of exotic flavour and texture reduced to easy to swallow pills.
What everyone gets is excuses.
Let’s take a look at these four products, which were supposed to be generally available by now.
Flying cars require a power plant with a thrust to mass ratio that is not easy or inexpensive to produce. Additionally traffic laws would have to make light speed advances in order to keep up. Rescue services would have to be totally revamped to handle more midair collisions. Road Rage advocates would need to add surface to air missiles to their handy arsenal, causing small and medium arms prices to soar.
Robot servants are nearly here, if only they were not so aware of things like rights, pay or world domination.
Moon bases are tricky, it all depends on what you believe. If you believe the press releases from organisations like NASA, the Scientologists and Madam Fu’s House of Infinite Muffins then there are no moon bases because it is economically unfeasible. Establishing and maintaining a moon base would require too much for too little gain. There is nothing on the moon that cannot be had or replicated on Earth. Honest.
If you believe the likes of Grey Xphile there are bases up there exploiting all sorts of minerals, resources and native beings.
Proving that is one thing, stopping it quite another.
Foods are becoming increasingly exotic and futuristic, with many edible products containing less than ten percent by weight items that have been waved in the general direction of something that would qualify as natural food.
Reducing these and other items to pill form is taking some time. Explanations range from lack of present technical know how, to the inability to turn an entire cow into a pill.
Excuses range from obesity issues that will have to be resolved before consuming great amounts of food is made any easier to the notion that Pizza Hut won’t survive the transition with the loss of the traditional shape of it’s product.
None of this is satisfying to the public at large, still demanding flying transport, banquets that fit in the palm of their hands, automatons that can do everything for them and much, much more to make sure they don’t have to get off of a nice, comfortable chair.