We’re already seven years past Billy Joel’s projected dystopia of “Miami 2017”, 2010 (the year we make contact) is now 14 years in the rearview mirror, and Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles of 2019 was supposed to happen five years ago.
By these cultural yardsticks, we are doing:
- Better than Miami 2017
- Better than Los Angeles 2019
- Well, about 2010…
The movie 2010 came out in 1984 and imagined a world where Russians and Americans worked together in space (but were on the verge of starting WW3 on Earth). Despite Russia descending into an autocracy ruled by a brutal, invasion-loving dictator since then (meet the new boss, etc.), that cooperation still happens today (albeit with more tension) with the International Space Station. But humans have never ventured past the moon (nor even been there in the last 50 years), let alone voyaged out to Jupiter. We’ve left most of our exploration to unmanned probes and the movies1Unmanned probes are actually a very effective way to explore the reaches of our solar system.
So we are doing better than the dystopian versions of the future, but kind of standing still or regressing on the space exploration part. And any alien life that may be out there has not seen fit to help us with our various crises of climate, politics and all that. Maybe they look at us like the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas. We amuse them.
But here’s to 2024, and to things getting better, hopefully, even as we continue to deal with the ills, problems and plagues of 2023 that don’t pause because we flip the calendar over to a new year2As I write this, there are reports of a 7.5 major earthquake in Japan. Another reminder that the world doesn’t pause for a new year.
