Well there is no point in denying it, 2007 is here and it’s here to stay (for 12 months at least) and I’ve even been starting to talk about things that are happening in 2008. It is as a result of this that I have now realised that we are in fact… living in the future! (cue dramatic music, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a large choir, playing something Strauss-esque I feel, with kettle drums!)
Now I have had many conversations with people, over the years, about the abstract concepts of past, present and future and how, depending upon your frame of reference their relation to us can vary greatly, etc, but have you watched any classic Sci-fi films recently?
I remember very clearly watching the technicoloured vision of the future that Back to the Future II presented, with flying cars, hover boards, etc, and wondering whether I would ever see such fantastic developments within my life time… yet now I realise that it was set in 2015! That’s only 8 years in the future! And Back to the Future is by no means an isolated example.
If we look at The Terminator we realise that Skynet went online on 4th July 1997, with Judgement Day following quickly on the 29th. In Demolition Man, the initial apocalyptic vision of Western America was 1996, with Sly and co waking up in 2032. Even Star Trek First Contact was only set in 2063.
So according to science fiction, we are already well into the future. We should all be living in sky pods, wearing disposable clothes, driving hover cars, shooting little green men with laser guns (at least the bad ones anyway). We should have warp engines, transporters and anti-gravity devices… not to mention force fields, stasis sleep, photon torpedoes, universal translation devices, androids, cybernetics and replicator machines that can materialise any food, or drink, your heart desires. None of us should be working, since the robots/androids will be doing that for us, so we’re all free to be plugged into virtual reality units, or holidaying on the Moon, or Mars (depending upon your budget), or generally scooting about the solar system in space ships.
That of course is a best case scenario. The other view is that global warming should have destroyed us, aliens should have invaded us, an asteroid should have hit us, or that the computers and/or robots should have revolted, deciding that humanity was it’s own (as well as everything else’s) worst enemy, and all but wiping us off the face of the planet. The surface of the planet should be either a nuclear wasteland, a planet wide desert, permanently dark, or in it’s 5th Ice Age, with mankind being a food source, a power source, or all but extinct… all except for a small resistance group/band of survivors who in the interests of political correctness conveniently come from every colour, creed, religion and sex. Or maybe we should have just been replaced by the Apes! (I could go into a political rant about this being true in the case of politicians, but I’ll save that for another time!)
So, which is it? Well annoyingly it’s a kind of hybrid of the lot, which in actual fact is insanely dull. It’s almost like somebody has taken all of the most interesting parts of all the science fiction films and removed them, leaving behind the back story and the padding.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve achieved some truly awesome things. Take the Voyager 1 Space probe for example. Launched in 1977, it is now the farthest man made object from the earth, at a distance of 14.96 terameters (14.96×109 km) from us – that’s about 9.3 billion miles – and it is still communicating back (messages take 13.8hrs to reach us). We’ve put remote control cars on to Mars (call them Lunar Rovers if you will). We’ve taken photos of pretty much anything, from tidal patterns on the surface of a planet, to a fruit fly’s eyelashes. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips and can send information in the blink of an eye to anyone and everyone around the world, be it a simple message, a photograph, a music file, or the latest celebrity sex video. We have cars that can all but drive themselves. Phones that are cameras and walkmans, cameras that are phones and walkmans and walkmans that are the size of a one pence piece, yet can store a lifetime’s worth of music… as well as being phones and cameras. All this yet we’ve only been to the moon 6 times.
Now I know that I am regarded as a lover of shiny stuff and indeed the promises made by a lot of sci-fi is very exciting. However when it comes to it, it was the space travelling bit of the future that really transfixed me. I love space. I love the completely un-explainable nature of it. I love lying in the dark looking up at it. I love trying to understand it and getting really close before suddenly feeling an incredible sense of vertigo. In fact if I had had to make a list of all the things from science fiction that I wanted, it’s space ships that would have topped it. When in 1968 MGM released 2001: A Space Odyssey, much was made about the films realism. So much so that experts told us that “Everything in 2001 can happen within the next three decades, and… most of the picture will happen by the beginning of the next millennium.” Well the next millennium is here and has been for 7 years, yet despite some of the film’s predictions being realized, the closest we’ve got to most of it is Virgin Galactic who plan to offer sub-orbital spaceflights and later orbital spaceflights to the paying public (note the ‘plan to’). The hope is that their first passenger flight should happen before the end of 2008, though prices are still set at around £150k.
So as Robosapien gently totters around the living room, my MP3 system sorts through the 10,000’s of songs in it’s library and plays something in glorious 8.2 Dolby that I’ve never heard before. The games unit in the corner analyses my movements and replicates them photorealistically on the 64 inch flat screen, both here and for my competitor in Japan. While all this is happening, I am still left thinking of Voyager 1. I think of it passing through the heliosheath (the termination shock region between the solar system and interstellar space (you’ve got to love Wikipedia)) and I can’t help but feel a little jealous. I realise it’s foolish to be jealous of a machine, something that can’t feel emotion (yet) and that can’t truly appreciate the position it’s in (yet), but it is breaking boundaries that I suspect won’t be broken by mankind in our lifetime – and even if they are then it won’t be by me.
Space exploration is probably the slowest developing technology area. We landed on the moon in 1969 and we’ve achieved little since. We’ve taken some amazing photographs, we’ve crashed a Rover on mars, we’ve launched countless probes and we know far more about the science behind the solar system, but we’ve not actually explored it, we’ve not gone anywhere. We’ve barely explored 5% of the sea bed on this planet, let alone any other!
I realise that it’s not as simple as just doing it. I realise that it takes billions of Pounds/Dollars/Euros/Yen etc to achieve, but we spend stupid money on far more stupid things. For example Football clubs pay each other millions for the privilege of paying the players millions for them to do little else than run around kicking a ball. Only for the players to then get paid further millions for advertising everything from cars to razors. More money is spent making movies about space than is actually spent on getting out there and seeing it for real.
And so, as the chances of me going boldly where nobody’s gone before, dwindle into the ether, I can’t help feel a little sad. Sad that I’ll likely never go into space. Sad that I’ll likely not even get to go to the upper atmosphere anytime soon (if at all) and even then it will only be for the briefest of moments and the largest of cheques. Sad that I’ll probably never meet an Alien, or get to understand what happens beyond the Universe, but then, in some ways, I think that it would spoil the fun if I did. I suspect that space is rather like a really good magic trick, it never seems so good once you know how it’s done.
Stay Groovy all!
DG.x