The Future Is Now. . .

Is This the Brave New World We Had Expected?

The future is now. This is it: the year 2000. But how does the world around us stack up to what we all thought the "future" was going to be? We've all grown up with images from popular culture showcasing the marvels of technology that would be available to us: cars that fly, food pills, wall-sized TV sets and robots (there are always robots in the future).

Visual by www.PDImages.com

Houses designed in stainless steel and plastic would clean themselves automatically, businessmen would only work four days a week (from home, no less), and vacationing on the moon or an orbiting space station (Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey") wouldn't be unheard of. The future looked to be a pretty cool place to live. On the flip side, many pop-culture prophets heralded doom and gloom for the future. George Orwell's book "1984" predicted a more totalitarian vision of the future.

Despite the fact that these predictions range from a future of whimsy to one of despair, it is clear that popular culture's view of the future has had a profound influence on our present-day lives. One need only look up to see that the future is all around us. We're in the future. Live it or live with it.

Imagine yourself behind the wheel of a car and you look outside your window to see the pavement speeding by-but there isn't any. The reason you don’t see any pavement is because you are in a car that is flying miles above the earth.

The flying car is usually always thought of when the future of transportation is being discussed.

Not seeing flying cars in the sky today doesn't mean the prospect has never been tried. After World War II, the project to make a successful flying car was in full force. The Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company of San Diego made a prototype in 1947 of the flying car called the ConvAIRCAR. On its first trip out, it circled San Diego in one hour and 18 minutes, but crash-landed on its second trip out, pretty much ending the chances of a flying car.

According to the Smithsonian, there have been at least 30 patents filed for flying cars in the United States since the ConvAIRCAR was introduced, although the chances of these flying cars ever hitting the market are slim to none due to FAA regulations, engineering problems and insurance difficulties.

The flying car was one idea conjured up in entertainment that were never put into flight. That doesn't mean there aren't new advances being made in transportation today. New developments in transportation are being made at Humboldt State University.

Michael Winkler, a physics graduate student, is working on improving the quality of our automobiles at Schatz Energy Research Center. He and a team are currently working on an energy source called fuel cells that can be used in vehicles. These energy-efficient fuel cells run on hydrogen and their only byproduct is water. The team is working to use them first in automobiles, but it wants to get to a point where the cells can be used in airplanes.

"The fuels cells are not a reliable source yet," said Winkler. "They are not yet ready for commercial use. It will take time."

There have also been advancements in communication.

Disposable computers, video monitoring telephones, a whole network of phone lines and computers, these make up just some of the advancements occurring now in the global village.

The Internet has become a way of communication and an informational tool. Where else can we sit in one seat and look up anything imaginable?

Telephone communication has also undergone some amazing changes. Not only has it become possible for telephones to be used anywhere, but also logging onto the Internet, linking to the stock market or keeping daily appointment schedules have all become common place for those digital cellular phone users.

When Captain Kirk whipped out his communicator to ask Scotty to "beam me up" on the popular "Star Trek" series, who knew that we'd be able to have our own communicators in the form of the cellular phone? Today, people can actually work, shop and bank from the comfort of home. In the business world, the Internet has become indispensable.

From one extreme to the other, the pop-culture prognosticators have provided us with a glimpse into our future, where the magical year 2000 would either be the herald of a technological utopia or the dawning of a self-inflicted apocalypse. For better or worse, we haven't reached either state, somewhere between George Jetson and George Orwell, the year 2000 may still hold some promise. The future is now.