The Column
Motto: GREAT SCOTT!
Yesterday was “Back to the Future” day. That is popular knowledge right now. I’m not stating that not so much to inform you now, but moreso as a reference for the future to give this Column some context.
Anyway, in Back to the Future 2 we got to see what 1985 America thought 2015 America would look like. There were some articles that came out yesterday in which people predicted what life will look like in 30 years… I think they were all wrong. Here’s my 100% “or your money back” guaranteed predictions for the year 2045:
- I will be 57 years old (or dead). I’ll weigh 240 pounds. Slightly heavier than I am now. I will have aged like fine wine… with the face of a sophisticated gentleman.
- Mizzou will still not have a Men’s Basketball National Championship… likely will still not have even gone to the championship game… or the Final Four.
- We will still not be flying everywhere we go (unless somebody recreates Tony Stark’s arc reactor and repulsor technologies).
- Everyone’s mom will be named “Elsa”.
- Most forms of travel in the civilized world will be automated. Welcome to your Johnny Cab.
- All computers will be made by the one, all-encompassing tech company: Microgoogpple.
- We will have cured a couple cancers, not others. The common cold will still be common.
- We will discover alien life, but we will be more advanced than they are. We will abduct several and probe them in what we think is probably their mouths to find out more about their species.
- We will land people on Mars.
- One of the people will accidentally be left on Mars, only to be rescued by a wormhole that some 4th dimensional beings placed behind Saturn. HAL won’t open the pod bay doors for Sandra Bullock. I’m mixing together space movie references, get it?
- We will have a global network of connections. You’ll literally never be out of reach of signal anywhere on the surface of the planet. The ubiquity of this connection will enable our societies to advance in ways that only the fringiest of the fringe nerds are experimenting with today. You’ll have a “personal cloud” of media, services to which you subscribe, health and diagnostics information, and productivity information that you can access from literally anywhere using one of many different form factors of device. Keys won’t be a thing. You are the key. Augmented reality will become more popular, and as such, wearables will become more the norm. The audio and visual inputs to your brain will reside in a thing on your head. You won’t need a phone with a screen and speakers any more. We will effectively become cyborgs, without the need to splice machinery into our bodies.
- We will still work 40 hour weeks, despite dozens of advancements and automations that should have rendered the working week to 30 or 20 hours.
- We will have removed the barriers of communication between people. The translation apps we have on our phones today will translate in real time - and in a voice similar to the person with whom we are talking. Phone calls will still be called phone calls, even though the notion of a physical phone will be somewhat recently outdated (similar to how we “dial” a phone today, even though our phones no longer use dials.
- Teenage girls will start reading Frankenstein romance novels. A fanfiction Frankenstein romance novel will spin off into a real, but unrelated set of novels called “51 Shades of Grey”. It will be renowned as “truly being 1 better than the original”.
- 4+ of these predictions will turn out true, including at least 1 joke prediction. To keep things interesting there I alternated between being serious and joking every other prediction.
Here’s an unrelated picture to go out on… I told a few people I needed to make this GIF for when I make a terrible joke for the sake of making a terrible joke:
Top 5: Things Marty McFly would be disappointed by in actual 2015
5. Cars don’t fly.
4. Nobody wears clear neckties.
3. We don’t have 19 sequels of Jaws. Instead we have 19 prequels, origin stories, reboots, and spinoffs of every franchise that’s ever existed.
2. Our videogames still use physical controllers.
1. The things we call “hoverboards” have frickin’ wheels. C’mon, science.
Quote:
“I have the heart of a lion, and a lifetime ban from Sedgwick County Zoo.”
- Jon -