the FUTURE

and how disappointing it is

We're living in the future. There's no doubt about that. 2001 is unthinkably forever ago. 2010 has come and gone and we only have one sun. Lost in Space took place in 1999. And even Kahn himself is a product of late Twentieth century genetic engineering.

We're well past all these dates with very little to show for it. In fact you can't list what we do have at this point, so lets review just some things we don't have:

• NO mysterious black obelisk.
• NO super-computer driven space ship that will kill us.
• NO space adventuring families.
• NO super-villain with a terrific accent that can be a scurge to both Captain and Admiral (Admiral? Admiral) James T. Kirk.
• NO hovercraft, flying cars, flying bicycles, hover boots, or hover skateboards.
• NO X-Ray glasses, steak-dinner pills, shrinking machines, or personal-helper robots.

The best we have is computers, and they (or the machines they are certain to create) are 100% guaranteed to come back and overthrow us.

And this isn't all just fun and games. We don't have any of the cool stuff I listed above, but mark my words we will create some sort of machine / computer program / cyborg army that will attempt to destroy us. And you can be damn sure that they'll have X-Ray vision and some crystal-powered energy source. We're just going to look like a bunch of asses trying to fight them with our non-hovering vehicles and catapults.

At the very least, we have to put together some laser guns. If we don't, then the army of super-intelligent machines / cyborgs / Killer Trucks (I bet you forgot about that little twist?) will. Then we're fucked.

It doesn't look good. The Matrix, Terminator, Alien, even Maximum Overdrive - all spell our doom at our current level of preparedness. How are we supposed to blot out the sun? The only reason we stood a chance in those future-predicting movies is that we had good weapons, time travelers, or cunning main characters.

I'm looking around right now – I don't see any of it.

Our best case scenario is Planet of the Apes, where no one has any good technology. But then we have to fight the apes off with those odd looking rifles - there's no laser gun or hovership to be found. Of course half of the human race at that point has been lobotomized. So even the best case scenario looks bleak at this point.