Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.