Where's My Flying Car?

I was born in the swinging 60's and as a kid there was no shortage of exciting, futuristic concepts to delight the imagination via the wonderful world of science fiction. I was captivated, not only by the imaginative stories, but also by the exciting descriptions of what life was going to be like in the 21st century. At some point I remember working out how old I was going to be by the time the year 2000 (a perennial sci-fi milestone since the days of Verne and Wells) rolled by, and I was thrilled to discover I was only going to be 34. I knew 34 was old, but I also knew it wasn't exactly ancient, so that when 2000 finally rolled around, I'd still be reasonably fit and vital and would be able to fully participate in the golden age of science-fiction dreams come true.

I was going to drive a futuristic flying car inside a dome city while post World War 3 mutants crawled around in the radioactive wilderness outside. I was going to communicate telepathically with my pet dolphin while robot servants did all my household chores. No-one would have a boring job; I was going to be an astronaut specialising in alien life forms. Every home would have a HAL9000 talking computer from "2001 a Space Odyssey". Meals would be selected by simply pressing a button on your food-O-matic 2000, and music would all be made with synthesizers going beep beep. This all may sound like the fanciful imaginings of a 7-year-old, but it wasn't just kids that were coming up with this stuff. We were basing our fantasies, at least partly, on how the adult experts were telling us it was actually going to be.

In 1962 the city of Seattle in Washington played host to the World's Fair, also known as "the Century 21 Exposition", a six-month-long event that offered visitors a peek at the "glittering world of the future". In the spirit of the childhood fantasies offered above, visitors to the Worlds Fair were introduced to a "Jetson-esque" 21st century in which people flew to work in their personal "gyrocopters", lived in cities covered by giant domes and where every home had a "TV telephone".

Among the predictions the official World's Fair souvenir program boasted were "certain to be realities by 2001." were the following:

• The 21st Century home will be a "castle of ease, convenience and relaxation." The kitchen will be "a miracle of push-button efficiency" with a cool-wall pantry, push-button electric sink, electronic bakery drawer, clothes conditioning closet. It will have a private heliport as well as an indoor swimming pool and garden and will rotate to take advantage of the sun and will feature wall-to-wall television.
• The 21st century school will have walls made of jets of air, its tables standing on invisible legs, its floating canvas roof controlled to catch the sun. Memory-retention machines whir in the background while television screens mirror the day's lessons.
• Supersonic air travel will allow people to circumnavigate the world in minutes.
• There will be rapid transit jet-propelled monorail systems, air-cushioned trains that move 500 mph, air-cushioned cars and rocket belts that will "enable a man to stride thirty feet."

I don't know how these predictions make you feel, but I'm mad as hell just writing about them!! What the hell happened to my shiny sci-fi future? I'm supposed to be wearing a silver suit right now, chewing on my Soylent Green while waiting for Warlike Apes to usurp their human masters and take over the planet!!!

We've been duped brothers and sisters. They promised us HAL9000 and instead we got Windows. They promised limitless clean Fusion Power and instead gave me energy-saving lightbulbs and a jumper to wear in winter. Instead of a flying car I got a SUV with dodgy transmission, and in place of cities on Mars they gave us the crappy International Space Station. This is nothing like the future I was expecting.

So what kind of future can the kids of today look forward to? In his 2004 speech on the rejuvenation of the NASA space program, George Dubbya hoped that: "the fascination generated by further [space] exploration will inspire our young people to study math, science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers"

Well, you know what kids? It's all just a lie. You might as well pack away those math, science and engineering textbooks, cause the only kind of space you're ever likely to explore is the vacant space inside your unfulfilled dreams, and you can forget about being pioneers in your exploration of that particular landscape, because I was here way before you got here.

US Resistance to Metrication (the real reason)

On September 3 1999, after a 286 day journey from Earth to Mars, a $125 million NASA probe called the "Climate Orbiter" plunged through the Martian atmosphere on a trajectory that was about 100km closer to the surface of the planet than had been planned. The resultant heat caused by atmospheric friction damaged the probe's systems to such an extent that it became completely dysfunctional. The probe was never heard from again but is assumed to be currently somewhere in space orbiting the sun; a very expensive testament to America's refusal to adopt the metric system.

The reason the probe was 100km closer to Mars than it was supposed to be was that Lockheed-Martin, the spacecraft's manufacturer, used the archaic U.S. traditional system of measurement (the system currently widely-adopted in the U.S.) to program navigational information into the probe, while NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California used the metric system (used throughout the rest of the world). The mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the spacecraft team at Lockheed-Martin and NASA's JPL team, resulting in the $125 million bungle.

There are only 3 countries on Earth that have not officially adopted the metric system. They are Liberia (in western Africa), Burma (also known as Myanmar, in Southeast Asia) and the United States of America.

The US Metric Association are working to try and convince Americans to change to the metric system (principally to ensure U.S. exports are not harmed by foreign unwillingness to work in inches and pounds), and the U.S. Government has adopted a pro-metric stance with the Metric Conversion Act (1975) and a 1991 Presidential Executive Order, but average Americans are still resistant to this change for 3 major reasons:

1. The metric system did not originate in America - Americans do not believe there is a world outside America.
2. The Metric system is French - America is afraid of France.
3. Americans are special

But seriously, the real reason for American resistance to the metric system is rooted in popular entertainment. If America went metric, all those songs where people are prepared to traverse 1000 miles in the name of their love would now have to present 1609.34 kilometres as the required distance. Instead of your lips hovering an inch away from your lover's, they'd now be 2.54 centimetres away, and how cool would Eminems movie; "8 Mile" have sounded if it was called "12.87 kilometres"? It all just fails to roll off the tongue in any lyrically satisfying way.

So while there may be all kinds of compelling reasons why America should adopt the same system of measurement used by the rest of the world, until someone finds a way to make 0.114 kilograms sound sexy, the quarter-pounder is going to remain, the quarter-pounder.