Welcome to tomorrow

I grew up during the golden age of science fiction. Every day, my friends and I would turn on the TV and see what the world would look like in the far-off 21st century, when we'd be in the prime of our lives. There would be colonies in space, encounters with aliens (both friendly and unfriendly), robots either doing our work or trying to kill us, and time travelers in DeLoreans looking for sports almanacs. And of course there would be flying cars.

We thought life would be like it was on The Jetsons, with three-hour workdays, fast food in space, and apartments high above the smog in buildings shaped like the Seattle Space Needle.

We thought the year 2001 would be like it was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with self-aware computers and pay phones in orbit — or that 2010 would be like the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in which John Lithgow goes for a spacewalk near Jupiter. The flying-car future was not far away!

Well, it's 2010, and I still don't see any flying cars. And where the hell is John Lithgow?

An engineer named Daniel H. Wilson had similar thoughts and wrote a very entertaining book called Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science-Fiction Future that Never Arrived.

Wilson describes the future as it was seen in books and films. But instead of lamenting its failure to materialize, he says much of it is still on its way. Even more importantly, he reminds us that we are already living in a science-fiction universe. Who, in 1980, thought that by now we'd all have mobile phones, Wikipedia, a complete map of the human genome, and affordable (though uncomfortable) flights to any point on the globe?

Wilson, who is a robotics expert, describes the science we live with already as well as recent breakthroughs that will change our lives even further in the next 20 or so years.

So in a Wilsonian way, I will explain — with the help of the IMDb — that John Lithgow is still around, but in minor roles in minor TV series, and as the voice of cartoon characters. His movie work seems to have been taken over by Christopher Walken, who has that same large-forehead, sunken-eyed, crazy-man look.

I'll also be fair and mention that The Jetsons actually takes place in 2062, so there's still time for things to turn out that way. Next week, in fact, people will for the first time be living in a 160-story building, the Burj Dubai. And The Jetsons satirized things like planned obsolescence that are truer today than ever.

Flying cars? Wilson has a chapter on them. Yes, they've been invented. No, you wouldn't want one. They're too loud. Jet engines, airplane propellers and helicopter rotors are the only ways to make cars fly today. To truly go back to the future, we'll have to go back to the drawing board.