By Silva

It's March in 2010. What happened to all of the awesome future stuff we dreamed of having by now as children? Many forms of media have expected that by now, we'd either be fighting off aliens, buzzing around in personal flying machines, trying to escape the scrutiny of a supreme ruler who has his eye on us 24/7, or just simply watching gigantic personalized adverts strung up in midair in a local mall. But here we are, living a seemingly similar life as the generation before us, and the generation before them. However, we have made quite a few "futuristic" advancements that while they may not lead us into the plot of some novelists' or writers' vision of now, they have given us a new scope of what we're able to accomplish, and a new bearing on what our version of the future holds for us.



First off, I'd like to know where the Jetsons family UFO is. Being able to break free from the mundane in an automobile has been great ever since I was 17, but I'm getting tired of being stuck with 2-D travel in a world getting ready for 3-D everywhere else. I know we have planes now, but the time and money needed to invest in a personal aircraft is too much. (I can also mention all the little nuances of the FAA and having to house the aircraft at a hanger, etc.) I want a craft that is stored at my house, can drive well on a road, then take off with no effort to take me into a further liberating airspace so i can go to a far off city in no time at all. Thankfully, a team of researchers is doing just that, unveiling a prototype a few years ago that was capable of vertical takeoff and short flights while still being US road legal.

I also remember the old comic Dick Tracy, who, with his trusty gun and watch phone, would take on the likes of criminals named Pruneface and Babyface. While the idea of having a video chat with someone on your wrist was fantastic back then, LG has shown us in recent years that they have finally proven it true. Upon hearing this news, though, I personally did not jump for joy because we already have laptops, netbooks, and smartphones that are capable of the same thing, in a much more practical fashion. With all of the micro cameras and webcams connected to the internet now in electronics, we've put that old detective's gadget star to shame.

Holograms were a staple in older sci-fi films, and were popularized most by Star Wars; however, other technologies have pushed this to just being more of a proof of concept for universities at best. The mainstream media channels have welcomed tech like LCD displays and bendable - even printable! - AMOLED sheets. Sony has even been in development, and provided working prototypes, over a laptop and phone that contains a transparent screen, just like the kind you see in popular crime dramas and near-future action flicks today.

I could go on and on about cars that could plug up to your house outlet and go for miles on a single charge, wireless and inductive power to eliminate the need for cords to charge your small electronics, MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail that have more data storage on them than several of the world's top computer powerhouses twenty years ago, live streaming websites allowing a person to share events with anyone or several thousand people in the world, or really any Star Trek or Star Wars tech, but it's too many for this post. All I really wanted to put out here was that even though a lot of our wants from memories in childhood are not here now and may not ever come to fruition, we have plenty of ideas and products that have made our collective heads spin when they were announced. Gone are the days of robots with box heads and antennae that go "beep boop beep", and here are the days of ASIMO and Roomba. Even the visions we have now will see dramatic change in a few decades. It's a different future we live in, and I can't wait to see what else the world thinkers and tinkerers have in store for us.