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IPFS News Link • Future Predictions

Tomorrow

• by L. Neil Smith (The Libertarian Enterprise)

I remember what the future used to look like.

Maybe you do, too.

For the most part, in what were called the "Sunday Supplements" of America's daily newspapers (or the decorative endpapers of some of my favorite "Young Readers'" books), it consisted of crowds of healthy, happy human beings, men, women, and children, colorfully but lightly dressed for their weather-controlled environment, inhabiting glass and silver cities shining in the golden sun, swarmed about by tiny private aircraft, levitating automobiles, and individuals hurling themselves through the air on jet-pack harnesses, while an atomic-powered flying wing passed by overhead, and a V2-shaped rocket ship blasted for the stars.

That was the brilliant future I was looking forward to, when I was a little boy, lying on my stomach on my grandmother's living-room carpet, with the Sunday funny papers spread out before me, a future of teardrop-shaped 300 mile-per-hour passenger cars and people staring at slightly bulky instruments strapped on their wrists, asking, "Can you see me now?" That was the bright tomorrow I expected to be living in today.

And I wasn't the only one.

But something went terribly wrong between that time, 60 years ago, when Disneyland was shiny and new, and the drab, gray, soul-smothering present....

 

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by PureTrust
Entered on:

I don't know about this. Life is pretty darn complicated. Do you think that if the politicians and bankers had been good guys all these years, and if they had truly attempted to satisfy the people rather than rape them, that things would have been much different life-span-wise?

I can understand the riding high on the thrill of living a life that I have authority over. But do I really have authority over it if I get old and die against my will? Are there enough technical advances that big medicine are keeping hidden that would, if revealed, allow someone to live in health indefinitely?

What I am really asking is, does man have the ability to pull himself out of the problem of death if he decides to join together, and use his combined strength to overcome death? Or would man fail in that area, just as he has failed in finding truly benefactor-like politicians?

Life is a pretty complicated thing. Do we have the ability to reach out and grasp it, take hold of it, and make it ours?



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