As a child growing up in the 1960s I, along with many others, was excited by the American space program, eager to get to the moon, enthralled by what I thought was a science fiction future in a high tech, high excitement world. I expected to have an opportunity to visit the moon myself, or even Mars, by the early twenty first century. And, like everyone else, I imagined that I would be driving a flying car. I could vaguely foresee personal computers, but cell phones and portable computers lay beyond my imagination...not even the top science fiction writers predicted cell phones and portable computers. In many science fiction novels written during the fifties and sixties, characters were flying around in spaceships and cars; but they still had to go find a telephone or computer installation, and all the computers did was cough up information, with no real communications applications.
The future vison that so animated my childhood never happened; instead a far different, yet interesting world emerged.
What sort of future to the children of 2011 imagine? Do they ever think of space exploration? Do they cling to the hope of flying cars? They have no idea what the world was like without personal computers, and for them, cell phones, still somewhat of a miracle to my generation, are commomplace and ho hum.
Do today's children see a bleak future of catastrophic climate change, and dreadful high tech terrorism? Are their hopeful visions high tech? Or are they jaded and complacent about technology?
After all the fuss, nobody has ever accurately predicted the future, and really, nobody has ever even roughly predicted it, verifiably. We are left to make guesses, and confront an unknown world.
Let us hope that today's children can find cause to dream of a happy future for humanity...
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