What did you think THE FUTURE would look like when 2015 was still the future?
I actually recorded this on January 6th, but for some reason never uploaded it.
MUSIC: My theme song is “Pluto Vs. Neptune” by Driftless Pony Club. You can buy their albums from DFTBA Records.
[spoiler title=”VIDEO TRANSCRIPT”]Hello, Earthlings. You’re watching Adam the Alien, and today we are going to talk about the future.
Or more accurately, a past retrospective vision of what the future, a.k.a. NOW, is.
Or in other words: where’s my damn hoverboard, Marty McFly?
[THEME MUSIC PLAYS] ♫ You can’t think you’ve won, sometimes I’m closer to the sun ♫
So as most people born in the 80’s, or just generally into sci-fi and Back to the Future, know: it’s 2015. It’s the year that Marty McFly and Doc Brown went to, to rescue his kid and all that whatnot from a horrible, horrible fate. Watch the movie.
And it really got me thinking about how that movie kind of shaped my vision of what the future would look like. I mean, it’s not the only thing that did that, but it had a profound impact.
I really did expect to see, in my lifetime (and not, like, my distant lifetime like it’s looking like now), flying cars and hoverboards.
Now these things aren’t actually that far off, they’re just ridonkulously expensive.
Take the hoverboard, for instance. There are some incredible hoverboard technologies happening NOW, NOW! But you’re not gonna be able to afford them for like, decades.
[TEXT ANNOTATION: In addition to price, they’re also still a logistical nightmare. Current hoverboard models & prototypes all rely on either air jets or magnets that only work moderately and/or only in specific situations.]
But anyway, this all got me wondering and thinking about, like, what other people’s visions of 2015 would look like. And I–so I asked around.
When I asked my grandpa, who is 90 years old, he actually said he didn’t think he’d see it. He never thought he would see the year 2015, so didn’t really devote a whole lot of time to envisioning what it would look like.
A lot of adults of later generations, those who grew up in the Atomic Age, the age of the bomb and the Cold War…
…People of that age often told me they weren’t sure that the year 2015 was even going to happen. At least, you know, from a “humanity” perspective.
And if it was going to exist? There should be a moon base by now. Because back then, everything was about going to the moon! “We’re going to the moon, it’s the Space Race!” So there should a moon base right now, right? Certainly we should have at least gotten to Mars, but of course, no! NASA funding: hacked! and! slashed! to! death!
I don’t really know what the point of all this is. I just thought it was a beautiful foggy day and I thought I’d take a walk and talk about THE FUTURE THAT IS NOW!
I did recently re-watch Back to the Future Part II, and it’s pretty clear that the whole thing was meant to be a parody of visions of the future. Things like The Jetsons, where everybody’s living on houses on top of giant poles, and beedleedling around in little cars that go brdrdrdrdrdrdrd and fly through the air, and robot maids and all of that whatnot!
But still, I mean it leaves me wondering, when I’m looking at, y’know, visions of fashion where everyone’s wearing weird neon glowy things that actually were more of a staple of the 90’s.
And of course, the hoverboards and the flying cars and just…there are so many things, if you look at that movie and other visions of the future, you see things that are so right! You see things that are so right. Tablets from Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’ve got ’em…we’ve got ’em centuries early!
But still…flying cars and hoverboards, a little bit out of our range as a commonly used thing. At least, for now.
I guess what I really want to know, and what I really want to say, is: what did you envision?
When you looked forward into the future, that far off, vast, distant future of 2015! No matter what age you are, what did you see? Did you see something more or less like it is now? Did you see something more extravagant?
Did you see us completely obliterated by now? Did you see us thriving? Did you see world peace? Did you see war? What did you picture 2015 to be?
It’s interesting thinking about these questions at a time when we are so able to look back and reflect.
We have so much more of our lives chronicled, now. And we have apps like Timehop that take us back and back and back to our memories long gone.
And so many of those memories WERE envisioning the future. Even if only in a much smaller form.
For instance, you can go back and look at what were your New Year’s resolutions. It’s harder to forget these things, now!
It’s so much easier to look back and those silly little statements of, “Oh, in five years, I’ll have THIS. In five years it will be like THIS.”
So that brings me to my other round of questions. A more personal thing: your own life. We’ve–we’ve asked what the world would look like in 2015. What did you think your life would look like in 2015?
Go back one year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago, as long as you can go, and…all those little times you projected into the future your own life. What did you think you would be like right now?
So that…that’s just…that’s what this is. That’s what this video is about. This walk in the fog is just to ask you what you thought the world would be like, and what you thought you would be like, in 2015.
I welcome, plead for, even beg for any and all answers and, you know, even…I miss the video responses. The video responses that used to be a thing on YouTube. So post a video! Link it! I’ll approve it. It won’t say it’s spam. I promise. At least, it won’t say it’s spam after I check the spam filter.
Man, I really gotta think through these things more, but I just, like…the light was leaving and I just thought, “Hey! I wanna make something.”
And I’m being talked to, so…until next time, I’m Adam the Alien. Fare thee well!
[TO SOMEONE OFF CAMERA] Wazzup?
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Hello, Earthlings, it’s December 31st, 2014. You’re watching Adam the Alien, and I’m at First Night in Tacoma. Happy New Year’s Eve!
Let the First Night wild rumpus begiiiiiin![/spoiler]
Writer. Actor. Director. Chalk artist. YouTuber. Nerdfighter. Traveler. Pansexual. Genderfluid. Millennial. Socialist. Living a complex life beyond those words.
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