Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Today the Future, Tomorrow a Forgotten Dream



















Another library acquisition evokes Joyce Carol Oates: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" It's a book by Gregory Benford and the editors of Popular Mechanics, The Wonderful Future That Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past (2010), that recalls dozens of predictions and images of the future from the perspective of a time now in the past. Some were visionary, pragmatic and now do, indeed, exist in the visible world. Others persist only in the invisible world, at least for "now."

I'm supposing the biggest shifts of the last ten years have been the arrival of a near universality in communications and information synergies and quickening ecological change. In the words of a Detroit man at a yard sale, "What else you got?" 



Today's Rune: Signals.  

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I read some excerpts from that Benford book. fascinating.

pattinase (abbott) said...

I am always amazed at all the things that were supposed to happen and didn't. And vice versa.