Remember those people you used to talk to before the Internet was invented? I think there was a name for them . . . oh yeah, family and friends! Well, here's an excuse to talk with them for the good of the Internets.
The Paleo-Future Project seeks to document our collective memory of the future. Interview your friends/family/yourself/strangers with any recording device. Post your creation to a video-sharing site like YouTube, an audio/document site like Box or a photo site like Flickr.
Let us know where to find it by sending me an e-mail [matt@paleofuture.com] or posting a comment to this post. After I receive a few I'll start linking to them here on the Paleo-Future blog.
To get you started, here are some topics you could focus on. Enjoy.
The Year 2000
What did you think the year 2000 would look like?
What most informed your idea of what 2000 would look like? Movies? Comic books? Radio? TV?
The Jetsons
What did the Jetsons mean to you? Did you see the 1960s version or the 1980s version?
Flying Cars
With what degree of certainty did you believe you would one day use a flying car?
Jetpacks
Did you ever try building your own?
Futuristic Food
Tang, meal-in-a-pill, astronaut food? What symbolized the future of food to you?
Did you grow up on a farm? What dreams/concerns did you have about the future of agriculture?
In the seventies my older relative had absolutely no doubt about flying cars in 2000, less for the other technologies. When Back to the Future 2 came out, I even considered it too plain as a futuristic movie: because in as much as thirty years, I quite expected the world to make a somersault jump around itself. Instead we got the internet. Hell, I should have payed more attention to Gibson than to Clarke.
ReplyDeleteAs a kid I didn't try to build a jetpack , but I do recall trying to create a laser under my bed with a flashlight a bottle of Windex and a magnifying glass.
ReplyDeleteDuring elementary school -- some educational unit ca. 1971, who knows where the teachers got it -- I distinctly remember the promise of cars that would drive themselves; domes over cities; and that Houston would be the largest city in the nation. All that by 1985 if memory serves.
ReplyDeleteThe Year 2000
ReplyDeleteI was born in 1978 so for me 2000 never seemed that far away. As a child, I assumed that Regan's "Star Wars" SDI program would be fully in place by then and that large American and Soviet space stations would exist on a scale in between todays and one depicted in the film 2001.
The Jetsons
I always thought of the Jetsons as "The Flintstones in the future" it never held any special meaning for me.
Flying Cars
I was certain that we'd have commercially available Flying Cars by 2000, not replacing regular carsm, more as a replacement for helicopters in big cities.
Jetpacks
I never tried to build a jetpack but I did try to make a rocket sled out of an old fan I found in my neighbor's trash.
Futuristic Food
I never lived on a farm but my father was a Ph.D. in plant biology so I learned early on about famine in Africa. I thought the future would bring specialized hybrid crops that would allow for cultivation in rough climates like Africa and Russia, essentially solving world hunger much the way dwarf wheat saved India.
Oh, yes, and of course the main difference between any future from back then and our conception of it as of now, is that the world would have still been divided between USA and USSR. Could not even remotely think of any of the two giving up without a nuclear holocaust (always looming).
ReplyDeleteAs a child I thought flying cars and space travel would be here by the year 2000. To be honest it was a big disapointment when the year 2000 arrived and we where still fighting each other. I had thought the world would be at peace.
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