The Future We Didn't Get

[ecosophia]

There are times when I wonder why so many people seem so freaky these days, and then I remember this. 

This is the future we were supposed to get.  Two generations of Americans grew up being told that this was what they could expect, in newspaper ads like this one and in countless other venues. Next time you go for a walk or even look out the window, compare what you see to the image above, and measure the gap between them. The cognitive dissonance between the future we were told we were going to get and the one that's actually arrived is, I think, the single largest cause of the collective nervous breakdown unfolding around us right now. 

Comments

In the year 2000 and Man after Man

[neptunesdolphins]

I remember how 2000 seemed so far away as if it was a magical future......

I remember watching TV at a friend's house when I was teenager. (We had no TV or stereo or any other modern gizmos.) (do people still use the word "gizmo"?) We had an ancient tube radio that someone won in a raffle. (Do they still do raffles?)

Anyway, the two programs I saw about the future scared the socks off of me. (Do people still day that?) One was how overpopulation in the cities was going to destroy humanity. They had the rats living in smaller and smaller spaces. I suppose it was to promote the new idea of suburbia - the single family detached house with a small plot of land surrounded by other people with the same thing. I was living in an apartment at the time with various relatives.

The other program featured how people were going to evolve to be just heads floating around in little bubble cars. I didn't want to be just a head. That was frightening.

Yes later, I picked up a book called "Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990) is a speculative book written by Scottish geologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by Philip Hood. "
The theme of the book is the future evolution of humanity in the next millions of years. Unlike the previous books, the story is told through different periods of time and adding different individual characters in the first chapters, following many events in a timeline, that starting from the final days of modern civilization and its decline, the emergence of species created by genetic engineering, its diversification, evolution and extinction of these ones, and ending with a complete mass extinction caused by the distant descendants of humanity that colonized other planets."

Read more at https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Man_After_Man:_An_Anthropology_of_the_Future

That book made me depressed more than anything.

Re: In the year 2000 and Man after Man

[ecosophia]

I remember those as well.

Re: In the year 2000 and Man after Man

[cutekitten]

Dixon also wrote After Man, a look at what animals might be like once humanity was extinct.