2000s

I still remember when, as a kid growing up in the 80s, the year with numbers above 2000 for me was unthinkable. And if I ever thought of it, my mind was filled with images of flying cars, humans co-existing with aliens, humans living in outer space, terminator robots wreaking havoc outside major cities protected by geodesic domes, and mind-controlled home appliances (just think of a hamburger and, viola! out it pops from your futuristic oven).

But alas...none of these stuff ever happened. Well, except for wireless communication devices (reminiscent of Star Trek) which was definitely on top of my sci-fi inspired gadgets of the future...and it did happen.


Stanley Kubrick may have been over-optimistic in his classic 2001: A Space Oddessey. We've already spent a good ten years after we hit the millennium but us humans haven't really sent any manned space shuttle to Jupiter as of yet. But hey, it was a 1968 science fiction film and maybe even Stanley Kubrick didn't have any idea what 2010 would really be. How anticlimactic it must have been for him if he were still alive (he never even made it past 1999).

And has anyone ever asked Sir Arthur C. Clarke about this (the other guy who wrote the film. Maybe before he died in 2008 anyway)? I believe he did a sequel called 2010: The Year We Made Contact (hmmm...let's see if we will).

And who would have imagined the mighty United States would ever face financial difficulties in 2000? Never in the Kubrick/Clarke timeline, but could be possible in the Orwellian timeline (as in George Orwell's classic dystopian sci-fi novel Nineteen Eighty-Four...just about two decades later, that is).

Sorry, you caught me rambling like a crazed nerd...what the heck am I writing about again?

Oh...2000s

Where are we now in the 2000s? Still struggling as humans, I would say. Still trying to survive situations and conditions that have been there since before I was even born. Poverty, disease, crimes, political greed, natural disasters due to environmental degredation...these are the stuff us humans are still faced with...in this futuristic year 2010.

So, forget about flying cars...forget about adopting a Hayley Joel Osment look-alike robot for a son. We still have a long long way to go before we can even think of spending summer in Mars (or am I speaking too soon?).