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We were promised flying cars, weekend trips to the moon and personal jet packs. Welook back at what had been predicted for 2010 and what actually happened

B Y K R I S H R A G H A V

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The year 2010 was supposedto be the future. Now it hasbecome the present.

Be it the grimy cityscapes of the1982 film Blade Runner or theshiny Utopia of Steven Spielberg’sMinority Report (2002)—bothbased, coincidentally, on thework of author Philip K. Dick—wewere supposed to be well on ourway into living in a science fictionmovie.

Space would no longer be thefinal frontier. Earth no longer ourlast refuge.

We were supposed to be debat-ing the rights of androids inhuman society, and bringingrogue computers to trial.

We’re not there, obviously.Writer Arthur C. Clarke, in an

essay on the hazards of predictingthe future, wrote that “any suffi-ciently advanced technologywould be indistinguishable frommagic”. Like any wish for magicin the real world, the Utopias ofscience fiction past were mostlymisguided, naive visions of afuture world.

The aesthetic of the Utopiaitself has diminished in sciencef i c t i o n i n t h e l a s t d e c a d e ,replaced instead by a grim visionthat sees the explosion of tech-nology, yes, but also the amplifi-cation of existing rifts in society.Last year’s District 9, for example,set in the Johannesburg of 2010,simultaneously dealt with bothaliens and apartheid.

So, where were we supposed tobe? We look back at the threekinds of 2010 that science fictionhad predicted for us:

FUTURE 1:Wired till our brains fried

Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Set in2010, it tracks the adventures ofa special branch of the US’ Fed-

eral Bureau of Investigation thatdeals with cybercrime.Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Thesequel to the legendary 2001: ASpace Odyssey , i t f o l l o w s agroup of astronauts sent on amission to Jupiter to explainwhat happened in the previousfilm.

How a day would passY o u w o u l d w a k e u p t o t h esound of your intelligent, self-aware house computer remind-ing you of your daily appoint-m e n t s . Y o u w o u l d t a k e a ninstantaneous transporter towork, or just plug in to a fullysensory virtual world and flythere. You would have a middayappointment on the moon, fol-lowed by lunch in orbit, whereyour meal of choice would beassembled by eco-friendly nanodispensers. The news would befull of diplomatic negotiationswith extraterrestrial civilizationson the fringes of the galaxy.

Are we there yet?Short answer: No. Long answer:Not for a long time. The loom-ing spectre of climate changehas thankfully put a stop tothoughts of reckless jauntsacross the solar system, and thefuture is more likely to involvetravel in virtual worlds (some-thing present-day video gamesdabble in) than travel acrossspace.

In March, the US’ NationalAeronautics and Space Admin-istration launched the KeplerMission, a three-and-a-half-year project to discover earth-like planets beyond the solarsystem. It’s the first seriousattempt to look for planetsbeyond our immediate neigh-bourhood. It’s a tiny sliver of thegalaxy that the Kepler Mission isfocused on (like sifting througha h a n d f u l o f s a n d o n abeach)—but who knows, wemight just get lucky.

FUTURE 2:Death by dystopia

Banlieue 13 (2004): A Frenchaction film set in an Orwellian2010, where inner cities aredivided into brutally repressiveghettos called “districts”.Absolon (2003): A post-apoca-lyptic film where large corpora-tions have a helpless populationunder their thumb.Children of Men (2006): Set in2027, it charts the aftermath of a

m y s t e r i o u s i n f e r t i l i t y t h a tspread through the human race,where no children have beenborn since 2009-10.

How a day would passGrim, with little or no hope.Communities would be dealingwith the aftermath of war, ornuclear fallout, or extreme cli-mate change. Government con-trol over societies would beminimal, and roving bands ofbandits would be common.

Technology would be minimal,practical and mostly weapons.

Are we there yet?D y s t o p i a s a r e n o t s o m u c hfutures as “what ifs”. The effectsof climate change may not mani-fest as extremely as The DayAfter Tomorrow (2004) suggests,but there’s enough photographicevidence to suggest that thetruth may not be too far away.

FUTURE 3:Scarier than imagined

Knight Rider 2010 (1994): Atelevision film loosely based onthe Knight Rider TV serial, inwhich a former police detective

becomes a modern “knight”,fighting crime. His loyal steed?A talking car called KITT.

How a day would passThe scariest of all possiblefutures, Knight Rider 2010 ima-gines a world where the char-a c t e r o r i g i n a l l y p l a y e d b yDavid Hasselhoff is the ideal-ized hero, modified Ford Mus-tangs are the dominant car aes-thetic and 1980s pop is thesoundtrack of choice.

Are we there yet?While we can never discountthe possibility of such a dysto-pia, we have thankfully movedaway from the above threemain tenets of this vision.

Dystopia: A still from2012. Extreme climate

change figuresprominently in modern

science fiction.

Time warp: (clockwise from top) The future as imagined by Childrenof Men; Knight Rider; 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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2010THE FUTURE IS HERE