I Thought This WAS The Future

Next week The Discovery Channel will be airing a plethora of shows aimed at explaining our future world to us lowly…ummm…2007ers.  I thought this WAS the future.  I’m only 27 and I already feel like I’m living in a world that is so much more advanced than what I experienced while coming of age.  The average Joe out there has access to gadgets of all shapes and sizes designed for global navigation, personal communication, mobile audio/video, and a thousand other specific functions that our fathers considered the lore of sci-fi.  So why does it feel like all this crap doesn’t really DO anything useful?

So to get on with it, here are a few of the stellar wormhole views plucked from the existance of our great great grandchildrens daily life for ‘Future Week’.  My crappy yet awesome DVR will be recording shows on the homes of the future and how they will undoubtedly be wired to serve us coffee in bed, notify us when the mail is delivered(an idea I’ve had for years that I think should be reality today), come complete with paint on wall-sized video screens, dynamic floors that clean themselves, and other mindblowing functions that make me want to rip my own house apart and get started today.  They’re gonna be talking about the future of weather, weapons, robots, space travel, and probably a few seemingly frivolous matters such as clothes, human relations, and leisure activities.

I’ve yet to determine if I want to keep my posts more professional and bland and just give the reader the basic meat and potatoes of the topic, or if I want to rant my little buttcheeks off with personal opinions, observations, and frustrations.  For now though, you’re gonna get a rant.

For years I’ve been very keen on future-geek crapola.  I love reading Popular Mechanics/Science, and I can’t get enough of these ‘Future Week’ type shows.  But lately a big part of me has been so repressed about such issues, as I think I’m either very late, or very early, to the party of those who know that it’s all a bunch of BS.  This future-tech crap is tons of fun to dream about, and some of it really may come true, but it can’t be expected or relied upon to change the way we fundamentally live and die in our world.

A few months ago I was driving in my car and I heard a commercial for a local medical center on the radio.  The commercial had some lady with a soft spoken voice babbling on over some soft atmospheric lullaby style music about how this particular med-center is paving the way to allow the blind and deaf to see and hear.  At first listen, my mind raced through all these Popular Science articles I’ve read in the years prior about all the crazy things that modern science and medicine can do, and how much greater future medicine will be.  To allow the blind or deaf to be relieved of their affliction is nothing short of remarkable in my mind.  Then I remembered a real harsh lesson I learned back in June of 2000.

Not to get too deep or too depressing, I lost an immediate family member back in June of 2000 to heart failure stemming from a blood clot in an artery.  I don’t claim to be a doctor, and I don’t think that all medical fields progress at an even keel.  What I do know is that technology and ‘future medicine’ did not save my late relative.  After surgery in the mid 90s to replace a kaput heart valve with a mechanical one, and then a pacemaker implant in 2000, my dad ultimately fell victim to the fact that his Doctor wasn’t there.  The story I got is that some small town in Iowa didn’t have a resident doctor.  So instead of getting one, or sucking it up and moving where the doctors are, my dads doctor would commute to this small town frequently to check up on it’s citizens.  So long story short, the night before my dad passed, when he was complaining to the nurses of chest paints and shortness of breath and was obviously not feeling alright, his doctor was nowhere to be found, and instead of having another doc check in on him, the nurses just told him to wait it out.  Because these nurses were idiots, and this doctors time was stretched thin, my dads heart developed a blood clot and he never recovered.

So I’m hearing about all this crazy medical miracle crap every day.  But can technology alone save everyone?  For a while I thought that maybe I’d be a member of the lucky generation whose life expectancy jumps into the 150-year range because of all this medical tech junk.  It’s just that though.  It’s junk.  You still have to rely on people, and people are far from perfect.  I’m sure every year these medical advances make life for those in pain so much better.  It may stop my nose from running, or allow me to function at an acceptable clip while nursing a hangover, but it’ll never be something we can rely on.  It’ll never be a crutch for humans who are destined to eventually conk out. 

Just as todays advanced medical technology couldn’t save my dad, tomorrows medical technology won’t save me.  My cellphone, mp3 player, PC, and DVD player are all nice technologies, but they don’t fundamentally make my life better, and todays generations children won’t be any happier with their home fabrication machines, 90″ OLED HDTV walls, flying cars or moon resorts.  Future Week is gonna be some good TV, and I’m gonna watch it and I’m gonna dream and I’m surely going to enjoy the nards out of it, but not for a second will I believe that any of it is going to be reality one day…and I surely won’t expect it to make my life better.