In 1950, the world of the year 2000 seemed terribly distant. Those who had lived through the first 50 years of the century had already seen incredible advances. Their parents lived in a time when people still rode horses, and their children would live in a world where you could fly past the speed of sound, or destroy all life on earth with nuclear weapons.

Woody Allen disguised as a robot in the film Sleeper.

Given this incredible rate of technological change, writers of the 50’s and 60’s imagined what the world of the future would look like by passage of the millennium. They imagined cars that could drive themselves, robots that would remove all drudgery from our lives, and spaceships that would carry passengers to human colonies on the moon and Mars.

They were way off. Instead, we got cell phones, so we can be bothered not only at home or at work, but at all points in between, and the internet, which allows us to look at pictures of people taping bacon to their cat.

So what happened to all the cool technology envisioned by science fiction writers?

Transportation

In 1850, it took 6 months to get from New York to San Francisco on a ship and just as long if you went overland. By 1900, railroads had connected every corner of the United States. You could probably travel from NY to SF in a matter of weeks instead of months.

In 1956, President Eisenhower authorized construction of the Interstate Highway system, allowing travelers to drive uninterrupted at high speeds. This made the trip a matter of days.

The first commercial jet, the de Havilland Comet, first flew in 1949, and the Boeing 707 was introduced commercially in 1955. The trip from NY to SF was now a matter of hours. In little over 100 years, the travel time from east coast to west had gone from a journey of half a year, to something accomplished in an afternoon.

And it hasn’t budged since. In fact, it’s getting slower.

In fact, air travel is probably slower now than it used to be. There are more passengers, meaning more congestion, more airplanes, and more traffic. Security Theater takes much longer to pass through now, and delays become more common every year.

The same thing is happening to travel on the highways. There are more cars, meaning more traffic and slower travel times. Cities are constantly sprawling outwards, adding further stress and congestion to every trip.

Fifty years from now, it may be that it takes even longer to travel, due to ever increasing levels of traffic, both in the air and on the ground.

Science fiction writers imagined we would travel in a variety of exotic ways. Many wrote of flying cars, which would be cool, but not terribly practical. Others described cars that drove themselves. You could sit back, relax, and let the robot drive. While there are some trial systems, teaching a car to drive is tricky. Look how hard it is to teach humans to drive, and we’ve got the reflexes built in.

Even if we can’t have cars that fly or drive themselves, could we at least have one that doesn’t run on gas? In 1910, cars ran on gas, trains ran on coal, and people heated their houses with wood or kerosene. Cars still run on gas.

There were visions of fantastic trains that would speed us across a city or across the country at incredible speeds. In Europe, it’s called the TGV. In America, trains are for cows (although I did ride one from Connecticut to New York, and I was surprised that it was all seats- not a cattle car to be found).

Air travel was supposed to merge with space travel, with smaller ships taking us up to orbital stations where we could hop into the upper atmosphere for an hour or two, and land anywhere on earth in three or four hours.

As I can personally testify, this has not happened.

Transportation technology has not kept pace with the incredible innovations of the 18 and 1900’s. Who would have thought that the future would move slower?

Robots

Whether it’s Asimov’s I, Robot, the Twilight Zone, or the Terminator, robots have always held a place in the popular imagination. By the year 2000, they were expected to live with us, take care of the household chores, help the disabled and elderly, and generally make themselves useful. If technology was advanced enough, they might even pass for mates for lonely people. That’s right: Robot Sex Women (or Men). Then, at some point, the robots would become self-aware, and either become our staunchest friends and allies, or carry out a campaign to wipe us from the face of the earth.

Instead, we have the Roomba.

There has been a lot of progress with industrial robots, as any laid-off factory worker can tell you. Military robots like the Predator drones and the bomb-disposal units have shown some potential. In Japan, they have a greater variety of friendly robots, but few are widely available in the US.

But still no Robot Sex Women.

Space Travel

This is where the vision of the future differs most sharply from reality. Sputnik was launched in 1957. Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969 (which is still the coolest thing we’ve ever done).

Not long after, we stopped going to the moon. We have the shuttle fleet, which was built 25 years ago, and is set to expire without a replacement, since the next generation will not be ready until 2014 (and probably not even then).

Nearly every science fiction mind imagined the future of the human species to be in space. Exploration has long been a primal human urge, and there is a near-limitless area to explore in the skies above us. By now, people would be able to buy a ticket to the moon, just like you could buy a ticket to London or Hong Kong in the 1950s. Before long, people would be terraforming Mars. Human colonists would fill the solar system, then expand into the systems beyond. Hard core writers imagined colony ships that would have travel times measured in generations, while more fanciful ones conjured warp drives and hyperspaces to ferry us across the galaxy in a human timescale.

And why not? In just 100 years, the travel time from NY to SF had gone from 6 months to 6 hours. In 1769, George Washington (and everyone else) was still riding a horse; 200 years later we had walked on the moon. Why shouldn’t the next 50 or 100 years bring further innovation and exploration?

When I hear the name ‘International Space Station’, I imagine a huge structure, like the Federation Stations in Star Trek, where dozens of ships can dock and refit, and where hundreds of people can move and work, and hundreds more can be ferried to and from earth in affordable (yet roomy) transportation.

What we have now is nowhere near that cool. Space exploration costs money, and politicians have decided that money is much better spent on wars and bank bailouts than anything as trivial as exploring the galaxy.

In 1970, seeing the progress of the past years, an educated observer would likely guess that a trip to the moon would be available within the lifetime of anyone born in that decade.

Now, most of us are lucky if we can fly first class. At 30,000 feet, that’s as close to the moon as we’re likely to get.

There are obviously some technologies that have grown at incredible rates. Computers continue to follow Moore’s law and get faster and faster. Computer technology is great for connecting people, but it lacks the adventure, the exploration, the challenge, of space travel.

Medical technology continues to advance, although I’m still waiting for the cure-all nanobots.

Yet the fabulous advances predicted in transportation, robotics, and space travel have not come to pass, and our world seems the poorer for it.

Even George Orwell’s prediction in 1984 that there would be cameras everywhere, monitoring our every step….

Oh. Wait. That one came true.