So what things did you expect to happen by 2010? I was making a build of RetroCopy on the 1st of this month and up comes 2010 for the file date, I had thought we (Earth) would be in a different place by now.
#5 - Flying cars
Most of us watched The Jetsuns growing up and thought "yeah, going around in pipes and flying cars is the future". Wrong! The closest we have come is the Moller and what a disaster that is given it is as loud and annoying as a dog barking at 3am. To top it off it's powered by oil, a resource on the verge of running out. People can't even stay on flat roads so should we really be adding an extra dimension for them to worry about?
#4 - Fusion Energy
For 60 years now people have been going "Fusion is 50 years away" , it has become somewhat of a joke in the energy industry. Even today they are saying the same thing, with most of the world putting all the eggs in the ITER basket. They are now saying by ~2050 it should be operational! At least that's only 40 years.
#3 - Peace on Earth
"All that we are saying... is give peace a chance" - John Lennon . Give peace a chance hey, haven't we been giving it a chance since Woodstock 1969? Like all kids growing up you wonder "why is there war, it's stupid". But with the Earth reaching nearly 7 billion people and most of the world facing water/food/energy shortages how much longer will we give peace a chance? I expect the hit single for 2013 to be "All we are demanding, is sign up for war" sung by Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter - the first female U.S. president, and sponsored by Diebold.
#2 - Colonies on the Moon
Ever since the USA made it first to the moon the only reason for NASA existing appears to be putting spy satellites with lasers on them into orbit. What happened to the ideas of traveling to the Moon or Mars for a nice holiday? We always knew the Earth would eventually be too polluted to want to travel within it so the Moon was going to be the ideal way to relax from flying our cars and zipping through pipes.
#1 - Artificial Intelligence
Predictions for human like A.I. resemble those of Fusion "just a few more years away". The 80s brought us a lot of movies that told us in no uncertain terms that human like robots were on our door step (Short Circuit, Terminator, Weird Science, Robocop, Aliens). Being impressionable at that time and watching cartoons like Astro Boy it isn't hard to make the leap that by 2010 there should be frickin' robots with rockets for legs. Alas the best we have is robots that get stuck walking up stairs :-
Or robots that look like dogs, emit frightening sounds and hunt you down :-
Not quite what I imagined as a kid, but it's good to know if there is a bad little girl or boy that there is a solution other than a dirty lump of coal in their santa sock. Just buy them the Big Dog and you won't hear a peep from them again!