Time keeps on slippin’…

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

It’s 2025, y’all! That just sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

When I was a kid, growing up on the mean streets of Marion, I often thought about the future. I was a huge Star Wars and Star Trek fan and even though Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and all their battles took place “a long time ago,” it was clearly in a futuristic, sci-fi setting.

It was a huge deal when we went into outer space back then.

The Space Shuttle was a major news story. We were still trying to make sure the Soviet Union didn’t put missiles on a satellite or put a base on the Moon. We were sending out probes and launching giant telescopes and all that.

Crazy, but nowadays, there are billionaires who send millionaires up into space like tourists and we’re talking about a mission to Mars within the next decade.

See VIEWPOINT, page A6 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

Back in nineteen-eighty-whatever, there was no limit to what our minds could conceive about what life would be like in the far-away world of the 21st century. Well, we’re a quarter of the way through it, so how are we doing?

The future is something we all looked forward to back then.

There were shows like “The Jetsons” and articles in magazines and all sorts of speculation about what life would be like now. Remember in “Back to the Future” when Marty goes into the future and there are hoverboards? Well, that was in 2015… also known as 10 years ago! Where are our flying cars and jetpacks and why are we still not setting up moon bases and how have we not made the jump to light speed?

It’s 2025. and we can’t teleport or clone ourselves, and Roomba is no Rosie the Robot Maid. Yeah, it’s a little disappointing. That’s not to say it’s all bad. We have made some huge leaps forward, especially if you think about what we now have here in the Information Age. Most of us carry a little black box in our pockets that has all the world’s knowledge on it, just a few clicks away. The future kind of snuck up on us. I was 26 years old when 1999 rolled into 2000. It was a very interesting time. We were all still getting used to this thing called the Internet. There was this whole scare over our computer systems somehow destroying the world because of the “Y2K Bug” that was looming. We entered into the new millennium full of hope.

Of course, whatever path we were on was completely derailed by the events of Sept.

11, 2001, and from that moment on, the course of our history was changed? For the better? For the worse? It’s really hard to say. But, here we are, living in the future in a society that somehow has managed to become even more insular despite the rise of social networking, and a world that is still facing all the problems (poverty, racism, political division, disease) that those magazine articles in the 1970s and 1980s were so sure we’d have figured out a solution for by now. We’re trying, but living in the future isn’t the utopia we were all led to believe was coming.

But, hey… my giant flatscreen TV is amazing!