So we’re officially in the future – minus the flying cars, self-lace up trainers, dehydrated pizza and levitating hoverboards. As the world celebrates the day when Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel in 1989’s Back to the Future II, we take a look at the predictions futurists have been making over the years. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves for not living up to their optimistic standards.
Here are a bunch of travel things we really should have sorted out by now.
Hovercars
In 1985, Back to the Future assured us that by 2015 hovercars would be our main form of transport. Doc Brown clearly said that where they were going, they didn’t need roads.
Well, we do, and the traffic and the potholes are all getting worse. We want our hovercars!
Hoverboards
Hoverboards are an even bigger letdown from Back to the Future’s predictions because that’s just depriving kids of fun. Won’t anybody think of the children?!
Teleportation
Obviously, this would annihilate the aviation industry and probably all other forms of transport – we’d probably even use it to get from the living room to the bathroom.
We’d be so fat if teleportation existed, it’s probably a good thing science hasn’t given it to us yet.
Food in pills
Transporting sufficient food and water on long journeys can be a logistical conundrum and a lot of the time passengers don’t enjoy the supplied vittles anyway.
If they’re not going to enjoy it and we can free up the space, just give them the grub in pill-form, as once prophesied. Even in First Class it’d be a good idea – lobster is a pain to eat, if you’re really honest about it, what with all that tool use and shell cracking. It should just be a fishy-smelling pill.
All cars electric
Optimists thought by now we’d all be puttering away in environmentally-friendly electric vehicles. Sure, there are a couple around, but we’re still into our gas guzzlers due to the, you know, dominance of the petroleum industry.
Whoa, sorry, did we get a bit too real for you there, sheeple? Let’s move on before your minds get blown, yeah? Why yes, this hat is made out of tinfoil, thanks for asking.
Space colonies
We’ve been talking about living in space for a very long time, but we just don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Gravity is such a drag – we’re bored of living with it.
The International Space Station is a squib compared to that Babylon 5 we were looking forward to.
Mars for holidays
It’s big, red and just crying out for us to take walks all over it. Why aren’t we there yet? To be honest, it’s probably a good thing because Cohaagen won’t give the people air anyway.
Hypersleep
Why do we have to sit through economy travel? Just put us to sleep already. Sure, whenever people are put into hypersleep in sci-fi films, some sort of alien inevitably violates their unconscious body, but, as long as we don’t have to watch that little plane slowly blipping over a world map, it’ll totally be worth it.
Wormholes
These are supposed to provide handy stargate-like jumps across unfathomable swathes of the cosmos. It must be the name that’s putting scientists off getting their act together.
Jetpacks
“Where’s my flipping jetpack?” This is all anybody says in 2014. The world’s frustration at science’s inability to provide them is why war still exists.
Time travel
The ultimate form of transport is via time. It’ll allow us to create alternate countless timelines and enter parallel universes where some joker thought it would be funny to go back to the Cretaceous period and give dinosaurs iPads – some app would’ve helped them survive that meteor and today the President of the USA would be a velociraptor.
But really, the main thing anybody needs to do when time travel becomes available is to go back in time and make the rest of our list available today!
