THE FUTURE ? ? ?

People are always trying to show the rest of the world what the future will look like. Most of the time they are only trying to show what the products that they manufacture will do in the future. Most of the time all they really want to do is to show that they will be making things that they think will define the future. I was reminded of the Carousal of Progress that dominated Tomorrowland at Disneyland. It was sponsored by a company that made appliances and it showed how these products would advance in the future. Most of what they anticipated has not come true in the form that they guessed. The future will be sooner then most of the people planning have guessed and it will do things that we have no way of guessing. Some products that we now are showing are based on products that are now made. Plastics seem to dominate the house of the future. The way that we are using up our petroleum reserves we will not be able to manufacture plastic in any quantity and it will become prohibitively expensive. The future planners must go back to basics and find the raw materials of the future. In the not to far past we could not even anticipate the advances in manufacture of products we deem basic to our lives. The size and shape of computers is just one of the areas that we missed. No one guessed that not only would we all have computers but that we would be sending our thoughts all around the world and that the candidates for national office would discover the Internet as a campaign tool and way to raise money and awareness. A major communications conference several years ago the manufactures were anticipating large screen TV’s that would not entertain us but would provide us with the access to our computers and the internet.

We are all dreaming of the future and in fact it would not be a surprise if the future is not developed by the people who are now in Rand D around the world but by the people who are now in school and learning the basics so that they can chance everything that we now know to make it hopefully better and maybe just help the groups of people who most need help in today’s world.