Yes, it's the far-off, distant future world of 2023, where we get morning thunderstorms in Indiana in January. I don't care if you want to call it weather or climate -- it's not what we used to get and while (relative) warmth and thunderstorms are probably better than six feet of snow and temperatures that will turn it to ice, I'm not a big fan.
In this World of Tomorrow, the biggest (or at lest best-publicized) maker of electric cars has painted himself into a corner where the people who were happy to buy his cars are backing away because they loathe his politics and people who generally approve of his politics are disinterested in electric cars if not outright hostile to the idea. --And yet the same guy has managed to bring the cost of space travel down to a level where the average well-connected billionaire can afford to go exploring, and one already has.
--Meanwhile, one of his competitors is selling front-row seats to an in-person look at Earth from space to the merely rich and famous, and another has launched -- and crashed -- the first mission to orbit directly from Britain (a mere 77 years after the British Interplanetary Society proposed sending a man into space from that green and pleasant land and 15 years too late for Sir Arthur C. Clarke to see it).
This is not the future I expected -- but that's how it usually works.
And here we sit...STILL devoid of spacely sprockets to power our flying cars. I believe that "Mistakes were made."
ReplyDeleteI was promised lunar cities when I was a child.
ReplyDeleteI will never not feel cheated.