From the RAT Files circa 2003: The Future is Here! It's Just Very Hard to See...

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO which first aired in June of 2002. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this amateur radio news service. This is one of my favorite Random Access Files. Aside from it being an adjective-heavy boatload of copy, it was one of my more passionate efforts. Also, this installment has been reincarnated several times. I believe the original voice only version played in two ten minute segments. It reappeared as a twenty minute two part version with added sound effects. I finally reshaped it down to a single ten minute version, which still airs from time to time.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.
Since they promised us:
FLYING CARS!
So far, I see no flying cars.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.

Since they promised us:
HOUSEHOLD ROBOT FRENCH MAIDS!
So far, I see no household robot French maids.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.
Since they promised us:
ANTI_GRAVITY TUBES!
(Something like an elevator without the elevator).
But so far, I see no anti-gravity tubes.

Buck Rogers
Flash Gordon (the Mac Raboy version)
Life Magazine
Popular Electronics
Popular Science,
Popular Mechanics
Science and Mechanics
Rocky Jones - Space Ranger
Captain Video
Captain Midnight
Gort
DC Comics
Marvel Comics (Stan Lee, always cool)
The Jetsons
The Flintstones
Walt Disney
Bill Hanna
Joe Barbera
The collective Captains - Kirk, Picard and Janeway
Mister Spock (live long)
Scotty (She's gonna blow)
Bones (He's dead, Jim. I'm a doctor)
Stanley Kubrick (despite his amusing toilet scenes)
Doctor Strangelove (not really, but I liked the film)
The Big Black Monolith (scary)
George Lucas
Luke Skywalker
His father Darth
His sister Princess
The tin can R2
The other can C3
Steven Spielberg
Steve's CE3K thing from the mother ship
Rita Liebowitz
The Great Gazoo
MAD Magazine (rarely)
Playboy Magazine (barely)
Robby the Robot (Oh, my Krell)
SuperCar
StingRay
FireBall XL-5
Thunderbirds (are GO F-A-B)
Scott McCloud (Space Angel)
Space Ghost (Gary Owens)
The Herculoids
Tom Swift (not Tom Slick)
Analog Science Fiction
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Issac Azimov
The National Geographic
Potzrebe
Roger Ramjet (Gary Owens)
Noodles Romanoff
Max Headroom
Max Korn
Anna Nova
Adam Strange
Wonder Woman
And anyone else
You can think of.

They all promised us...
Cities sculpted into impossibly tall, shimmering see-through time-share
high rises (which we shall call):
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal flying car for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal helicopter for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal jet pack for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Antigravity tubes for zooming up and down inside, outside and around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal robot French robot maid for cleaning:
The Glass Spires.
They promised us this fabulous, spectacular-looking future!

Things around here look pretty much the same today as they did in 1953. There are a few obvious changes, like buildings, automobiles and airplanes. Here in little old Albany New York, we've got an Empire State Plaza and the State University of New York at Albany and the New York State Office Campus, all apparently designed by frustrated former New York City World's Fair architects. Very, very ultra modern but surrounded by sagging turn-of-the-century vintage tenement buildings, dusty depression era houses, post World War Two cookie-cutter split level semi-detached ranches and even a few Lustron stainless steel houses in the Beaver Cleaver suburbs. But overall, most of the buildings that were here in 1953 are still here in 2003, in some cases, filthier, in some cases cleaner and in some cases rehabbed and stocked with a load of well-meaning, over-educated, under-paid and terminally misdirected social workers.

Cars have changed. But too not much as you might expect.
The testosterone-pumped 57 Chevy..
The estrogen-flooded Thunderbirds.
Then.
Sexless little boxy Acuras........
Sexless little boxy Toyotas.......
Sexless little boxy Subarus.......
Sexless little boxy SUVs..........
Now.

Trucks never really got into future gear. The ultimate boy toys got bigger and more ominous in size. But look pretty much the same as they did one and two score ago. City, suburban and intercity buses sad to say have changed for the worse, going from the warm and friendly well-rounded rolley polley Art Deco appointments of the General Motors coach of the 1950's and the fiercely loud, rattle trap diesel engine of the Mack bus of the same era, somehow morphing into giant moving tin can bread boxes spot-welded together by manufacturers that no one has ever heard of.

Airplanes.
The rugged workhorse and pack mule of the Second World War......
The Douglas DC-3, it's brothers....the manly DC-4,6 and 7......
And the ultra sexy three-finned Lockheed Constellation.........
Then.
Big blobby terrorist blowtorch Boeing 727s, 737s, 747s, 757s...
and all the other 7s and of course the big blobby Euro AirBuses
Now.

THE FUTURE IS HERE! But a lot of it is just very hard to see. Hi, this is Bill Baran - N2FNH - with some thoughts from the Random Access File. The future is very hard to see because the future is mostly hiding inside things, like old falling-back-to-nature farm houses, crappy old city apartments, even crappier old office buildings and cars, some crappy and some not so crappy and commercial airliners and boats and things like that. The Internet, arguably our most universally futuristic application to date can't be seen at all, except as images skittering across dumpy beige-colored TV monitor screens, downloading their way out of boxy beige boxes sitting on dumpy dingy desks or dumpy beige towers sitting on the floors beside those dumpy dingy desks inside those same old falling-back-to-nature farm houses, those same crappy old city apartments and same even crappier old office buildings. Outside, the Internet is incognito. Looking just like old, tired, weather - ravaged, very badly listing telephone poles strung with droopy, sagging wires, clad with Flying Walanda squirrels, cranky crows and timeless pairs of kids' KEDS (or maybe it's NIKE) sneakers tangled, strangled and dangling for dear life, the wires secretly and quietly transmitting the megabauds to the unseen distant servers sequestered in big city basements. In some cases, you may see fatter, pudgier, bird poop-stained cables groaning from the same poles and this would be your Verizon, Bellsouth, Pacific Bell, SNET et al broadband DSL or Time Warner Road Runner transmission line.

The big boxy beige boxes themselves ARE getting smaller, changing color and becoming more more invisible too, turning into PDAs that are so small they can fit in your pocket. The Internet is more invisible to the outside world then television has been in its various forms. The 1950s saw single-channel 20-element Yagis and multi-channel 40-element log periodic antennas mushroom over rooftops everywhere. You knew where the future was because the antenna was the visible link to the Ether. Nowadays, computers are linked with their hard-to-see Ethernet cards but they are connected with equally hard-to-see cables and twisted pairs of wires that slide around and then disappear into a tiny socket in a wall inside an office or residence.

By the late 1970s, the first of the giant metal ears, satellite dishes - small-scale Arecibos, blossomed in back yards at first across the rural fruited plain. But then many sprung up in suburban backyards too and sometimes even New York City high rises. Neighbors were pissed. They complained it was an eyesore but really they were jealous because they did not have the future in a boxy beige box delivering 500 channels of "Gee Honey, there's nothing good on the tube tonight".

As we made our way to the mid-90s and then into the present century, the TV dishes got smaller and became almost completely invisible, every house on the block with an 18-inch Japanese stir fry wok jammed on a stick sideways over the porch or on a window sill in the suburbs and the urbs, the trailer courts and the downtown ghettos. The TVs got bigger and bigger and still promise to get even bigger but they are hiding inside houses, hiding inside apartments and hiding inside condos that somehow themselves seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

Cable TV, even worse, with its black, shaky, snaky, kinky coax wires strung helter-skelter under the ground, through the basements, behind the walls and other filthy cobweb-laced, insect-infested places just out of view. The future..terminating in a little boxy beige box with glittering red LEDs sitting by the TV set. The future continues to become even more invisible.

As the TV dishes got smaller and the decades-old rooftop TV antennas now almost completely rusted away, some things - were - getting bigger. You could actually see them. King Kong vs. Godzilla-sized cellphone towers rising up like gargantuan steel weeds, spreading their giant Rodan antenna wings everywhere, on every open lot, every roadside, every hillside, every apartment rooftop, the towers are appearing to be getting bigger and wider and heavier and are studded with truly ominous and very formidable emitters. But the telephones they serve, Are getting smaller. They are so small. They are almost invisible. They are smaller than your hand. You could easily drop it in a toilet.

But you can telephone someone with no wires needed. Or make like a two-way radio (Ala' Nextel). Or send instant text messages or even get HTML or XML or any ML on some. But they are so small, You could easily drop it in a toilet. The future continues to become even more invisible.

And what happened to those thousands of CB and amateur radio antennas that were homegrown on housetops and towers everywhere. Most did indeed rust away. Many were taken down as new property covenants condemned the gawky, gangly sky hooks a socially unacceptable structural offense. Clever entrepeneurs moved right in and invented invisible antennas or at least every small but supposedly very active antennas. And the radios themselves, Like the cellphones and PDAs, Smaller and smaller again. The smallest ones, You could easily drop in a toilet.

Other radios will soon be hiding, masquerading as brother and sister boards, stuffed in PCI slots inside the boxy beige boxes but will be called Software Defined Radios, virtual transceivers where the radio is just a picture on the boxy beige box screen. In professional circles, the radio station, the television station, the audio and video post-production house, once repositories of big red glowing glass tubes, big iron rack mounts, big patch bays snarled with big finger- sized wires, big 14inch metal reel-to-reel tape machines, and the big Gates control consoles with the big fist -sized pots - all have given way to tiny little virtual studios that can easily be concealed in a little boxy beige box and further concealed in a closet painted in the color of your choice. The future continues to become even more invisible.

Our neighborhood shops and superettes, one on every corner when we were kids, all have politically defected from the neighborhood and have slipped inside big giant boxy, in some cases beige, boxes. Monstrous, sprawling, faceless landscape eaters that we all call the Mall. But it is here in the Mall where the glass-spired future comes closest to the desired realization. But this future too is concealed within the great sometimes boxy beige-colored boxes. The interior decoration often appointed with spectacular see-thru glass elevators, brilliant sparkling glass chandeliers and of course the ubiquitous go-up and down escalators. But escalators will always be the always-cool but truly retro future machine. All of this invisible to the world...

Unless you go inside.

The future continues to become even more invisible.

Each day, take look around you and see the future. Each day, there will be something new to see. Something truly futuristic. Something truly fantastic. Something wonderful - (ala' 2010). But this, and the rest of the future, will continue to become even smaller and more and more invisible. So small in fact, You could easily drop it in a toilet. -30-