Future Schlock

What do Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, Charles Duke, John Young, and Harrison Schmitt have in common?. Besides the resemblance to a law firm or a British art rock group, they are precisely half of the twelve Earthlings who have set foot on the moon. (Not counting the late Dr. Timothy Leary, of course.) Isn't it amazing we don't know their names by heart? Most of us can name more of the original Mercury astronauts than those of Apollo vintage.

It could be a lack of spin control. As we well know, Astronauts are not exactly the world's most exciting people, even though they may have its most exciting job. We abhor the routine. After all, the second-most-famous Apollo mission was 13, which went horribly awry. Not all astronauts are boring, of course, but they tend to be penalized for any flashes of personality. Take Wally Schirra. He was a smart-ass, so he didn't get to go to the moon.

Which brings me to my main point. During the heady days of the Apollo program, experts confidently predicted we'd live in space by now. But predicting the future is a tricky business, and almost everyone gets it wrong. By all rights, I should be writing this article inside a giant Habitrail on Moonbase Aldrin as I drink a Mickey's Big Mouth from a tube. Instead, I'm writing it on a device that blindsided all the experts: a personal computer.

Few seemed to see the impact computers would make. Sure, we needed them to do important astronaut stuff: “Check the telemetry, Gordo.” But computers only crunched numbers. How would they change our lives? Easy. They'd control robots. Robots were the future. They'd clean the apartment, fix drinks, and make nifty hors d'oeuvres for parties. (All right, they weren't always good. Sometimes, they'd come back in time from the future and try to kill women named Sarah. But that's a small price to pay for decent cheese puffs.)

And we believed. In the mid-'60s, science was our god. We ate multicolored nutrient-packed cereals as we watched Jonny Quest, and stayed up late for Star Trek, shows where the marvels of technology conquered adversity. The devices rarely failed, and when they did, what matter? Good old human know-how could always save the day. We had not yet run up against the limits of our technology. The Vietnam War was only just beginning to sour; Challenger and the decline of NASA were still 20 years away.

Now, whether we're ready or not, the future has arrived. Take 2001: A Space Odyssey. The magic date is now only five years away. Do you see any giant rotating space stations in orbit? Remember the Pan Am space plane? You can't even take Pan Am to Chicago now. A three-year trip to Jupiter? I worry about flying to France. How are we supposed to move into the future when we can't even leave the '70s behind? We're not sizing moon boots, we're sporting platform shoes again.

2001's astronauts, David Bowman and Frank Poole, if anything, were more boring than the six astronauts listed earlier. The most interesting character in the film was Hal, the ship's sanity-challenged computer. I'm pretty sure his psychosis was caused by running a beta version of Windows 99, but that's strictly a guess. Anyway, to wrap up the plot, Bowman pulls a Major Tom, and turns into a giant earth-orbiting space baby. Since there are presumably no Huggies in space, I'd keep watching the skies.

In 1969, the year after 2001 was released, my second grade class hosted a visitor in a gray flannel suit. He was from the bright future, here to show us a product we would all be using within five years: the mighty Picturephone! We squirmed excitedly as he solemnly explained how this device would revolutionize our lives. Well, 1974 came and went, and I wondered why my parents hadn't bought one yet. Now it's 1996, and no one I know owns a Picturephone. Sure, they exist, but Steamboat Willie had better picture quality. The real secret: no one wants one. The Picturephone requires important sacrifices, like wearing clothing at all times.

That's the point futurists miss. For a product to be successful, it has to be something people want. We didn't want Picturephones, Edsels, or New Coke, and we don't want movies on demand. However, for obvious supply reasons, certain well-known video rental giants want you to have movies on demand, which is why the issue won't die. (A recent technology poll put movies on demand dead last out of ten proposed interactive services.) The jury's still out on the Arch Deluxe. Mainframe behemoth IBM didn't think anyone would want a personal computer, but Apple did, and that has made all the difference.

Well, there is one other factor for the success of the PC. Mathematics. In the '60s and '70s, you had to be good with numbers to program or even use a computer. But the PC changed all that, and now even a math bozo like me (I can't even do long division) can write HTML. In other words, millions of people have joined a club previously barred to them, helping create the current explosion of computer users.

The irony is obvious: the very device that allowed us to make the complex calculations for landing on the moon has made math virtually irrelevant.