BY this point in the 21st century we expected to be driving around Mars in spacesuits while robots do all the work. But we’re not. Here’s seven other things we’ve been deprived of:
Food pills
A couple of food pills from your belt dispenser and you’ve had your nutrition for the day, leaving you free to jet about in a perspex helmet. Instead everyone’s obsessed with eating and being first to roast purple yams has societal value.
Death sports
In the proper future, everyone watched great sports where the participants killed each other. From Rollerball to Death Race to The Running Man, slaughter was entertainment. In 2020, VAR checks whether Wilfried Zaha has bruised his ankle.
Amazing communicators that do everything
Imagine a little device that could communicate with anyone, provide any information, buy things, call transport, watch films and tell you where you are. They all have them in the sci-fi movies. All we have are sodding iPhones.
Nuclear devastation
Not that we really wanted it, but 80s kids grew up expecting to eke out an irradiated living from the poisoned post-apocalyptic land. It feels wrong not to have done at least a couple of years.
Cool new drugs
Where’s our purple glowing shots that switch our mind with some kind of Arcturian hyper-monkey for two days? There hasn’t been a new drug since E.
Future slang
In fictional 2020, you tell your hover-cab driver ‘You don’t blizbek me as a typical Venturi transvek klon’. In our 2020 the only new words are sh*t like ‘Brexit’, ‘The Goop Lab’ and ‘stan energy’.
A f**king moonbase, even
It wouldn’t even have to be a good one. Just a few domes linked with tubes, a rocket pad, a buggy and a rotating international staff. Just to say we had one, when the aliens come.
