what happened to our retro-futuristic dreams?

Where are our flying cars, portable reactors, and robot butlers? Well, thank the 1980s...

If you live in the 21st century and watch mid 20th century shows about the future, its hard not to feel cheated. After all, by the year 2000 we were supposed to have flying cars, three day work weeks, machines helping us in every facet of our lives, vacations on the Moon and Mars and interstellar travel. Just watch this little feature about The Jetsons to see how easy and automated our lives should have been according to writers in the 1960s. (Well, not including the scary bosses.)

So what happened? After the United States pulled ahead in the Space Race and its main reason for putting so much money in R&D, the USSR, began to stumble and groan under the stress of monetary problems and the Afghan War, it seems that science and technology became less of a priority.

Booming financial institutions and the idolization of brokers and executives overtook the admiration previously granted to scientists. There was also a huge disillusionment with the US government during the Vietnam War and Watergate. The culture of the 1950s and 1960s, a belief that people in lab coats would give us a brighter and ever more advanced tomorrow with starry eyes and an open mind, changed to that of pragmatic, skeptical consumers.

By the standards of a half century ago, were behind. Instead of all the machines and flying cars we have the good old internal combustion engine, high energy costs and a space program that progresses in fits and bursts, often using the relatively meager funds its given in a much less than optimal way and which insists on rebuilding old technologies that keep us confined to our own solar system. But at least we have computers far more powerful than anything imagined before and of course, the internet. And we have banks with money. Well, had until recently…