Where the hell is my flying car? Part 1

And other things that the future promised yet didn't deliver!

Imagine: You're 12 years old. You're watching Back to the Future 2. Doc Brown almost murders Marty McFly as he jumps into the future in his flying car. Biff Tannen and his goons just got their asses handed to them on their hoverboards. I legit thought this was going to be the future. Pretty much any movie you would see that was "futuristic" you bet your ass they had flying cars.

Fast forward 25 years we have this.

Yay! Traffic!

So I wondered. What other are some other things we were promised in the future that we didn't get? 
I asked some people over at Musings Of Shawn on Facebook what they ​think. 

Flying Cars

What are you talking about? This doesn't look dangerous at all!

I would say flying cars would be the number one thing that I thought my glorious future would contain. Where the hell are the scientists in labs working on propulsion systems and where are the engineers designing, let's be honest; the ugliest cars you've ever seen. 

I thought by now that I'd be taking a damn Delorian to work. What do I get instead? Self driving cars. What the hell man! Stop it! Stop it right now. No one wants your fancy car that can drive itself. What's the fun in that?  I want something that if there's traffic, I'm going 20 feet higher to get around that shit. 

'What about the accidents" you say.  "What about cars plummeting from the sky, reigning terror down on the poor helpless people below?" Well I'll tell you what I say. "Accidents smackshidents" 

I'm sure if you can figure out how to make a car fly, you can figure out how to also make that car not turn into a ballistic missile. As Nike says. Just do it. 

A wall? 

So one response I got was that they always thought that in their future, out of everything thing else, that there would be a wall.

​A wall? Yes. A wall.

The vagueness of the response makes me wonder, what kind of wall would I want in my future. Here are just a few.

A climbing wall

Ah, yes, a climbing wall. The perfect gift for the over the top exercise aficionado. When going to the gym for 3 hours a day isn't enough. Now you can have your own mountain (with convenient steps of course) in your very own home. Watch as people marvel at your ability to climb. Ooh fun.

Prison wall

The understated prison wall. A simple yet eloquent work of art that doesn't get the credit it deserves. Bear with me here. What does every prisoner want more than anything else? Besides drugs and a cell phone.
To know whats on the other side of that wall. They eat, breath, sleep and dream about that wall. Nothing else really matters and that in and of itself makes the prison wall something that anyone would be a fool to pass up. 

See, I see where the commenter is going with this and it's brilliant. 

The goddamn holodeck 

What do you mean this thing only goes up to PG-13

Star Trek is one of those shows that gave us so many things to look forward to. A future without racism, where humans live among the stars in peace and harmony. Some of the things Star Trek promised me, I'll get to in a minute. But first, let's get to the most important, the coolest, the most far reaching, world changing invention that the Star Trek universe ever created. No, not glasses for the blind.

The Goddamn Holodeck. 

Let's get a few things out of the way when it comes to the Holodeck. The real Holodeck is probably a filthy, disgusting place that you wouldn't want your worst enemy to visit. The Enterprise janitor who is stuck on Holodeck cleanup duty probably dreams of the day that he is in that one spot when a Klingon photon torpedo blasts through the engineering deck or the captain gives him a red shirt and assigns him to the away team.

The second thing is: Virtual Reality is not the beginnings of the Holodeck. Wearing a stupid thing on your head and pretending you're in the Amazon is not the Holodeck. Not even close. I want the day when I can press a button and say, "Computer, bring me back to tenth grade so I can punch my worst enemy in the face." See that would be cool.  

Smellovision

Smell-O-Vision. Seriously, why the hell don't I have this yet? How has society not banded together and demand that all scientific research be put to a halt until this becomes a thing. If we can get behind Harambe, we can get behind this people! 

Sit back, let me take you on a journey. You're on your couch... or are you. Okay you are but bear with me. Waves crash along the shoreline as you rock back and forth on your hammock with a cocktail in your hand. You smell the fresh lime on your fingers as you squeeze it into the Corona bottle. You smell the coconut from your suntan lotion and the salt in the air. You pause for a moment. <sniff, sniff> What's that you wonder? You lower your sunglasses and peer towards the ocean, suddenly realizing it's low tide. Mother nature is gifting you the smell of it's now dead ocean inhabitants and the distinctive smell of rotten eggs or sulfur.

Okay, maybe I need to rethink this whole Smell-O-Vision thing. Imagine horror movies with Smell-O-Vision? Or even worse...

The Food Replicator

If there is one thing I hate most in life, it would be cooking. I'm not only really bad at it, I get exactly 0 enjoyment out of it. My personal hell would be an executive chef at a restaurant that had ALL THE FOOD TO COOK! <shudders>

 Unfortunately unless I become independently wealthy and can afford to eat out every night, either myself  or my wife is stuck cooking. This could easily be solved with a goddamn food replicator. Why the hell does Elroy Jetson get to press a button and instantly get a freaking pepperoni pizza with extra cheese and crispy crust?

This would seriously solve so many issues for me. I don't really get to try a lot of new foods, mainly because of the paragraph above but I'm not going to pay for something that I might not like. How does one solve this problem? Well I could hire my own personal chef, but again, money. It's 2017! I should be able to press 25 buttons at the same time and have some complicated machine start spitting out things like Salmon, fried clams and  salami sandwiches. That way, I can try a bite, then throw the horrid thing away the second I decide it's the worst thing I've ever had and probably should have never tried it to begin with.