Science Friction

One of the tricks to not being disappointed at the way your life has turned out is to not take romantic comedies too seriously. I’ve seen enough people who feel that their life is packed with bitter disappointment and humdrum banality simply because they haven’t had that wondrous love story, haven’t met ‘the one’ or do not have the sort of movie lifestyle where no one ever seems to be working but everyone is still rich enough to go on exciting and exotic trips where they follow their hearts to find themselves and have a perfect ending of life lessons learnt and redemption earned.

While the same could be said about other movie/book genres, I’ve never gotten terribly carried away by any of them, so life has been quite all right. However, if there is one genre that has left me disappointed, it is sci-fi. And it’s not because I was a sci-fi geek who’d read every book in the genre and watched all the Star Trek episodes and was therefore trapped in my own little world completely disconnected from what was going on around me. Nonetheless, there was a stage in life when I was reasonably into the genre – I’d read a few books of Isaac Asimov (how did that man write so many books?), Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut and the like, as well as enjoyed many an episode of The Jetsons. Sure, calling yourself a fan of sci-fi because you watched the Jetsons is a bit like saying you’re interested in history because you watched the Flintstones, but still. All that space travel and time travel, new planets and strange new planes of existence, personal jet packs and robots that did everything for you – it was very exciting to my childlike imagination. Now, I wasn’t naive enough to expect all of that to have transpired by the time I was an adult, but am I the only one disappointed that it all seems as distant now as it did when I was 14? I mean, come on – I’m ok forgoing the robots and the new planets, but at least a personal jet pack that lets me fly around as I wish?

Not that I was alive then, but as early as the 1960s everyone thought that the space age was upon us. The Russians and the Americans were busy competing with each other by sending all sorts of animals to space, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and David Bowie devoted half his discography to songs about space travel. Sci-fi movies and books did the rest, making it look like it was all a matter of time – that even if it wasn’t by the 1980s or 1990s, at least by the 21^st century a combination of advanced technology and terrible fashion sense would see us zipping around planets in our personal space crafts while wearing silver jumpsuits and sporting bad haircuts.

Yet, all we’ve got today is social networking and junk mail from African royalty of dubious antecedents. Now, a lot of you might think that this isn’t true – that artificial intelligence and virtual reality are the next big things that will alter the face of technology. All I can say is that for the last two decades, artificial intelligence and virtual reality have been the next big things, without ever really looking like becoming the current big thing. Again, a lot of you might say that companies like Google are at the cutting edge of innovation with drones that deliver pizzas and cars that drive themselves around – but these are the sort of things that kids today will be disappointed about 20 years from now when they see that they still haven’t transpired. Of course, if technology had actually done something truly remarkable like discover a cure to all of life’s diseases, I would have overlooked the lack of a personal jet pack – but the diseases have only gotten worse, haven’t they?

All this made me wonder – what has science been doing all these years? The answer suddenly dawned on me a few weeks back, when I was shopping for shoes. Shoes! That’s where all the scientific effort has been diverted to all these years. The best and brightest of scientific minds have been hired by the likes of Nike, Adidas and Puma, ferreted away into a remote and secret facility and been ordered to come up with the most advanced footwear that mankind has ever seen, never mind whether mankind really needed it. Shoes with technology so advanced, a gullible enough soul would be willing to part up to a month’s salary in exchange for a pair of them.

All I wanted was a pair of sneakers for the occasional bit of walking/exercising that, in all likelihood, I would not get around to doing, so I was hoping for a purchase that was quick and inexpensive.  Yet, I was interrogated thoroughly as to whether my intentions with the shoes were in any way honorable, what kind of activities would I subject them to, how long might I be using them everyday, and so on and so forth, before finally being handed a pair of shoes with a description on the tag seeking to justify the exorbitant price they commanded. It sounded something like this:

“Made using the same Dura-Edge flex-curve technology used by NASA in their space missions, our shoes rearrange themselves at a molecular level to fit the contours of your feet to ensure 360 degree dynamism and optimal comfort. Customized Hexa Polyhydrons, invented at our state of the art facility, allow you to jump from great heights and feel invincible.  Our micro fibrous, ambidextrous, jaw dropper, heart stopper, come a cropper material uses quantum aerodynamics to answer vital metaphysical questions that make them a perfect addition to your daily fitness routine.”

Looks like all that science fiction is reality after all, just not the way I expected it to be!