The Future from Past to Present

Throughout human history, predicting the future has preoccupied the imagination and brought on everything from novel invention to widespread panic. Stories were concocted about the end times, fumes were inhaled to receive divine insight, and all manner of objects were consulted, all in an attempt to predict what was coming next. Television, like any storytelling medium, was also used to convey ideas about what the future might be like—using predictive strategies from serious contemplation to idealistic daydreams to plain old SWAGs. What follows are a series of examinations of different techniques used in television to predict the future.

Early in television history, Walt Disney’s show Disneyland was submitted to the Peabodys multiple times. When it won in 1954, the Peabody panel said it had “changed the bedtime habits of the nation’s children.” The “Tomorrowland” segment always had audiences thinking about the world of tomorrow, if there was life on other planets, and new technologies that could be developed. In one episode entitled “Mars and Beyond,” Disney focuses on efforts to build a spacecraft that can reach Mars. The episode is documentary-like, detailing humanity’s interaction with Mars, from Greek philosophers to a 1957 scientist explaining how it is possible for Mars to sustain life. Everything is illustrated, there are even accounts from scientists to back up the points the episode makes.

The most notable aspect of this episode’s approach to the future is that instead of explaining the trip to Mars using conditional words like, “could,” “would,” “maybe,” or even the future “will,” the Disneyland episode is all in present tense, as if the launch was actually happening then. As everything is said, it is carried out through cartoon, models, or still images. The only time conditional words are used is after the spacecraft makes contact with Mars, because no one at the time had actually seen close up what the surface of Mars looked like. This decision to use certainty made the program’s predictions of impending travel to Mars more engaging and entertaining for its audience—fueling the imaginations of the young viewers, as was ultimately the show’s prerogative.

On July 10, 1962, ABC launched Telstar; it no longer runs today, but this communications satellite was considered a big deal by everyone in the industry. It was the first satellite to send television pictures, telephone calls, and fax images from space. The launch of the satellite coincided with a film entitled Worldvision: A Passport to the Future.

    

ABC believed that the launching of Telstar would influence how communications would evolve, and as such the company would be at the forefront of this technological advance. Exalted for its stunning visuals, this program tragically no longer exists beyond a working script and an audio recording. However from these, the optimism of the broadcaster is clear as the program exclaims that with the satellite, the communications industry would be launched into the future and, as the title implies, ABC was inviting the world to come along for the ride.

Conversely, The World of Tomorrow takes an approach to visualizing the future based largely on novelty. The program emphasizes the “wow factor” of technological advancements possible in the next decade (from 1984) with flashing lights, outer space-themed graphics, musical accompaniment reminiscent of futuristic programs like Star Trek and the astonished-sounding narration of William Shatner. It presents dozens of future inventions like computer-generated graphics in movies, interactive laser compact discs, and lasik surgery—which in hindsight, weren’t too far off. There are few dramatizations; most of its glimpses of the future are of the specific technology in play during the present, so its conceptualization was founded entirely on things currently in existence, with no speculation really needed. By keeping few its forays into the realm of complete conjecture, the program embraces extraordinary aspects of its future world while keeping it grounded in reality.  However, when the era of the future being predicted is only a few years off, rather than centuries, the margin for error shrinks considerably. Programs like this, which aim to legitimately give their audience a glimpse into the near future, must take care to ensure that their representation has a good chance of being accurate, because many who watch it will actually live to find out. 

On a very different note, Time Trumpet is a documentary made in 2031—or a satirical faux-documentary made in 2006, depending on who you ask. It takes then-contemporary trends to the illogical extreme by making the program as scatterbrained, celebrity obsessed, and ill-focused as its audience “will be.” It pokes fun at human nature as something absurdly shallow, yet pushes no real agenda; it simply deteriorates into nonsensical logic and jabs at people, corporations, and the documentary format. It uses the near-future as a fun house mirror for the present.

Finally, Futurescape opens segments of its program, like this one, with dramatizations of the future that introduce its discussion of how modern research could develop into technologies that shape the distant future. Here, the scene-setting sketch portrays a future city much like one today, except with high-rise structures built with some amorphous future architecture and flying cars zooming through the air. Yet when it zooms in to street level, we see people who remain dressed in modern American style, speaking English, and exhibiting behavior no different than one would expect of people today. This concept of the future, it seems, is different from the present in very imaginative ways - like robots who look like and live alongside humans - yet similar and largely identical on other levels. On the one hand, the idea of robots with human functions who demand the right to vote is highly presumptive, given that today’s robots can barely manage to traverse such difficult terrain as a slightly raised threshold. On the other, it’s an equal stretch to assume that the United States government, the English language, and modern customs and lifestyles will still exist a hundred or more years from today. It’s something drastically advanced fit into familiar and realistic concepts.

Such is Futurescape’s approach to visualizing the future: a sensational portrayal built around actual technological advancements that are unlikely to affect the future in the ways the show presents any time soon. Research into mapping the circuitry of the human brain may, in fact, enable scientists and engineers to build computers that can mimic or duplicate its functions. Achieving this is one thing, developing it into a viable technology that is consistently problem-free and successful is another. As neat as it is to imagine the possibility of having computer chips that enhance the processing power of the brain or humanoid robots with emotions and ethical decision making power, the odds of it all are slim for the foreseeable future.

However with futurism, an artistic movement that rejects traditional forms in order to celebrate through art the energy and dynamism of modern technology, the canvas on which to paint is boundless. Programs like The Jetsons and Star Trek have made use of those endless possibilities in their depictions of the future—some intentionally absurd and some borrowing from principles of theoretical physics to legitimize the program’s scenarios. With no definite predictor of exactly what is possible years down the road, no idea of what the future might hold for humankind is too outlandish. Futurescape seems comfortable, within the constraints of reason, to go as far as they can with that creative license. 

Choosing a strategy for portending, predicting, or playacting the future all depends on the oracle’s goals. From the idealism of the technology advertiser to the scathing absurdity of the satirist, no one way is useful for all objectives. Though some strategies may prove more accurate in the long run, very often the aim of the program is more immediate. In fact, the way in which the future is presented says more about the present than its ostensible subject matter. Starry-eyed idealism and outlandish optimism may serve the advertiser and the entertainer, but realism is more apropos for the journalist, as pessimism is for the activist documentarist.