Timestreams

 Hey! Look at that! Way down at the bottom of this page. It tells you the number of days until Soylent Green becomes available to the public. Lest you believe that Blogger is somehow involved, this is a little widget that I installed a few years back. To be funny. Because I find it amusing that our possible futures keep rushing up on us faster than we can generate them, but somehow we keep finding ourselves living in the present that looks nothing like what we were promised back in 1970. Except for the big TVs and cell phones. And the crystals embedded in our palms that count down to our ritual suicide. 

Originally, that spot was going to be a countdown to the moment that Skynet became self-aware, but that was way back on August 29, 1997. The events of the Terminator saga may have been playing out behind a veil of media blackout and misdirection, but if they truly are currently set in motion, here is the good news: We only have to wait eight more years until the resistance, led by Sarah Connor's son John, destroys Skynet and we can all go back to imagining a future where we eat people crackers instead.

I apologize for the previous paragraphs in which my nerd expectations forced you to wade through the scrap heap of my mind. But it is a messy business, this future thing. Like the announcement made recently by the Gateway Foundation, where they told us that we are just six years away from the opening of the first hotel in space. I was alerted to this news via a tweet in which someone was opining "Hotel in space? We just want healthcare." Which immediately set my memory banks reeling to the not so distant past in which Neill Blomkamp's 2013 film gave us a peek inside what's coming, and it turns out they are completely connected. In Elysium, a great big wheel of a space station, the privileged live in a world without war or poverty or sickness. 

Sound familiar?

Well it turns out that all the sickness and poverty is stuck down on Earth, with the rest of us. The rabble. A resistance, led by Sarah Connor's other son Matt Damon, travels to the eponymous space station in the hopes of bringing down the upper class and opening the door for universal health care. That movie is set in 2154, so we've got a while before we have to start worrying.

Except that the first hotel in space really happened in or around 2001, when Hilton and Howard Johnsons worked together to make outer space your home away from home. In your Earth years, that was 1968 with a future envisioned by Stanley Kubrick. It is not clear if reservations made for that Hilton in the intervening fifty years or so will be honored at the Gateway resort. Or if Matt Damon will be allowed to travel there. Because he has a history of getting stuck off planet. 

Maybe he can keep himself from getting hungry by dipping into those nice green crackers.

I'm so confused.