Yesterday, William Shatner woke up the crew of Discovery with a re-working of the Star Trek opening. Tomorrow, the shuttle will land for the last time. But today, I’m just sad.
The end of the shuttle program heralds not just the end of an era in spaceflight, but rings out the last, tinny echoes of hope from a chorus that once sang of all that was bright and wondrous in this new world of technology and promise. Or, at least it was a new world. Back before we forgot that we live in the future.
I’m a child of the ’80s. Not a pretender to the decade as so many twenty-something hipsters who grew up in the ’90s are, but a true, dyed-in-smurf-blue kid of the Reagan era. I grew up alongside computers, as PCs fought their way into the world, but before they’d taken it over.
Back then, during the closing days of the Cold War, when Russia and Cuba could reasonably be expected to launch an assault on Colorado and Patrick Swayze, the air was different. Maybe it was because I was a kid, but it seemed like there was a bit of magic mixed in with the paranoia, and the future was an exciting new landscape of technology and innovation in which I couldn’t wait to live.
Everything was new. Computers were new. Modems were new. Bulletin Board Systems held a tantalizing promise of digital community the world had never known. The future was everywhere. Lasers became commonplace, dizzying displays of light synced to the driving techno-chords of Moog synthesizers. Or Pink Floyd.
I built a robot in third grade. In sixth grade, I reproduced the hydroponics configuration of Walt Disney World‘s “The Land” with a motor, a hamster wheel and a handful of tomato plants. I did everything I could to reach the future of the 1980s, a time where we collectively imagined we’d explore the frontiers of space and test the limits of the human mind. Technology would usher in a new era of humanity, ruled by science and reason and intellect. And flux capacitors.
But somewhere along the way, it all went wrong. I can’t remember when it happened. I just know that it did.
The community of BBSs dissolved into the increasing chatter of FidoNET, which itself later fell to CompuServ, Prodigy and America On-Line, until the Internet eventually ate them all. The sense of belonging to a digital family was washed away by the tidal surge of the Net and its ocean of limitless information. And noise.
Lasers, once a great symbol of science blending with the promise of art, a taste of lightsabers and ray guns, became nothing more than presentation tools for waterheaded MBAs to use during their torture sessions of PowerPoint and buzzwords. Now we use them to annoy our cats.
Computers stirred the imagination to touch the boundaries of the possible and push beyond them. Games rose up from text-only affairs to adventure and role playing games with crude graphics that provided more introspection than they did entertainment. They were a solitary activity, requiring a working knowledge of the arcane science of interrupt requests, input-output addresses and configuration files. Now, they’re photo-realistic, normal-mapped depictions of war and blood and brown. And sometimes they come in happy meals.
Where did our future go, exactly? Thirty years ago, I dreamed of a great world rising up thirty years later. But that was before the promise of innovation yielded to the demand for consumer products. I admit, my iPhone is amazing. I can watch movies on demand anywhere in the world inasmuch as AT&T decides to provide coverage. I can check my e-mail, surf the web and buy any song I’ll ever want with the touch of a button. It’s amazing and I am amazed by it.
So why does it feel so cheap?
Maybe it’s because I grew up. Maybe the hopes and dreams of youth are always dashed upon the jagged rocks of maturity. It happened to the hippies, where the flower-children of one decade became the yuppies of the ’80s. I don’t remember them, though. I was too busy playing with Star Wars toys and charting a course into the infinite unknowns of tomorrow to care about the mundane world of adults. The world I’m in now.
If it is meant to be this way – if the natural course of our lives is one of rising hope and crushing disappointment – then when the nose wheel of Discovery next touches the Earth, it will be the last step on a 30 year journey to nowhere. For all the convenience of our gadgets, the world isn’t much different than it was three decades ago. We just have more things that go bleep and bloop, and more ways to keep us up at night and away from all the things that ever really mattered.
I will always miss the days of my youth, when the future was an enormous playground of unending possibility. But what I miss more is the ability to hope and dream and wonder like I could back then. Whether it was because I was young and stupid, or if there really was any magic crackling through the atmosphere back when Woz tinkered in his garage, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever spark was there – or that I thought was there – is gone.
I can only hope my son feels some touch of it during these early days of his life, and that he’s able to hold onto it longer than I have. And when Discovery touches down tomorrow for the last time, and as the crew pops out to give one last ceremonial wave to the cameras, I’ll hope that maybe one day I can get it back.
So long, and thanks for all the dreams
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