On the advice of my friend, The Dark Lord Cyclohexane, I downloaded a three episode series that was on the discovery channel about what things would be like in about 50 years. Each episode concentrated on a different aspect of society, beginning with the body and then moving out to the city and finally the world.

Episode 1 - The Body

The main story line in this episode involved an everyman character waking up after night of binge drinking and faking an alcohol test. It seems that in the future alcohol will be illegal and so if you are caught drinking you'll lose your health insurance. Well, naturally our everyman does the classic thing and steps on some kind of robot things that happens to be lying around falls out a three story window on to the ground. Luckily for our Monsieur Everyman, they have flying cars in the future so, the ambulance flies right out to pick him up. They then drain out is blood in an attempt at "reversible Death", or as those of us less prone to ridiculous exaggeration, suspended animation. They then break into a segment about current flying car technology, with an example of a car the can take off all by itself.

Next the talk about printing out new organs directly with printers and nifty real time x-rays, all of which is pretty cool, but then they dive back into the story. The health insurance finds out about everyman fun night and cancels his insurance just before he gets a new heart. (those evil insurance people) so everyman is taken to the uninsured ward where he's left to die. Luckily the doctor has fallen for our hero's dashing good looks and has decided to fight the man by using some rich dead mans fancy insurance to get a new heart for our hero. yay!

Reaction:

The reversible death part was a bit hard to swallow as was the idea that there would be an insurance agent sitting around just watching what will happen. It would have been more realistic (though this is only a hypothetical future after all) if they'd had a computer doing all the work, instead of a mass of big brothers enforcers sitting around watching everyman's drug test all the time.

I'm also not too sure the constant monitoring would fly very well, considering how controversial id cards are at the present. I mean how are you supposed to get an illegal immigrant to do your laundry if big brother is monitoring everyone? (Heaven forbid that you'd do it yourself)

Episode II - The City

I guess I'll get this out at the beginning, I though that this episode was lame. Our characters for this episode involved a smart ass kid (the hero), a crooked cop who is also an incompetent single mother on the side and and an old disgruntled Hacker (who is the kids grandfather) and a bunch of people who were rejected from Idiocracy for not quite making the stupid cut. Basically the future will be filled with hologram advertisements floating everywhere running on windows 95. Every kid will have a little hologram friend hanging out with him, in our hero's case ,he starts with a dolphin, but Grampa makes him a shark. Granpa then leaves after another fight with his daughter the cop. (Considering his daughters reaction he probably throws a tantrum once a week and moves down to the flophouse for the weekend, and stumbles back on Monday morning with empty pockets.)

So after leaving our the kid unsupervised, le hero comes up with the brilliant idea of trying to put his shark into the city's main computer, because that would allow him to put it on all the holographic billboards. (I suppose it's beats going out with a can a spray paint...) So he pushes some buttons on his grampa's old laptop and magically releases an unbeatable virus that completely shuts down widows 95. OH NOES! This disaster paralyzes the city and our hero's mom tracks down grandpa and tries to arrest him,(because obviously no one else could hack Windows 95) until he convinces her that he's the only one who knows how to reboot a computer now. He fixes things and saves the day, our hero doesn't get any jail time for completely crashing every computer in town and everyone learns that setting your laptop to release virus upon startup is a social fauxpas.

Reaction:

I find it completely ridiculous no one knows how to work on the main computers because there so 'old'. And while a virus could get in and crash the system I find it to be equally impossible that someone could do by accident, I would expect that you'd need to know a little bit more that which button to press to bring down the city's entire system. And our stupid hero is too lame for words this episode was really lame and comically bad.

Episode III - The World

This episode was the final episode and as such treated us viewers with invisibility, space elevators and magical cures for the worlds energy problems. The main plot for this episodes involves solving the world energy crisis by developing efficient solar panels. Reasonable enough I suppose, though it is interesting that they chose the US and China as the two groups working on this research. During this time, they show some nifty gadget, a combination of small screens and cameras, that allow someone to turn invisible by having some cameras shoot what behind the person and then that info is displayed on many little screens on the clothes. Very cool. Meanwhile the EU is reduced to mediating between the quarrellings of Great (Evil) powers, while two scientists attempt to find a magic formula on a research station attached to a space elevator.

There is a scientific breakthrough, but unfortunately each of the evil Super powers wants to keep the info for themselves, but though some smuggling to the friendly media the world is saved. YAY!

Reaction:

The space elevator is pretty cool, and from what I've read, should be feasible in 50 years. Now the solar panels are a bit far fetched, since one has to wonder what would happen on a cloudy day, however I suppose they could put huge constellations of them in space and then beam the energy back to earth somehow.... This was an enjoyable episode. They briefly mention a fusion reactor which seems like it might actually be able to provide enough dependable energy to solve future energy needs, but even in fifty years might still be just a dream.

Conclusion:

This was quite entertaining, and some of it's predictions seemed somewhat plausible, but on the other hand, I'm sure that people thought we'd have flying cars and hearts to go by now fifty years ago, so it would be wise to take this program with a healthy dose of skepticism.