We made it back to the future, but in a parallel universe

9 July 2010

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Back to the Future fan I hope you weren’t taken in by the claim that last Monday, 5 July, was “Future Day”. That being the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in the future when they travelled forward in time during 1989’s Back to the Future Part II.

The arrival of the time travellers from 1985 last Monday may not have been all bad though, had it have happened. In the twenty-five years since the release of Back to the Future, and only five years out from 2015 — the setting for much of Back to the Future Part II — we still have ground to make up in terms of matching some of the advances in technology seen in the movie trilogy.

So far we’re still lagging in the development of:

Flying cars (actually they exist, but are far from in everyday use)
Hoverboards
Time travel

We have however made advances in other areas, with the advent of:

The World Wide Web
Smart phones
High Definition TV (if that’s much of innovation really, considering we’ve had low-def TVs for years)

There’s still another five years to go though, perhaps by then we’ll at least have hoverboards that are able to match what we can do with skateboards today.

Originally published Friday 9 July 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.