Twenty Minutes Into the Future, by John Ostrander
A little more than twenty years ago there was, briefly, a smart satiric SF TV series called Max Headroom. It starred Matt Frewer who now has a supporting role on another smart comedic TV series called Eureka, which in a few weeks will start its third season on the SciFi channel. On the earlier series, Frewer played both the crusading young news reporter, Edison Carter, and his manic, stuttering electronic alter-ego, Max Headroom. It also had a terrific cast that included Jeffrey Tambor, Amanda Pays, George Coe and – as an regularly recurring villain – Charles Rocket.
I’m surprised no one has thought of updating it for a movie or another TV series.
The series was set, as it stated at the start of every episode, “twenty minutes into the future.” This future has a cyberpunk feel and TV rules the land. It is, in fact, against the law to turn your television off. If you cannot afford a television, one will be provided for you. The major networks are global and ratings are instantaneous and constant, being tied to revenue. The programs we glimpse might have come from Paddy Chayefsky’s great movie, Network. In addition, Max Headroom really did anticipate a number of trends that are now commonplace.
It’s that “twenty minutes into the future” gag that keeps popping up in my mind. It’s both brilliant and really tough to do. You need to be perceptive of the world as it is and then be able to project forward, to see the consequences of what we’re doing today, and that seems almost impossible. If there’s one thing we’re real good at doing, it’s ignoring unpleasant facts until it’s no longer possible to do. By then, it’s usually too late.
When I was teaching, one of the assignments I gave my students was to take something of today and then project it “twenty minutes into the future.” In other words, describe that future. They had to be able to justify it; it has to have connections to the real world. Anybody can play.
For example, we’re now in a major energy crisis. The price of oil keeps going up and there’s nothing to suggest it’s going to come down quickly. Yes, by all means, slap some regulations on the oil speculators who may be causing a price increase by as much as a quarter to a third. That will simply slow down the rising price of oil but it won’t roll it back. Let’s just take the high cost of oil as a given. What are the impacts of that and are they all necessarily bad?
Keep in mind that when we mention oil, we’re certainly including gasoline, diesel and heating oil, but we’re also including everything that uses oil in its make-up, such as plastics.
It’s not hard to see the impact on the price of food, for example. Fuel drives the farm machinery as well as the transportation that brings the food to market. The desire for an alternative to oil brings us to ethanol, the corn-based derivative. Problem is, some people are saying the international food crisis is being exacerbated by all the corn being grown as fuel. Do we feed people or machines?
On the other hand, do we see the return of the more local grown foodstuffs? The shorter the distance from where the food is grown to where it is consumed should have lower prices than those trucked long distances. What will the American farm and the American table look like twenty minutes from now?
The costs of goods and merchandise goes up because the cost of making them goes up and, even more important, when the factories are overseas the cost of transporting them goes way up. On the other hand, I’ve seen reports that say the high cost of oil may bring factory jobs back to the United States. What will “made in America” look like twenty minutes from now?
The State of Utah has announced that, as an energy saving measure, it is going to a four day, ten-hour work week come early August. This will hold for most of the 23,000 state jobs, not including such services as police. It will save on heating and cooling, among other things, to an impressive degree. Some employees like it and others, such as single parents and/or those working second jobs, are having real problems with it. Two other states are looking into the same idea and you can bet industry will do the same. What will the American work place look like twenty minutes from now?
A local college in a rural area in Ohio is going to offer a week’s worth of classes stuffed into a single day. The concept is that the students, if they can do it, won’t have to spend the gas going back and forth all week. It’s not mandatory; it’s an optional program and the school says the students have to be highly motivated to do it. If it works, however, will it become more prevalent? It saves costs for both students and school. Or will more schools go to more online classes? What will the American education look like twenty minutes from now?
People are already driving less because of the price of gas. This will have a positive effect on the environment. Fewer carbon emissions. Honda is about to introduce its hydrogen fuel cell car in California. GM is trying to sell off the Hummer brand of SUVs or Sports Recreational Military Vehicles or whatever they are. Last Sunday’s Opus in the funny papers had every liberal’s dream – solar panels on the garage roof feeding a converter unit plugged into an all electric car while the main characters mooned pictures of Arab Oil Sheiks, Big Oil Execs, and Dick Cheney (who is a hideous mutant mixture of both).
Meanwhile, the cost of air flights coupled with the airlines draconian measures to keep themselves afloat are almost certain to lower the number of people who can afford to fly. And the train system continues to molder in this country. What will the American transportation system look like twenty minutes from now?
Is that future, even in the short run, necessarily dystrophic? Well, no – despite the fact that writers such as myself like to keep playing with that type of scenario. There will be solutions; there always are. Or we’ll adapt. That’s what humanity does and it’s what this country has made a practice of doing. What it really signifies is change and, as an Old Fart, in general I’m agin’ it. Change is difficult, dagnabit! It’s like hitting puberty again; I hit puberty once and puberty hit back. There was change and I wasn’t in charge and I didn’t know where it was going. It feels like that again only outside my body.
Still, one can’t help speculating about the future. As the Amazing Criswell said in Ed Wood’s masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”
See you in twenty minutes.
Writer John Ostrander writes stuff.
Max Headroom ever amazed me with the little background concepts they came up with to flesh out the TV-centric world of theirs. I was always impressed by the room full of commodities traders, trading commercial time. On screen only for a second, but introduced a whole new idea that could easily have been fleshed out.I have a friend (no, really) who knows the location of a buried block of experimental Teflon approximately the size of a cubic football field. He always joked that when we finally run out of oil, he's gonna go dig it up, break it back down into oil and make a mint.As soon as making something locally becomes cheaper than importing it, it becomes a viable possibility to make it locally again. But once you add in the cost of setting up a local factory (not to mention the time it takes to build it) most companies will stick with importing, under the theory that X number of years from now when the oil bubble pops (we're in a speculative market right now, and that's contributing to the rising prices, nearly as much if not more than the oil companies themselves), it'll go back to beibng cheaper to import, and they'll have spent all the money "for nothing". People (like myself) are saying that we need to drill for oil locally, and build more/new refineries to process the oil more efficiently, but not too many of those people grasp that it'll take several YEARS to build those refineries, so there'll be no true "short-term" improvement, as in the next few months. The only hope is that if those steps are started, OPEC might actually think we're serious, and open the spigots on the oil, increase supply, which will lower the price (it really does work), which would cause many of the day-trading speculators to move on to more profitable products (maybe they'll come back to comic books), which would FURTHER drop the price. The trick is to KEEP working on the alternatives, in the hopes that we actually WILL start using less oil, and all of the benefits thatcarries with it.If we start seriously changing power consumption habits, building new and more effiecient energy production systems, and really explore feasible alternative resources, we won't actually see the effects of those changes until, say…twenty minutes into the future.
"…he's gonna go dig it up,…"He's going to need a bigger shovel.
People (like myself) are saying that we need to drill for oil locally, and build more/new refineries to process the oil more efficiently, but not too many of those people grasp that it'll take several YEARS to build those refineries, so there'll be no true "short-term" improvement, as in the next few months. Actually, i have heard politicians and others whose positions depend on short-term effects arguing against allowing more drilling (and against building nuclear plants) because "it won't help now, so we can't afford it".Much the same people who are demanding mandatory improved fuel efficiency in automobiles by 2010 that, given manufcturing and tooling lead times (and the laws of physics and chemistry) , realistically may be possible by 2012 or later. (Well, perhaps such results may be possible by 2010, if you don't care about little things like enjoying the experience of driving the cars…)
MikeI remember when catalytic converters became mandatory on cars despite the auto industry's weeping and moaning that it wouldn't be possible by the deadline, that it would cost too much, it wouldn't work and blah blah blah. Turns out they had secretly already worked all that out. They were waiting until they were compelled to do it and then they made it happen. So I take the auto industry with a very large grain of salt.John
Brewster Rockit has been doing a "20 Minutes into the Future" gag all weekhttp://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/I miss Max Headroom a lot. I still don't understand why it hasn't been released on DVD. I guess there is a rights issue somewhere. I'd love to see it again.
Our ol' pal Marty Pasko was story editor on that series. Just sayin'.
In my morning newspaper here in NJ, there are talks of various municipalities also looking into or actively moving to the 4 day/10 hour work week. Anybody else noting that in there locality?
That's great. Unfortunately, the people they are supposed to be serving still work 5/8. A lot of people won't get the services they need.Out here in the northeast — and in certain other areas of the nation — it can be a great idea if it's widely adopted. It'll cut down commuting time by cutting down the number of cars on the road, and that'll cut down air pollution. The problem is, everybody's going to want to have either Monday or Friday off, so Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays will still suck.We need a World War II like commitment to rebuilding public transportation: electric trollies, commuter trains and other light rail. That means we'll need to build a lot of parking lots. And I, for one, do not dismiss nuclear energy. It's had a very, very good track record here in the States and in most other places that maintained and updated their facilities. There's work to be done to make it all the more safe, to be sure, but that's always the case. When electricity was introduced a century ago, a lot of wooden homes went up in flames after they got wired. Even a half-century ago, cheap aluminum wiring burnt down a lot of houses. We have sufficient experience with nuclear already to make it more safe.But nothing will help end the energy crisis faster than banning SUVs and vans and Hummers and cars that can't average 25 MPG.
John, Max Headroom was updated recently. http://www.comicmix.com/news/2007/12/11/max-headr…Max didn't age well.
Seat belts. windows stickers listing components on hew cars. Catalytic converters. Any increases in fuel efficiency.For every single one the auto industry brought out exactly the same arguments about costing too much and not being able to make deadlines. A broken record they are.And every time people continued to be able to buy cars and the auto industry continued rolling along.A grain of salt? Only if it's about 100 meters across.
Moore's Law: Moore's Law is an observation made by Intel Executive, Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit (a computer chip) doubles (a 100% increase), approximately every two years. This trend has continued for half a century and is likely to continue for at least the next decade, probably longer.What this boils down to is that about every two years the current crop of computers is vastly more powerful than the last. Faster, more efficient, more memory.It's also a self fulfilling prophecy. If the entire industry is working under the assumption that you need to be twice as good every two years or you will be obsolete, then you see VAST amounts of money poured into research and development so products can stay "ahead of the curve."My point is, "Where is Moore's Law for the Auto Industry?" If there was some expectation that auto fuel efficiency had to increase by even 8% every two years, then cars that averaged 20 miles to the gallon in 1976 would be averaging 70+ miles to the gallon by 2010.Right now I believe there was a goal of an average of 27 mpg set for 2004 on new car sales in the U.S.; the current goal is an average 35 mpg by 2020. That's an expectation of less than a 3.5% increase in fuel efficiency every 2 years. I'd say these are seriously LOWERED expectations.The fault doesn't just lie with manufacturers or regulators. Consumers just need to demand that each new car they buy be more fuel efficient than the last. Steady increases in efficiency are inevitable as soon as consumers make that a priority.