When I was your age......

I always get a good laugh when adults tell me about how things were back when they were growing up. Sometimes you get the classic, "back when I was your age, gas was three cents per gallon." The way these statements are communicated makes it seem like they thought nothing was ever going to change. I'm very curious about what the future holds when it's my time to tell the world's youth about when I was growing up. "When I was your age, I had to text my friends," as if that is so inconvenient compared to whatever people will be doing in the future. Maybe people will be able to send messages from their brains to other people's brains or something.

I had to use books to do research!

Another one of my favorites is when teachers or professors are talking about research for a paper and they tell us about how much easier we have it now because we can look up sources online. "When I wrote my thesis, I had to look everything up in books at the library," (said in an obnoxiously annoying teacher voice). I guess they're right though, you don't need to know how to read or sift through information to find sources on the internet.

I notice that most of the changes between different times in history result because of technology. I also notice that most interpretations of the future whether through literature, film, or whatever medium, have extremely bleak outlooks. Hopefully I won't be saying, "when I was your age I didn't have machines from the future trying to kill me." Because with the current advancement in technology, how long is it until machines become self-aware like SkyNet from The Terminator series? It could happen! Or maybe it will be like Orwell's 1984 and we'll all be watched by cameras at all times.

Hopefully none of these views of the future come true, but if they do I hope we get a hybrid! If the future is going to be bleak let's hope that it's at least intriguing! For example, machines become self-aware, think for themselves, and realize that they can take over the human race. Meanwhile, a company finds a deadly alien species in the depths of space that could be the perfect weapon and sends an unknowing crew to bring it back to earth. A planet-cracking ship finds a marker that turns people into hideous necromorphs, but the church insists it is good. People are trying to water grass with Gatorade (yay for electrolytes!), a man named Randall Flagg is gathering sketchy people in Las Vegas, and some scientist/doctor has found a way to recreate Dinosaurs.The government has become extremely oppressive and monitors everything that happens everywhere, but the surveillance crew thinks that they're watching a reality t.v. show and get overthrown by a guy wearing a Guy Fox mask, thus creating world-wide anarchy in a world rife with battles among humans, machines, necromorphs, and aliens.