Today is October 21, 2015. Today is the day visited by Doc and Marti McFly in Back To The Future Part II. Technology nerds like myself celebrate many things today beyond just a classic movie, we also celebrate how far technology has come since 1985, we celebrate where we are today in our 2015, we celebrate vision for the future and where we will be in another 30 years – October 21, 2045.
There are many articles that highlight the predictions of Back To The Future and compare the movie vs today, for example, BestBuy, CNN, C|NET, and many others and yes this is another one of those. but I feel like many of them fall short, or are incomplete in some way. This blog post will definitely NOT be a complete definitive comparison, but I hope to plug in some gaps I have noticed. No worries, I will not spend a lot of time on any one thing that has been covered in detail by many others.
Note: I will refer to two different 2015’s – BTTF 2015 is the Back To The Future 2015 and Our 2015 is the 2015 we live all live in.
Hoverboards
This is what we all really wanted.. and we wanted it just like in the movie, a skateboard that floats on air and although it “dont work on water”, in the movie, it did appear to float on water, he was just unable to move forward. We don’t have that, but in Our 2015, there are promising hopes to one day have hoverboards… thanks to Lexus , Hendo, and a few others. Notably they all work by magnetism andt require a special surface, perhaps if we got the guys at Solar Roadways involved to also support hoverboards.
Mr. Fusion (energy)
In the movie, Doc puts some garbage into Mr. Fusion and it appears to be sufficient to power the Time Machine – which we all know previously required an enormous amount of energy. Today, there are some interesting developments. Toyota has very recently released a video with Chris Loyd and Michael J Fox highlighting fuel cell and hydrogen technology. Another YouTube video shows converting plastic trash into oil.
Food Hydrator
In the movie, the McFly’s put a tiny dehydrated pizza (From Pizza Hut) in a Black & Decker Hydrator machine and moments later a Full Size hot pizza is ready! We are not really close to anything like this… but we do have toaster ovens and in my household we use the toaster oven much much more than our actual oven and YES we have used it to defrost and cook a frozen pizza many times! Still does not come close to “hydrating” like the one in the movie, in fact one could argue that if anything a toaster oven “dehydrates”.
So as far as Dehydration and Hydration is concerned, what do we have today? A year ago or so, my wife and I wanted a dehydration machine. We looked around and found some good ones notably the Excalibur Dehydrator, but that was pricey – we ended up getting a $20 one from Harbor Freight Tools. It is terrible and not worth $5. Something else of note, in the world of dehydration is freeze drying. Remember Astronaut Ice Cream? That is made by freeze drying. Well the folks at Harvest Right have made a freeze dry machine for home use! Mountain House makes pre-packaged freeze dried food for camping / survival purposes. You simply add hot water to the meal and whamo, you have a hot rehydrated meal. To my knowledge, there is no machine to hydrate food. In our 2015, we are beginning to get good at dehydration, but we have a long long way to go for rehydration as seen in the BTTF 2015.
Garden
In Back To Future, there was Garden Center which was a garden full of fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs that dropped down from the ceiling. Other blog posts simply say this is not invented yet… but I disagree. We can grow herbs and spices indoor. It’s called an AeroGarden. The technology also easily exists for it to drop from the ceiling on voice command. The only thing is it does not grow fruit and limited vegetables.
Although I would love to add television, cell phones, the WWW and lots more, perhaps Ill save it for a Part 2. I would also like to cover what I think October 21, 2045 will look like. (30 years from today). I will wrap up this blog post by saying this. Our 2015 falls short of BTTF 2015 in many ways, but it also exceeds BTTF 2015 in many many ways.
See you in the future.