THE FUTURE IS FLUSH WITH PROMISE
By Carrington Vanston - February 18, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/future_flush

I remember the exact moment that I realized I was living in the future. Not just some boring old normal future, but a real science fiction Atomic Age future like something from a 1950's movie poster telling me to SEE the city in the clouds and HEAR the roar of jetpack engines.

It happened on a road trip. I was somewhere in the middle of America where the roads are long and straight and indistinguishable from one another save for the occasional world's largest pumpkin or giant ball of rubber bands. I'd been driving for hours and I pulled into a rest stop on the side of the highway. It wasn't much of a site, nor much of a sight: just a little parking lot in front of a single small building surrounded by deep woods. Inside the building were a pair of washrooms, some vending machines, and big maps on the walls.

The big maps on the walls let me know not only that I was lost but just how lost I was. They were very specific about it. "You are here," they said, pointing to a little red dot that looked nothing like me. "But you think you're here," they continued, pointing across the room at a completely different map. Of a completely different state.

I was off by two full time zones. That's what I get for using a small inflatable globe as my navigation system. I've always been a firm believer that the only truly useful landmarks are visible from space. I'm quite good at directions like "go that way until you reach Lake Superior, then turn left" but I'm not so good at "take I-165 to the I-156 cutoff, then follow I-615 for 516 miles until it becomes I-516..."

I have an unfortunate habit of going to get bread and ending up in Virginia. A car filled with MP3 audiobooks is a dangerous temptation for me. In this particular case I started out with the best intentions of going to a movie and I just kept driving and driving until I had no idea where I was.

Wait, where was I? Oh right, a roadside rest stop two time zones over. Like I said, it was in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere. Just me and trees and a pair of know-it-all smarty maps and maybe bears.

But it wasn't the maps that told me I was living in the fabulous future, it was the washrooms.

At first I'd just gotten out of my car to stretch my legs. I thought it would help me reach the pedals, but upon reflection I decided it would be better just to pull my seat forward. (Buh-dum-pah! Thanks, I'll be here all week.) Since I was up anyway, I thought I'd head into the little building. That's when I found the maps, but like I said the maps aren't the point of this story. The point of this story is the washrooms. I should probably get to that point.

I walked up to the little building in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere and the door slid open for me. I walked in, frowned at the maps which are not the point of the story, and then headed over to the washroom. The washroom door was also automated like the front door of the building, and it just as happily slid open for me.

Well, I assume it was happy to do so. It didn't squeak or groan, but its silence didn't seem particularly sullen either. If not content, it was probably at least resigned.

I approached a urinal and played a quick game of melt the white hockey puck. (I scored 15; not a personal best, but respectable.) When I stepped away from the urinal, it flushed itself.

The faucet turned on as I placed my hands in the sink, and shut itself off when I was finished washing my hands. A wall mounted dryer similarly exhaled warm air automatically to dry my hands.

The doors opened and shut themselves again as I left...and then halfway back to my car it hit me: this is the future! There I was in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere and yet doors open themselves for me, and faucets run themselves for me, and urinals flush themselves for me, and shiny dryers whoosh warm air for my convenience. This is the kind of background technology that's so pervasive we hardly notice it any more, but it's the stuff of science fiction from just a few decades ago.

Our remote rural washrooms have doors straight out of Star Trek. We have motion sensors on our feckin' urinals, fer chrissakes.

Screw the Internet and cellular phones and wireless computing. Forget about vaccines and mapping the human genome. And as for the fact that as I type this article there are a pair of remote vehicles being driven around the planet Mars: pshaw!

If you want a real sense of how much scientific progress we've made in the past fifty years, take a moment to pay attention to some of the throwaway technology that's so common we ignore it. We are surrounded by near invisible technology that would until recently have been the domain of sci-fi writers. Almost all of us live with a level of assisted convenience that wouldn't have been within reach of the world's richest person just a few generations ago.

Take a drive out to the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere to pee if you want to fully grasp the fact that we are, right now, living in a golden science fiction age.

So the only question that remains is, where the hell is my jetpack? I'm sure we were promised jetpacks by now. Let's take some of the big brains off the urinal motion sensor tweaking project and put more people on this jetpack thing, okay? Thanks.

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]