Future Events Such As These Will Affect You In The Future

A number of essayists have noted our lives don't look like Stanley Kubrick predicted, or The Jetsons. In a Reason piece, Katherine Mangu-Ward adds her name to the list. (She's actually commenting on Daniel Wilson's Where's My Jetpack?.)

Her main point is the reason jetpacks and underwater homes aren't common is that we didn't really want them.

This is true as far as it goes. The evolution or our lifestyles in a free market is largely determined by what we really want, not what inventors think we want. But there's a second factor just as important--feasibility.

While some items work even better than many sci-fi authors predicted--computers are perhaps the best example--lots of other wishes just have too many physical limitations built in.

Take space travel, the bread and butter of futurists. Human travel to other planets, not to mention other stars, takes mind-bogglingly large amounts of time and money and so simply ain't happening with present-day technology; furthermore, there may be insuperable barriers (where are those wormholes?) to significant advances in the future. I don't think we're not stepping on other planets because we don't want to--if it were feasible, we'd be doing it now.