Controling the Future

Turner Classic Movies began the new year with a 1984 movie titled “2010". This is a sequel to “2001", made a couple of years earlier. Both movies are fantasies showing us how totally off the mark people are when predicting the future.

I only watched a little of “2010". It was just too silly to hold my interest. The movie began with a Russian scientist talking to an American scientist perched on the stairway to a giant reflective dish telescope.

The scene was obviously filmed at the Great Array in New Mexico, where a row of these monster dishes are lined up in the dessert where they are moved around on railroad tracks to scan various parts of the sky hoping to receive transmissions from other planets or alien space ships. I’ve been there, near Magdalena, New Mexico, and it is an awesome sight. What impressed me more than the size of these huge dishes was the fact that they have been scanning the sky for years and have yet to receive a single message from Outer Space.

In the movie the Russian tries to convince the American to share technology on building a robot to control a space ship. The film’s maker assumed that in 2010 the Communists would still be in control in Russia and that the Soviets and the U.S. would still be embroiled in the Cold War. He could not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union or that our astronauts would live for months with Russian cosmonauts on the space shuttle. No robots in control here.

This reminded me of George Orwell’s “1984", which he wrote in 1948 and predicted that “Big Brother” would control every aspect of life. Well, today we have surveillance cameras everywhere, but they hardly control our lives. Cameras on traffic signals don’t even prevent people from driving through red lights.

Instead of “Big Brother” we have the chaos of the internet, where libel laws do not apply and radicals spew out all sorts of nonsense. I am just a little pot complaining about that big black kettle of fish. The internet is anarchy. No one at the controls.

History tells us how certain events have consequences, which could serve as guides and warnings about what might happen in the future. Unfortunately, many who shape events (i.e. Congressmen) seem totally ignorant of history. I don’t believe all those dire warnings about how we are becoming a “socialist” nation.

St. Paul told Philemon to remain a slave because Jesus was coming back to free him in a few days – or at most in a few months or a few years. Anyway, within his lifetime. That was 2,000 years ago, and Jesus has not showed up yet. People still believe.

But a Communist, Putin, is trying to bring Russia under his complete control. Will he succeed in reversing history?

I don’t predict the future. No one can control it.