Dreams of Futures Past

            Isn’t the future just the most beguiling and enigmatic plane to explore?

I recall Futurama as an old childhood cartoon that fascinated me as a kid with its distinct, out-of-this-world scenes and characters, despite never really understanding the story of the show. Over a decade later, I still found myself reveling in the technological breakthroughs and innovative ideas it featured after watching its pilot episode, Space Pilot 3000.

Futurama is one of the many shows that tackles the uncertain and intangible premise of the remote future. As such, it strives to come up with a challenging commentary on the way progression is unbridled by limits, yet riddled with numerous potential horrors that are unanticipated in our world today.

Fry, the protagonist of the show, was incidentally frozen in a tube during his stint as a pizza delivery boy. He wakes up a thousand years later to an unrecognizable and futuristic “New New York City”. Much to his disdain, he is assigned the computer-determined job as a delivery boy again, permanently this time. He flees and finds refuge with his only living relative, Professor Farnsworth, together with the acquaintances he met along the way. Farnsworth gives Fry the job as a delivery boy once again, to which he eagerly accepts.

This episode in particular, depicts how science and technology goes hand-in-hand with the future. Flying cars, sentient robots, transport tubes, spaceships – almost everything one can imagine about the future can be found in the show. These, of course, influenced the lifestyle of the citizens in Futurama’s setting. They were heavily dependent on these technologies – technologies that people used to live without a thousand years before. This dependency also cost them their freedom in choosing their career and ultimately, their future.

The element of time-travel portrayed in the film involves cryonic preservation, which entails the organism to be encased in ice in order to prevent decay. It certainly isn’t the first show to use this technique to transport the protagonist into the future, but it’s interesting to note that this technique is under study in our present day society.

Similarly, the perfection of such technology in the future will give us unprecedented breakthroughs in medicine and space travel, but what underlying costs to society and morality will it have on humanity? Will it result to a “suicide machine” or a “career-generating computer” for us?

What then if seeking the “future” will ultimately rob us of the future we so desire?