~o:> Of flying cars and shining spheres

Note: the embedded photographs have absolutely nothing to do with the post.  They are simply here for those of you who I know will simply pass on all these words and only look at the pictures. Little bums.

The Post

In the continuing saga of Eureka, a brilliant scientist from the late 1940s (Founder, as it happens, of the very scientific community of Eureka) not-so-accidentally finds himself transported to the Future.  The 2010s.  (I myself, once from the 1950s, have found myself similarly transported, only it took me years to get here.)

“And it’s a great disappointment,” he says, looking around.  “Where are the flying cars?  I thought surely by now there’d be multi-laned super highways in the sky.”

Guy wasn’t with me when I heard this line; he’d have laughed his head off; the promise of every animation about the future we saw when we were kids: flying cars.  Which is why the line is funny.  Just in case you didn’t know.

Flying cars.

Other stuff that was the deep concern of the times: bad breath, dandruff, Bayer aspirin, Mr. Bubble and Brill Cream.

And ESP.

ESP was big back then.  And, frankly, the future has been pretty disappointing on that front, too.  I always thought I’d be the kind of person who ended up with it, you know?  Every night at bedtime when I was visiting my Mother Jeanne in Kansas City, she’d sit on the side of my bed, and I’d try to tell her exactly what card she was holding in her hand.  “Think about it very clearly,” I’d tell her.  Then I’d try zen myself so that a picture of her thought would form itself behind my eyes.  Failing that, I left every neuron in my body open to receive vibes.  Yeah.  Didn’t happen.

Big brained aliens were big back then, too.

Transporting now—fifty years into the future (blink—it actually happens).  And I’m watching television, and I see this commercial—an unhealthily cool and skinny young woman (dark haired—there’s a change from the past; in the fifties and sixties she would have been fleshy and blond) is walking across a very urban street.  She takes out her cell phone and starts to punch in numbers.

Suddenly, there are these totally techno satellite receivers popping up like Transformers everywhere.  The special effects are really good – the roof of an expensive parked car opens up and a tower constructs itself before your eyes, huge dishes form out of the side of a mega building, street lamps, trash cans – everything she passes turns into an antenna so that she can communicate, mouth to mind, with anybody she wants, any time she wants.

And it hits me: here it is.  The future is actually, finally, delivering ESP.  I can communicate, almost brain to brain, with people two hundred, six hundred, three thousand miles away—people in basements, on towers, in boats, driving through the vast, alien emptiness of The Panhandle – all I have to do is close my eyes, believe – not even passionately, just enough to touch a button and press a tiny brain extension to my ear, and through ears, and the movement of the breath as it leaves our throats, I connect my mind with somebody I cannot see, or even reach in under a day.

But that’s not the whole thing.  I’m remembering standing in the middle of my kids’ bedroom one night, frustrated and laying down the line: “There is going to come a day,” I was saying to them, “when you’re not going to be able to use MY brain anymore to store all your good sense.”  Because they were doing that – filtering the choices in their lives through MY brain because they evidently couldn’t come up with enough room on their own hard drives for the database.  Like the way I keep iPhoto on three back-up drives.

And isn’t that kind of like brain-sharing?

This is going to sound like a change of subject – but, trust me, it isn’t: the art of animation is a staggeringly complex symphony of arts, disciplines and sciences.  And computer animation is perhaps the most complex of all.  You have the artists who draw, the artists who light, and bone the models, and color the scene, creating the dimensionality – you put these pieces of a seven second scene together, then you have to render the scene – pressing all the computer information flat, coordinating it, integrating it into one stream of instructions that will be read by a digital projector, or recorded on a DVD.

The time it takes to render even a short little scene?  Hours.  Hours using absolutely tons of computer memory.  You can’t do it on one computer.  You have to have several.  Dozens.  And so they use what they call a “render farm.”  I’ve know Murphy to connect up to guys all over the states, networking the computers together into a farm all night long so that one little scene can be rendered by morning.

And then I think of all our cel phones, and all our internet connections – facebook, blogs, email – if the communicating we do showed up in the air as tiny beams of light, the entire planet would glow with the interlacing beams, a sphere made out of the networking of minds – me to Rachel down the street, to Gin in New Mexico, Lauri and Linde and Chris up in the north, Linda in South Africa, Julie in London – sometimes all at once.

Me times as many of you as can cover the wired world.

Doesn’t that make us all part of a giant render-farm?  Ideas shared, expanded, improved, changed, sent on and on and on?  Inspiration shot through the ether in shining arrows? Hearts encouraged?  Parenthood reinforced? Knowledge and experience shared? And shouldn’t that be producing something utterly unexpected and good and remarkable?  Like flying cars?  Or cures for Alzheimer’s?  Or World Peace?

So I’m wondering if that guy from the 1940s was right – for everything we’ve got, everything we’ve done – has the world really changed so much, essentially, in the last sixty years?  Have we done more than simply expanding beyond the greeting/Christmas card sociality?  I’m just wondering – do you see any flying cars?

And if you do, will you tell me what they look like?

Maybe  little like Andy?