FUTURE CHINKS

by The Staff of Magellan's Log

No, the title is not a dreadfully un-p.c. gaffe. We refer here only to those occasional, rare moments when through the tiniest of unexpected holes in the usually impermeable wall separating today from all those coming tomorrows we catch a momentary glimpse, maybe, of things to come.

These are not your ordinary garden-variety "predictions," neither of the trivial tabloid kind, nor of the more serious academic kind. Rather, these are objects, carefully designed and thought out, scheduled for future production, with which at the moment when we first saw them, we experienced the faintest of chronological "clicks", the most nearly inaudible of "aha's!", as the future seemed to open for a nanosecond and we thought, "Yes! That's how things are going to look."

You can't get much more subjective. Elsewhere in Magellan's Log, we've recorded our puzzlement over the lack of sweeping foreseeings as the millennium changed. Whereas around 1900, artists and thinkers couldn't get enough of dreaming up pictures of the glorious future, around 2000 there was a notable lack of such recorded visions. Still, as the new millennium got underway, we found ourselves now and then having these little "extra-temporal" moments. So we started it a list. Which is still open, and to which we will add if other such unorthodox perceptions come our way.

We're talking objects here, not trends or concepts. Things.

For now, this is what our hints of the future look like (and we repeat, these items are all scheduled for mass production in the next five years):

1. The Boeing Near-sonic passenger jet.

Since passenger jets entered service in the 1950s, except for the ill-fated supersonics, looked drearily the same, from the old Boeing 707 to the 777.   Finally, with this design, which is to fly just below the speed of sound, we have a truly 21st century design. Scheduled to fly around 2005. Maybe. There's some talk that Boeing may just be floating the design around to scare the Air Bus people.

2. The Cadillac Imaj.

Go figure.

3. The Go Chair.

Clearly the chair in which denizens of 2075 will sit as they receive the first emissaries of the Galactic Empire.

END

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