The future of yesterday is here tomorrow!

Look out internet, today is Back to the Future II Day! Yeah, what's that? Today's the day Marty and Doc travel to in Back to the Future Part II in order to do something about Marty and Jennifer's kids. Something has got to be done about their kids.

"Because fuck causality."

-Doctor Emmett Brown,

deranged time-meddler

The hell with Mars, let's be the
first country to colonize Gabargia.

Anyway, even though Marty and Doc come from 1985, the movie came out in 1989 and predicted events of 2015. Still with me? Great. A lot has been made about how we're here in 2015 and hoverboards are far from ubiquitous, cars are completely non-flying and non-garbage powered. Oh, and speaking of garbage, instead of simply tossing ours into the nearest Mr. Fusion, we just add it to the floating garbage continent in the Pacific. In many ways, the future as it unfolded turned out to be kind of disappointing.

On the other hand, it's a small
price to pay for hoverboards...

But I'm not sure we're not better off. Hoverboards look cool but they're really just a frictionless recipe for broken collar bones. And at first glance flying cars seem super-convenient. They combine the speed and efficiency of air-travel with the comfort of not having to sit in a sealed compartment next to someone with swine-flu on a five-hour flight. But they also add a third dimension to driving when most people seem to barely be able to handle two. Look, I'm not poo-pooing Robert Zemeckis's glittering utopia of holo-sharks and Regan/Max Headroom duels, but the real future's not so bad.

Finally, a reason to live.

I mean, the Cold War's over, we have the internet and smart phones and consequently the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips at all times. Also, there's a new, probably not sucky Star Wars coming out soon, so we have that to look forward to. Sure, we have climate change, people who don't believe in climate change and gun laws that make it basically legal to shoot anyone you want, but we also have streaming video. The future turned out ok, didn't it?

Oh, and not to keep picking on Zemeckis, but is it me or is handing everyone in America a car with a built-in fusion reactor the absolute worst idea ever?

Above: a minor collision on the 101, thanks Mr. Fusion...