FUTURE PREDICTIONS
Daily Telegraph - May 2007

FOR as long as I can remember I've been into The Future: bubble homes, Mars landings, thawing Walt Disney. Just can't get enough. SBS's Future Focus series should, therefore, have been a source of great satisfaction to me. Yet, after watching the entire thing, I feel only disappointment. Other than global warming - the new nuclear war - it seems our visions of the future haven't changed much since Star Trek. Fifty years on and it's still flying cars and silver jumpsuits. I've been waiting for my flying car for 30 years. At this rate will I ever get to see that wisecracking robot maid? Here's what the future is really going to be like:

• BY 2050 half of Sydney will be underwater. But rather than move west, people in the Eastern Suburbs will attend dinner parties in deep-sea divers' suits and discuss the three trillion rupees they just paid for a two-bedroom fixer-upper in Surry Hills.

• PETROL will become so expensive women will wear little tins of it hanging from their ears and families will feud for years over who gets grandma's jerry can. On the upside, cars will fly -- but flying Volvo drivers will still go slowly in the overtaking lane and no one will know how to use hover roundabouts.

• SHIFTS in power will bring dangerous new conflicts. After the US and China nuke each another, Jamaica will emerge as the leader of the world and we'll all be too high to notice the alien invasion.

• CONTRARY to predictions of science fiction, Lycra jumpsuits will never be cool. Forget the double-breasted wetsuit. In my future, the Jacobean look makes a comeback and we'll all walk the electronic dog wearing silk britches and lace ruffs.

• THE Macquarie Bank board will launch a hostile takeover of a distant planet where they will accidentally uncover an alien life form which implants itself in their chests and then eats them one-by-one.

• A POPULAR TV show will feature a house full of dim-witted clones fighting one another in a cruel popularity contest designed to humiliate and ... what's that? Oh, I see. Sometimes the future comes faster than you think.

• WITH the rise of Asia and increases in global migration, all our children will have names like Chang. This is fine by me, but who's to blame if they can't drive and are still crap at maths?

• ALL four-star generals will be Asian women. They'll be as tough as any man but with the added advantage of sexy accents and the ability to move objects with their minds. Pornography will reflect this trend.

• THE future will be just like today: except Strathfield will be beachfront property, petrol will have replaced the gold standard and John Farnham's clones will be conducting a ``definitely final'' farewell tour.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008