2001: a time odyssey

Kubrick's 2001 movieThe Redding sun shone brightly through glass block walls at the Mercy Medical pediatric level in May of 1983, on the morning my first daughter Erin was born. I recall musing the mental math and discovering she would graduate from High School in 2001, a year that had special meaning back then. The turn of the century was the setting of the futuristic and obtuse Kubrick film 2001: a space odyssey. The film set the tone and expectations for what seemed a distant but believable future. I speculated maybe Erin would become a flight attendant on a Pan-Am space vessel, or a resident of a colony on the moon. In 1983, anything seemed possible for 2001.

But here we are in May of 2011, and in a few weeks, we won’t even have so much as a Space Shuttle. Erin grew up, and graduated Class of 2001, but I don’t think I’ll be visiting her at her apartment on the moon base anytime soon. On the other hand, and in my hand, I hold a small computer more powerful than HAL. Such is the nature of long term predictions of the future.

Short term, I can predict that tonight, she and her CV classmates will be attending a 10 year class reunion at a Casino in Redding (Legal gambling in Redding? I’d not have predicted that in 1983.). Handheld video recorders were pretty new to us all in 2001, and so her video yearbook is a unique artifact. She edited it for YouTube, and posted it yesterday.
2001: A Reverse Time Odyssey. Not quite what we expected…

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