Neil on Back to the Future | StarTalk

Sci-fi geeks surely know this, but I don't know how widespread it is in the rest of the population that the second installment of the "Back to the Future" trilogy, there's a scene that takes place in the future on October 21st, way in the year 2015. Well, that's like now. That's now.

And so you get to see the creativity of the futurists of 1989 imagining the future that Marty McFly walks into. Of course, they had flying cars, which I think we will never have; but perhaps more intriguing than even the flying car is the flying skateboard. That idea triggered engineers to try to create something like a hoverboard.

I think science fiction at its best will have such a tantalizing idea that's just out of reach of your technology that you will stimulate research of people who want to create that future that had just been imagined.

What futurists tend to get wrong is they see what is going on around them, and in their extrapolation, they just sort of trump up what that is, imagining there's just more of it in the future. In the 1980s, fax machines were it; everybody had a fax machine. "Want to send a document to me? Here's a fax."

What would faxes be in the future? Well, in your home, you wouldn't have just one fax machine; you'd have three. And so, Marty gets fired from his job, and he's notified by his boss with faxes that come out of all the fax machines of his home. Three fax machines is not three times better than one fax machine, and today, nobody has a fax machine.

That was before most people had email and before the concept of an attachment was perfected. Predictions tend to focus on extrapolating from what is rather than imagining what could come in out of left field.

Perhaps the most impossible prediction they made was the Cubs sweeping the World Series. The Cubs have not won the World Series since 1908. So we'll see; right now, as of this recording, the Cubs have entered the playoffs. We'll see if the prophecy of "Back to the Future 2" is fulfilled.