Back to the Future, Top 5 Things that came into reality !

Today marks the day that Marty McFly arrives in our present as seen in the 1980’s movie Back to the Future.   In the original movie (Part 1)  Marty meets scientist Doc Brown who mentions he has car that is a time machine.  Some terrorist group surrounds them and kills the Doc. Marty gets away after getting in the car and putting the gas on the pedal speeding up to 85MPH+ which activates the the time travel mechanism in the car which leads him back to the 1950’s and meets his parents as teenagers.  Marty then meets a younger Doc who in the end is able to send him back to his present (1980s). In part 2 of the series, Doc arrives at Marty’s house to tell them they need to travel into the future to fix certain events that will affect Marty and his girlfriend. They jump into the DMC Delorean which now has the ability to fly and head into the future.  As they are flying around in the clouds, Marty asks “where are we, when are we?” to which Doc responds “We are in October 21, 2015”

Now keep in mind the movie Part 2 of Back to the Future came out in 1989, almost 30 years ago.   Could some of the things they predicted in the movie, actually have came to life by now? Well at the time, a lot of the things didn’t seem possible, but technology has sure came a long way since then.  Let’s see some of the things we remember.

In the original movie, Marty is  seen somewhere near the main park of the city and is escaping the bad guys when he seems some kids in hover scooters, he takes one from a girl and rips off the top part leaving a board below.  He then seems to have the ability to hover just a few inches from the ground and move in and out from obstacles. Amazingly the hover board also has the ability to go over water, and let’s be honest this was pretty badass.  There was a video that went viral with Tony Hawk a few years ago with this same hoverboard and it went viral however it just happened to be a hoax. Do we really have the ability today to come up with something like this?

Well amazingly we do, although not as streamlined as the movie version, a company called Hendo Hover has made a prototype of a hoverboard using magnetic levitation to propel the board a few centimeters from the ground.  A motor in the board generates an electromagnetic field and if you remember science class in elementary, magnets repel each other if they are same polar field, a special floor is used such as copper so the board can hover. While this hover board seems really cool to use, it’s actually pretty noisy and most importantly only works with special copper surfaces built for it, so we still have some years to go before we have a hover board that works just like the movies. Maybe we can use money to retrofit the skate park in Brownsville with copper floors so that this is available, we can go there and hover around !!  It’s pretty cool to think that in the near-future we’ll probably be seeing hoverboard incorporated into x-games. To watch a video of this hoverboard on youtube, click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plwX5NtF530

When Marty’s future self is talking to his boss, Mr. Needles is seen on a big flat screen TV video conferencing with him and tells him that he is fired.  We didn’t know at the time that technology has miniaturized electronic components smaller and smaller. After all, during the late 80’s and early 90’s, the closest thing we had to TV’s of those size were the big ass rear ended projector televisions.

Video Conferencing is something that is not new, it’s been around since the mid 90’s. I remember buying my first webcam, a Logitech one, crappy quality and it cost me something around $80 dollars, and it only worked using the specific software that came with it, still it was pretty cool and I did manage to semi video conference with some pen pals. Then came Skype in the early 2000’s, it revolutionized voice calls over the internet using special codecs and soon thereafter came video conferencing, there is other programs for video conferencing but Skype has become the main utilized program for video chats.

When the MccFly’s are sitting down to eat, junior mcfly is seen wearing some glasses that apparently he can see through, it is unclear what he is specifically looking or watching, but he does call for for a robot arm that brings some fruit down, so it could be safe to say they are somewhat transparent?

When Google Glass was in the beta stages, everyone was super ecstatic about getting these things.  They were supposed to be the next big thing ever invented and supposed to make your life easier.  You could basically be walking and the small heads up display told you anything from directions, image search, and take pictures and even video of whatever you were looking at.  It is unclear why Google Glass never became mainstream, I think primarily is that Google never set a specific launch date.  Normally when a company is going to release a product, there’s a big announcement and when it will be available to the public, google never did this and the interest for google glass waned and now it’s another product that Google could of made great but because of bad PR, will be laid to rest.

The Doc hands Marty a tablet of some sort, I don’t remember exactly what was on the screen, however it’s amazing that this part came surprisingly true.

Let’s face it, tablets are pretty cool. They have replaced the way we think when it comes down to computing.  Being able to sit down anywhere and have such a powerful device in your hand to read books, surf the internet, listen to music, check out the news, weather…. be on facebook and check out the #nomorecheezmeh page 😀  But seriously, this was pretty spot on.

I went ahead and put this one here, Chicago hasn’t won a World Series since 1908 or something like that.  In several scenes of the movie, Marty is outside a mall where a holographic image is projected that says “Way to go Cubbies” and there was also a part in the movie where McFly opens a newspaper and it says “Cubs sweep in 5” meaning they are total of 9 games? We know that baseball now is the best of 7.  It says that the team they beat is Miami, at the time the movie came out, there wasn’t a team in Miami. The Florida Marlins do play now in Miami, however they are in the same division to that of the Cubs so they wouldn’t be facing each other in the World Series.

The Chicago Cubs have made the playoffs, I think by Wildcard if I am not mistaken however they are on the verge of getting swept by the New York Mets being down 3 to 0 and I am not a baseball expert as I mentioned, but in any sport when you’re down 3 games to none, the chances are very slim.  If Chicago somehow pulls a miracle and win the next 4 games to advance to the World Series and actually win, then I think the Back to the Future made one of the best predictions ever, even if they didn’t beat Miami.

We still don’t have 100% flying cars as depicted in the movie, and we still use gasoline to power the majority of our vehicles, although electric vehicles are somewhat in the rise. Its amazing how Back to the Future redefined many aspects of our daily lives. Is it possible that a time traveler from our time went back during the 1980s and gave them all these ideas to put in the script? Whatever the case, here’s looking to our future.