The future is finally upon us. 2015, which starts today in case you hadn't noticed, was the year Marty McFly visited in "Back to the Future Part II."
The film, which was released in 1989, made a ton of predictions (transportation, fashion, food, entertainment, etc.) for how the future would play out for humanity.
As screenwriter Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis gazed 26 years into the future, what predictions about civilization did they get right, and which did they get wrong? It's a question that a group of futurists explored in a special report from Newsweek. In their lengthy discussion, the group of scientists looked at "Back to the Future Part II's" vision of the future and evaluated its overall accuracy.
The coolest takeaway from the conversation was that, believe it or not, hover boards really do exist. They might not be exactly akin to the awesome anti-gravity skateboards Marty rode in the film, but according to futurist Glen Hiemstra, there are magnetic repulsion boards called Hendo Hoverboards. Since the Hendo boards are magnetic in nature, they only work on metal surfaces...but, hey it's a good place to start.
An interesting miscall that the futurists noticed in the film was the future's over-reliance on fax machines. According to Hiemstra and fellow futurist Syd Mead, "Back to the Future's" 2015 relied heavily on communications via fax machines. In the late eighties, fax machines were the bee's knees, and apparently seemed futuristic to the film's creators at the time. Clearly, we've moved well beyond those almost archaic devices, but it's certainly an interesting observation on people's expectations in 1989.