– Chapter 8 –
Oil $500 Is Real
When I was a kid, I thought I would grow up to live like the Jetsons.
I’d drive a flying car. I’d live in a high-rise home in the sky. I’d have a robot maid. And of course, I’d work for Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc. After all, America was a nation of innovators. We had already gone to the moon. Anything was possible! My grandfather felt the same way about the evolution of technology in his day. He lived through the invention of the automobile and the atom bomb. When he got his first television, he just stared at it... amazed that pictures were flying through the air into this funny box in his living room. I was with him when he took his first airplane ride. I’m not sure he fully believed he was flying. He never believed we landed on the moon. My father couldn’t fathom how far technology had come with the invention of the microwave, dehydrated food, instant coffee, the grocery cart, pills to solve every ill, and the word processor. In my own 60 years, we’ve gone from black-and-white TV to color, drive-in movie theaters to streaming Netflix in our living rooms, snail mail to e-mail, paper maps to GPS, analog clocks to digital, desktop computers to tablets, and wall phones to smart phones. Children born in the 21st century will own self-driving cars. They’ll have robots. They’ll travel to Mars. They’ll commute from the U.S. to Paris in five minutes...
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