Phoenix, Arizona, and the world, thirty years in the future

I'm not really an historian, I'm a time-traveler. I make no secret of the fact that the difficult research is done by my friends, whom I call "PhDs" (Phoenix History Detectives). I try to get the facts right, but mostly I'm interested in jumping back in time. And I can also go forward, as this is just a journey of imagination. Today I'm thinking of what Phoenix, and the world, will be like in thirty years.

I was discussing this idea this morning with one of my top PhDs, and his first thought was to go back thirty years, which was 1990. We were both a bit shocked that 1990 was thirty years ago - where did the time go? And other than small details, it doesn't seem as if much has changed. The house that I'm in was already five years old (built in 1985) thirty years ago, and while it's not "ultra-modern", in the time I've been here (almost thirty years) it doesn't seem all that different from the houses that I see being built nowadays. Parts are still easily available at hardware stores, and it isn't as if someone will be putting velvet ropes around it and conducting tours of what life "thirty years ago" was like.

So projecting thirty years in the future makes me think that not much really will change. When I was a kid, in the '60s, thirty years in the future promised flying cars, that sort of thing. When 2001 was still in the future, it was a future whereby traveling to the moon was commonplace. And when I lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the future was predicted to be the movie "Blade Runner". I've been back to LA, and I haven't noticed any cyborgs (although they're difficult to recognize!). There are a few more buildings in the neighborhood where I worked, in the San Fernando Valley, but otherwise it seems pretty much the same.

So my projection for what Phoenix will look like as I enter my nineties, is that it will be bigger, but otherwise pretty much the same. There will be more freeways, more houses, more cars (probably still not flying), and I may entertain the young 'uns of stories of how we wore masks back in 2020, and I'll have more wrinkles, but I don't see things changing dramatically.

But who knows?

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