During the late-1990s, as the new millennium was approaching and pre-Blogosphere, I was largely toiling away for various home automation magazines (something I still do quite often, actually), where I wrote my share of "Welcome To The Home Of The Future!" articles. Here's one that featured quotes from my interview of Star Trek veteran David Gerrold, and is a representative (though heavily edited, as I recall) sample of the genre.

But my sci-fi forecasting had nothing on the Minneapolis Strib's apocalyptic vision of the future domus. Roger L. Simon writes that many of us are having the same reaction from Al Gore's low budget PowerPoint presentation agitpropumentary Academy Award-winnning blockbuster film:

After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore's narcissism - not exactly the result intended. In fact, the reverse. And evidently, from the poll results, I am not alone.

Seventy degrees on Sunday. Insert obvious, thin, miserably tired global warming reference, and subsequent predictable embrace of same if it means shirt sleeves in March, here.

Today’s paper had a big story on the House of 2037, and how climate change will affect the way we live. It presumes that the glum predictions will all come true, our mobility will be constrained by insufficient carbon credits, and we'll have an existence slightly more interesting than the society described in “A Canticle for Lebowitz.” Our houses, for example, will have shutters to protect the solar collectors, because hail – Gaia’s buckshot! – will become more frequent and violent. Kids will all be home-schooled, because the environmental impact of busing kids to school and running schools will be too great. I’m serious. Kids will wear 3D goggles and have personal avatars to teach them. I presume they will not be allowed outside to play, because they will be broasted in a second by solar wind.

This would also require a parent to stay home, unless they chain the child to a radiator before biking off to the train station. Another innovation of the Home of Tomorrow that had absolutely nothing to do with homes, per se? A woman who was an “internet bride,” and married a man in China, because they have a female shortage. (Wonder why.) He can’t come back to Minnesota to get her pregnant because he’s lacking the needed carbon credits to use a plane. Whether China forbids him to fly, or the United States forbids him to fly, or some other unnamed agency has laid down the law, we don’t know. We do know that the next three decades will see no advancement in airplane technology whatsoever, I guess.

I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet, but I don’t think many women in Minnesota suburbs will be using the internet to marry men in China who live in China and stay in China. A few? Sure. Enough so we have to rethink the basics of home design? Maybe not. The scenario illustrated the incorporation of the videophone in the home, but that's not sexy enough; we have to be reminded that air travel is bad for the planet too, and one day we'll have to pay. With carbon credits. I love how this has already assumed the weight of an actual thing, like a bar of gold.

Oh, cars? There’s no garage in the Home of the Future. “Fewer people own cars as more of them walk, bike, use transit and share vehicles.” If you’re elderly, perhaps you’re pulled to the market on a sled. (In the hail!) The cars, naturally, belong to The People: the diagram for the city of the future has a car barn, which house “shared hydrogen or electric vehicles, which are maintained by the community and checked out by residents.” The road in the community “circles the common area for delivery and emergency vehicles only."

If people want to live like this, they're welcome to do so. But I don’t doubt that half the people who find all of this attractive and necessary would hesitate to impose it by force of law on all new developments. For starters.

The houses reminded me of the “earth sheltered” houses of the 70s, which looked like personal burial mounds. That was thirty years ago. If a newspaper had done a story on the House of 2007 based on what they knew and feared then, they would have shown small huts with solar panels and composting heaps and tiny garages and a nice war glow of Concern for The Right Things shining from the entire project. Didn’t come true, and I doubt the House of 2037 will look like the one in the paper. Especially if the Mr. Fusion personal reactor hits the market in the next ten years.

Of all predictions about the weather, this was my favorite: “Minnesota will be warmer and probably wetter overall, but precipitation is likely to come in prodigious amounts interspersed with dry spells, even droughts.” In other words, it will rain, and then it will stop. And then it will rain again.

Global warming is what William James called a “moral equivalent of war” that gives political officials the power to do things they could never do without a crisis. As liberal journalist James Ridgeway wrote in the early 1970s: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society ... (and) developing a more coherent central state.”

At the end of the 1990s, Reason had a great look back at the start of this era, and some of the many nutty forecasts that Leading Scientific Experts of the '60s and '70s bungled.

No matter what our homes look like--hopefully not like these!--we'll look back in ten or twenty years at the Goracle's exploits with even more laughter than he's generating now.