By the time I was 10 years old (1969), I knew about the big problems. Population growth was out of control, we were running out of fossil fuels and soon food, water and raw materials would be exhausted. Fortunately, this was unlikely to happen because we were all to die at the hands of the USSR in a nuclear holocaust, so there was no point worrying about the little things. We had pointless revenge to build.
Anyway, by 2010 we would have population under control with The Pill but nice girls still wouldn’t and starvation would be fixed by harvesting the limitless supplies of fish in the deep oceans or from fish farms all around the coast, possibly even in the colonies. Energy demands would be met by nuclear fusion and space exploration would be starting to give us access to new mineral deposits on Mars. The downside was that pollution would have forced us to live in plastic domes. There was nothing that could be done about that.
I guess things don’t always work out as planned. On the up-side, no-one seriously thought I’d be writing this on a computer the size of a paper-back book and you’d be able to sit there on your fancy fitted-carpet, reading it off a flat color TV bigger than a hostess trolley, or that The Archers would have been the biggest thing on The Internet this week. “On the what, dear? You say the queerest things. You want to get that hair cut, it will soon be over your collar.”
On The Outside 