The opening of a time capsule in Siberia last week provided a remarkable glimpse of how some Soviets from fifty years ago envisioned our world today.
The tiny metal tube containing a contemporaneous message from the past was buried back in 1967 with the intention of being opened this year to commemorate the centennial of the Russian Revolution.
Inside the time capsule was a three-page letter penned to the 'people of the future' by residents of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk who were living there five decades ago.
The missive reveals some lofty expectations for our 2017 world that spectacularly missed the mark.
Denizens of 1967 Novosibirsk presumed that, by now, humans would have easily established themselves not only on the moon and Mars, but also that "your starships have been long prowling the galaxy."
While perhaps the deployment of satellites and probes into deep space might somewhat satisfy that prediction, we're guessing that isn't quite what the time capsule authors had in mind.
This conclusion is bolstered by their subsequent suggestion that, in 2017, Earthlings ought to be "negotiating cultural and scientific cooperation with representatives of other, extraterrestrial civilizations."
Setting aside conspiracy theories surrounding shadowy secret deals between ETs and various government agencies, it would appear that this prognostication also failed to come to fruition.
Although this is no doubt disappointing to anyone who thought we'd be working with aliens by now, the dashed ET dreams do serve to kind of take the sting out of the fact that there's also still no flying car either.
Source: Telesur