Into the Atom Age (and Beyond)

It's a pretty safe statement to make to say that nobody wants to look really stupid. Even the seemingly endless supply for complete morons they get to queue up to audition on shows like X-Factor think they have talent. They may be stupid, but they aren't all that aware of it.

A state of being that may well come to all of us with the onset of time. After all, don’t we in the present age like to have a good chuckle at how people were in the past. “Oh, how quaint, they used to think the earth was flat! And they used to have 20 children per family, all of which had rickets and scurvy!” It’s called progress – the same reason our girlfriends and mothers don’t just have to be baby factories anymore. Now they can come to work and lead a slightly less meaningless life.

Patrick McGoohan, genius creator of The Prisoner, felt that progress in the 20th century was going too fast. His show saw his character Number Six depersonalised to a number, his dreams, perceptions of reality and even his physical identity manipulated by technology. He saw the Prisoner as a warning of sorts, and felt we needed to slow it down some.

An understandable stance, perhaps, especially in the age of Nuclear Terror. But I’m an impatient man and I want my hover boots, damn it.

One good thing about the last century that we can say is that, despite the numerous genocides, world wars and other horrors, we’ve come a long way in a short time. The Industrial Revolution may have been important but when all was said and done, the average pleb was still living in conditions best described as “shit”. Now, at least here in leafy England, even the lowest of underclass scrote has an X Box and access to numerous TV channels of mind numbing cack.

The internet may well be the great invention of our time, enabling us as it does mass communication across the globe. Why, my own dear readers can be sat wherever they may be and think “I wonder what that stupid tosser Harrison is thinking today?” and know in a matter of seconds. Teenage boys around the world no longer have to hope someone has thrown pornography into the bushes for their first chance at seeing a naked woman.

Yet it is this very progress that means we will one day be comparatively seen as little more than prehistoric cave dwellers. When humanity has evolved into beings of pure energy (or something), we will look at our time, with our “iphones” and “eating habits”, in the same way we gawp at insects on Richard Attenborough documentaries. This is our inescapable collective fate, unless we conspire to blow up the planet before then, which you still wouldn't hedge your bets against.

All of which is why I tell anyone who knows me that when I expire, I want to be thrown into a fire rather than buried in the ground. The nightmare situation is that in 1000 years time, I'll be dug up by a 30th century version of Tony Robinson’s Time Team and laughed at as an example of Ancient Humanity. This also has the added bonus of meaning I can never rise as a member of the undead army and eat my friends and family. Always thinking ahead – it's the reason we go forward as a species.