2015? You Mean We're in the Future?
Posted by Will M on Jan 21st 2015
Well, it’s 2015, which means we’ve made it to an important milestone in human history: we’ve finally reached the “future” of Back to the Future II. That friend of yours who has erroneously posted “Today is the date Marty McFly traveled to in the future!” on your Facebook wall every few months for the past three years is finally going to inadvertently be correct later this year. While it is an incredibly entertaining sequel to an undisputed classic for most people of my generation (the four years between the two films seemed like an eternity to me from ages 6 to 10, and it ushered in the 90s for me as I finally saw it New Years Eve 1989), it wasn’t exactly the most prescient film.
No flying cars. No hoverboards. No Cubs winning the World Series (though they did foresee there being a team in Miami in the future – a franchise, ironically, that actually would win two World Series). Did they get anything right? Well, the folks over at MentalFloss.com wrote a fun piece postulating about what technologies from BTTF2 may be in our future at some point titled “When 8 'Back to the Future II' Technologies May Become a Reality.”
The one that caught our eye here at Human Solution involved Number 6, the exercise bikes at the 80s café. While the film did nail our nostalgia for the decade (which began long before 2015), exercise bikes are not yet quite that ubiquitous. However, as the article notes, insurance premiums will undoubtedly continue to be increasingly tied to your health and lifestyle, which may even mean tracking variables such as calorie intake and output. This could very well result in a prevalence of exercise machines in places other than the gym or your garage.
While exercise bikes and treadmills may not be available at most lunch counters just yet, if you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know of their increased presence at office workstations. You can pair a sit-stand office desk with a recumbent bike, or even create a walking workstation with a LifeSpan treadmill. To prepare you for the inevitable future in which your insurance company hooks you up to a monitor to see how many calories you’re burning, LifeSpan treadmills even come with software to set goals and track progress, such as distance walked and, yes, calories burned.
The future is just around the corner. Now, if we can just get someone to work on the Pit Bull Hoverboard…
The future is now at TheHumanSolution.com.
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