In just five days, we'll be in the year 2010 -- officially well into the 21st century. But how much progress have we really made? After all, we don't have the gracefully rotating space hotels they promised us back in the 1960s. We don't yet have our own personal android butlers, complete with quirky personalities and the ability to think on their own. How come I'm still eating chicken, when all of my daily nutrients were supposed to have been contained in my aspirin-sized food pill?

To put it another way, whatever happened to The Future?

To be sure, today we regard as routine marvels that would have bowled 'em over back in the '50s. There's exponentially more computing power in an Xbox than in the bulky machines used to get men to the Moon in 1969. Heart surgery now is commonplace, whereas 45 years ago it was considered only a final, risky option. Few imagined we would have Internet access to a huge swath of human knowledge courtesy of a device that fits in our pockets.

Still, for the most part, today we're living in a world that is but a faint echo of the gleaming, Buck Rogers society that was envisioned years ago.

Consider that space-resort whose rooms we were supposed to be booking by now. Recently, billionaire Richard Branson unveiled a plane that will take paying customers into space. But Mr. Branson's well-heeled clients will enjoy only a quick, two-hour jaunt above the atmosphere, not the extended stay envisioned by Conrad Hilton back in the 1960s. (Hilton's obsession with space tourism emerged in a subplot on a recent episode of the AMC TV series "Mad Men.")

Then there's the electric car, another once-and-future technology. Vice President Joe Biden recently attended a ceremony at a shuttered General Motors plant to announce that the factory will be reopened, but instead of gas guzzlers, battery-powered cars will come clattering down the retooled assembly lines.

Mr. Biden is betting on a technology that has a storied past -- none other than Thomas Edison himself, back in 1905, predicted that cars powered by electricity would soon replace their internal-combustion cousins. At the peak of the 1970s oil crisis, many also predicted a bright future for electric cars. Agog at skyrocketing gas prices, several disco-era futurists were sure that all our autos would have been plug-ins by now.

Medicine has not been immune (so to speak) from somewhat outlandish speculation, either. According to a recent study, about half of all newborns in the United States will live to be 100 -- not bad, until you look at what life expectancy was supposed to be. Gerontologists in the 1960s believed that today we would have elixirs that did not simply cure disease but halted, at the genetic level, the very aging process itself. A prominent researcher of the era, Robert Prehoda, thought that 200-year lifespans were well within reach and that, unless some previously unknown natural limit were encountered, we might even achieve an entire millennium -- yes, 1,000 years -- of life.

So things might not have worked out as well as we'd once hoped, but we should derive some consolation from the fact that they're not as bad, either.

For instance, while millions today are still at risk for starvation, this is a far cry from the billions who were supposed to have perished in the mass famines predicted by Paul Ehrlich in his 1970 bestseller "The Population Bomb." In fact, that we're here at all is cause for rejoicing, if you're someone who's inclined to take the biblical literalists seriously -- a decade ago, many believed that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were about to come galloping across the landscape. This is an especially enduring concern, too: consider the popularity of the recent movie "2012," the end-of-the-world thriller allegedly based on Mayan prophecy.

How do we get things so wrong?

Sometimes, we merely overestimate our cleverness -- the aging riddle, for instance, is proving to be an especially tough nut to crack.

And sometimes we underestimate ourselves -- the Green Revolution enabled us to feed far more people with much less land than Mr. Ehrlich and like-minded doomsayers had thought possible.

And sometimes, a forecasting misfire could be chalked up to a contingent X-factor not easily foreseen. We're far behind in space exploration, for example, simply because as a society, following the manned Moon landings, we decided that we had far more serious problems here on Earth that required our dollars.

Perhaps, though, we generally tend to get the future wrong simply because we all fall back on our natural tendencies when pondering the unknowns. The optimistic will see jet packs and benign androids, the pessimist will stock up his basement with nonperishables.

Perhaps the sweet spot here is to think of the future as being much like the present, if just a bit more so.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.