FORD FUTURA: Car that didn't make the future

Ideas About The Future Are Always Out There
This photo postcard makes me think how goofy all ideas about the future really are.
Of course we don't know what the future will look or feel like because our ideas are, as always, locked in the assumptions of the present. The future tends to pass us by, especially our technology. Perhaps if we could time travel we might be able to go forward into time and see the future but then our own travel to the future would alter the past and the future simultaneously, so that might preclude us from knowing the future especially if everyone wanted to travel to see it and of course they would. So time travel might not work as a way of smoothing out the journey.
Then too, there is the issue of acceleration. The speed of change is increasing exponentially. How can anyone keep up with that? No one has a clue of what might happen?  In a way, we're all dumb animals running into the street without the slightest idea that a car could come along, strike and kill us. We learn very slowly. I suppose you could say this fatal ignorance gives life its poignancy.
End of pondering our species limited knowledge. Now the short history of the postcard car.
This was Ford Motor Company's car of the future. Somehow the future arrived and passed this winged monstrosity behind. The car here looked a little like an Edsel on steroids, another Ford dinosaur. They called the car the Futura, not to be mistaken for the Ford Futura produced for the Australian market between 1962 and 2008. That car was a BF Series Ford Falcon, a much smaller car that morphed into the current Ford Fusion. The model shown here looks like what an engineer in the 1960's would think the future would look like -- sharp lines, wings, wrap-around chrome and big -- gas guzzling behemoth. It never made production, fortunately.

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Thanks Rick B. for the great postcard. Yes, I think it will be a "smash hit."

Planet X

During a recent trip to the southwest U.S. we stopped one evening at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. We lined up with 50 or so other tourists to take a peek through the 101 year-old Alvan Clark Telescope telescope, pictured in this black and white photo above. On view was the planet Saturn, and though small, its rings were visible. The telescope and building housing it were a big hit with mom and dad but the kids were more impressed with the gift shop and nearby museum with its interactive displays of the wonders of the universe.

The postcard above shows Percival Lowell viewing the planet Venus through the 24-inch Alvan Clark Telescope. Lowell is best known for his Planet X theory. He conjectured that the irregular orbits on Neptune and Uranus were caused by the gravitational pull of an as yet undiscovered planet. Though he searched in vain for eleven years, his theory proved correct fourteen years after his death when Clyde Tombaugh, a young astronomer at the observatory discovered Pluto.