It's October 21st, 2015. Somewhere, in a parallel present not at all like our own, Marty, Doc Brown, and Jennifer are about to land in a "futuristic" Hill Valley. Flying cars cruise the skies. Youth gangs with weaponized hoverboards roam the streets looking for kids to bully. And the fax machine rules all forms of communication.

Where we're going... we still need roads

Yeah, no. Let's not pretend that Back to the Future Part II's particular vision of the future resembles today in any meaningful way. But some of the ideas that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale cooked up back in '89 have come to pass in one way or another. Some things, like flying cars and drones, do exist — they just haven't, ahem, taken off with the general public quite yet. Others, like tech-enabled glasses, simply never delivered on their promise of changing our lives. We definitely don't have fusion-powered appliances that use garbage for fuel. But we do have smarter homes and cooler TVs. And yes, we technically have actual hoverboards. (I don't mean self-balancing scooters, Swagways, or PhunkeeDucks.) They're just nowhere near primetime yet.

The Cubs probably won't win the World Series, though. Sorry guys.

Try not to frown at how little "progress" we've made, though. Our future is still pretty cool. Zemeckis and Gale could never have dreamed of technology like the smartphone, which is increasingly becoming a fundamental part of modern society, let alone the internet, the single most important communications advancement since Gutenberg's printing press that also happens to underpin so much of the awesome things we do today. Those two things cannot be taken for granted. So take it easy and just enjoy 2015 for what it really is.



