Cliches of future past

Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought to see into the future, to know what will be.

Of course, in the past, this largely consisted of people, all named Og, making guesses about whether a given rock, if let go, would in fact fall to the ground. Modern physics largely put to rest these raucous, prognosticative debates.

But that was then. This is now, more than ever, and nowadays, increasingly advanced microprocessors (the brains of the computer), with wires only a dozen nanometers thick¹, enable us to make increasingly more precise, detailed, and, frankly, freaky predictions about the future.

It was this power I wished to harness when I took our baby’s ultrasound image to the Advanced Prognosticative Imaging Lab at the hospital. “Doctor,” I said, “my child — what of his or her future?”

“Easy,” he said, fiddling with some dials and presenting me with this image:

Whoops! Turns out, the doctor had made a few incorrect settings, accidentally predicting only the very near future for our child, and possibly having the wrong setting for the “species” button. Not sure. But after a few more minutes of flipping switches, he arrived at this computer-simulated age progression for our child (unfortunately, the simulatrix cannot predict gender, so I had him click the button for “boy”):

Isn’t technology something?

In other news, I’ve now been an uncle for a year, possibly more (depending on when you read this and in what hemisphere — I believe in Australia it is a Sunday). And yet, rather than celebrate my accomplishments as the brother-in-law of the child’s mother, most of the celebrations thus far seem focused on my nephew. Fine. But has he demonstrated this level of Photoshop prowess, I ask? Nevertheless, a happy birthday to young David.

Oh, and those wishing to download an entirely different ultrasound image than the one I posted last time may enjoy this entirely antler-free scan.

¹That is, one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair, or one-hundredth the width of mitochondria^2
2Known as the “powerhouses of the cell”