It’s 2010, and I don’t have my jetpack or a voice-activated computer running everything in my house. And Doc Brown didn’t invent me a DeLorean time machine. What’s the deal, science?

Then again, I’m not surprised. As a society, humans have done little to foster the sort of atmosphere conducive to supplying the technology needed to pimp my jetpack with thrust-vectoring and hands-free controls. The problem lies in politics and culture.

Consider the debate over the Talley Student Center renovation indebtedness fee from last semester. The argument in favor of the fee generally indicated that students, who are only here for four to six years, can’t really see the forest from the trees and don’t understand the significance of having a building for student life. I, on the other hand, argued that a far better way to improve the University would be to ask for more money so as to prevent cutting classes and increasing class size to deal with budget cuts or improving vital services that ensure students can go to class and learn every day of the week (transportation, health services, etc.)

Predictably, instead of any sort of carefully negotiated compromise or brilliant plan to balance academic concerns and improvements with student life facilities, the indebtedness fee became something of a Hobson’s choice: we can vote for any of the fees in the increase package, as long as the indebtedness fee is the one we have to pass.

On a broader scale, consider the quagmire in Washington concerning reform to the health care system or the financial sector. This may seem irrelevant, but given the fact that anyone graduating with me in May will need to buy health insurance unless certain aspects of the current bill pass and may need to pay off outstanding loans or take loans out to continue for further studies, this matters.

I am perfectly willing to discuss legitimate concerns with the proposals for public options or individual mandates against the need for fiscal prudence in the face of a rising national debt. I have no problems with discussing ways to control costs, whether they are tax incentives or social programs. But again, instead of hearing such a debate, the news from the Capitol mostly consisted of one senator or congressperson talking about the strength of the new legislation and another yelling about death panels, tea parties and socialized medicine.

And we haven’t even started to hear the inevitable craziness around bank reform. I have no doubt the free market purists will start screaming about government regulation stifling innovation. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with capitalism and do not believe in excessive regulation. But I happen to know that no matter how much the invisible hand may push consumers towards a certain corrective behavior in the big economic picture, simple common sense and math cannot be avoided.

One cannot simply say a loss of fewer jobs than predicted is a sense of recovery; a negative number of jobs is still equal to a net loss of jobs against a rising population. One can call packaging risky mortgage debt a brilliant financial instrument, with all the bells and whistles a bank can attach to it, but such a security still requires housing prices to go up at an unsustainable pace to make money, which is a terrible gamble for the people who handle our money to take.

With the sort of inane “debates” about simple social issues that should be a matter of weighing the evidence, how can anyone reasonably expect to address problems related to building jetpacks or inventing flying cars?

Whatever. I’m gonna go watch YouTube for a few hours. At least politics did not prevent a brilliant person from inventing streaming online video Web sites.