Back to the future; Experts imagined we'd be living in a space-age world by 1999, but the reality is very different. After getting it wrong, can we trust their predictions for the 21st century?

IN the year 2000, you will be slinking into your Barbarella catsuit, sipping a glass of artificially-produced hangover-resistant whisky, and then jumping into your hovercraft.

You'll take a short spin over to your local space station, where one of a number of regular shuttle flights will take just a few minutes to whisk you off to a party on Mars.

Then, after dancing the night away with your personal robot, you'll spend the weekend recovering with friends who live on a space station orbiting Venus.

You're probably thinking this is complete rubbish - and you're right.

But only a few years ago, some of the world's leading scientists, technologists and engineers actually predicted that we'd all be living in this way by the time the new millennium dawned.

They dreamed that real life would be like something out a 1960s science fiction film, where robots did our housework while we sat in Jimmy Savile- style armchairs with buttons to control our every whim.

Going to work in this world would be a thing of the past - our days would simply be spent pleasing ourselves.

Travel would also be easier than ever before. It was predicted that, if we could be bothered to move out of our electronic houses, we'd fly in our own spacecrafts between gothic space- age cities which always glinted in the sun.

We'd never need to bother about the weather because the climate would be controlled completely by computer. As for money, cash wouldn't be necessary because technology would look after all our needs.

So why is the reality so different from the bright future which was predicted for us. And why did the experts get it so badly wrong?

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