Futurama S01E01 - Space Pilot 3000

2013 - 17819

Futurama starts with the main character, Fry, having a particularly bad New Year's Evening. He had to work, which isn't that bad, but it is for a pizza delivery guy. While Fry was on a delivery, he stumbled on his girlfriend hanging out with another man. He walked up to her to say hi but she broke off their relationship instead. He went on with his job, but when he reached his destination, his bike got stolen. And what's worse was the delivery was just a prank call. He spent the rest of the last night of year 1999 in a cryogenics lab where he accidentally entered a freezing chamber set to be on for another 1000 years.

Fry wakes up to the first day of the year 3000. The civilization he woke up to was quite similar to the Community in the 1993 novel by Lois Lowry, "The Giver". In Community, there are Elders who would look for a person's strengths and weaknesses to give him an appropriate job. The future in Futurama had the same concept. They analyzed Fry with some sort of contraption and deduced  that the profession Fry should have would be... delivery boy. Afraid of his destiny, he escapes and encounters different types of technology that were not yet available back in his time. Traveling tubes, suicide booths, robots, head preservation, light sabers, you name it, they were all there like in any other typical science fiction show.

The show tackles the topic of time travelling in a unique way, probably the most possible way. Cryogenics, the process of freezing cells to preserve them, is now possible in our present time. I believe that it won't be long until this method of time traveling can become true. But, this method of t is not the same as the other, more complex ones. For one, it is irreversible. Once you go to the future, you will not be able to go back to your original time line. Second, you can only go to the future, the past is unfortunately not on the route of this train. Third, it was time travelling only for you. Other people will go about their normal daily routines. It's just as if you slept for a very long time and woke up to another time.