Compared to what most Americans in 1900 probably got to eat, I'm going to go ahead and say the food is great.
Giant Strawberries twice, for that matter.
Speaking of predictions, I was just thinking that I haven't seen anyone talking about which Presidential candidate(s) are going to be hit by what kind of scandal(s), and that given the inevitability of some scandal having a substantial impact on some campaign, current attempts to handicap the horse races are worse than I'd realized.
but in most other ways, life will be a lot shittier than it is now.
The problem is sorting out a way of measuring this. I suspect that by most measures, life's going to be pretty good still for Westerners. (OTOH, if you are, as anticipated, deported back to Iran, your prediction may well hold up.)
Where are my beet-sized peas? For that matter, why have advances in nanotechnology delivered me pea-sized beets?
I associate the 'every thing is getting better all the time' sentiment with the 1900-era for some reason.
I like prediction #22: I see it... tubes! delivering goods! Sort of like the Internet.
5: Why have they? I suppose it would be too much to rely on you to self-diagnose?
If we don't figure out what's killing off the bees, the giant-sized strawberries and most other foods are gonna be kind of a problemm.
Life after the Century of Genocide sucks in a lot of ways compared to life in 1900. I imagine that life after the Century of Catastrophic Terrorism will suck for many people, too, no matter how excellent our nanotech toothbrushes.
With giant-sized fruit we can use Mexicans instead of bees.
Speaking of the internet and tubes, did everyone see this on The Daily Show? Much funnier if you remember the context in which Sen. Stevens really said the final quote.
9: Nah, you'll just see fields full of brown people stooping over plants brushing on pollen. Nothing good old American exploitation of the pooringenuity can't solve.
Is this authentic? The bit about coal running out at certain times rings false.
Life after the Century of Genocide sucks in a lot of ways compared to life in 1900.
Are you specifically referring to the victims (or more indirect victims, like family) of genocide? Because I think for most Westerners, things today are much, much better. But again, I don't know how you measure something like that.
More of this sort of thing at paleo-future.blogspot.com...
I predict that in the year 2100 genetic profiling will have advanced to the point where everyone can have a confidence interval for their personalized life expectancy, leading to an enormously inflated number of suicidal terrorists, mercenaries and willing scientific guinea pigs among the ranks of those who know they will be dead by 30.
OT: You know you're in trouble when the NYT chooses this photo to illustrate a story on how your hearing went.
I predict we'll kill those people well before they get to the age when they will become suicidal terrorists, etc.
The thing sounds false to me because way too many of the predictions are true. Grand Opera in your own home theatre box? Hello TV! And there certainly are no streetcars anymore. But what I want to know is, where the hell are my flying cars? Almost every prediction for the yeat 2000 from 1940 on had flying cars, and yet we are earth bound. I smell conspiracy.
Coming to an indieplex near you: Who Killed the Flying Car?
13: What are the brown people going to eat?
24: Quorn, plus all the lichen that will be farmed on the deiced Antarctic.
23: It's out now. It's called "Meet the Robinsons," and it's surprisingly good.
24: That's their problem.
Alternate answer: Irish babies.
22: here. Apologies if I got this answer from an unfogged comment thread in the past week.
Come on everyone, give up your pessimistic prediction. This is the kind of thing the mainstream media doesn't do as the blogosphere, because the mainstream audience don't enjoy despair and hopelessness that can't be blamed on a child molester or bureaucrat.
See, I think the incremental "Things will be just the same, only better!" predictions are somewhat at odds with the dreamy, "Wouldn't it be awesome if...?" predictions.
The latter are what gave us all those goofy 1950s Jetsons everyone-will-have-a-helicopter predictions. But also: Jules Verne.
Who's our current Jules Verne?
31: You're lamenting a lack of futurists? In this day and age? I feel like I can't go three steps without hitting one.
Nah, not lamenting. Just noting that it's often the fanciful sci-fi writers who have something interesting to say. Of course, they can also be bloodthirsty, bigoted, kooky, and/or repeating all the evils of today's world in their utopian futures, so....
I wish prediction 11 were true.
9: Cell phones are killing the bees. Of course.
30. Pessimistic prediction: China will devolve into several warlord states after the "No bride" riots of 2015. The US decides that the Treasuries held by the various warlords can be repudiated, leading to a world wide financial panic. The resulting depression makes the Thirties look like the Ninties, and Oil drops to $.50 per barrell. The Mullahs in Iran decide "Why not, things can't get worse" and nuke Israel. The counterstrike wipes out both Qom and Mecca, which leads to Muslim on white pogroms in what used to be called Europe.
The resulting depression makes the Thirties look like the Ninties, and Oil drops to $.50 per barrell.
wha? no inflation? oil demand decreases, but supply stays the same in a world of chaos?
I bought giant strawberries just this week, and I'm not kidding at all. The Harris Teeter here is full of them and they're nearly the size of plums.
I do have to wonder what will happen to all those Chinese men, but I'm guessing that they'll import women or emigrate. I'm hoping option 3 (war) doesn't happen.
40: Yeah we get some pretty goddamn huge strawberries around here, too.
37. Oil is $.50 per barrell, but bread is $1,000 per loaf.
36: "Muslim-on-white pogroms," mmm-hmm. Careful, Big Dan will think you're stealing his schtick.
As futurism goes, the article is quaint but actually isn't all that bad. The politics of Prediction 1 are laughable, for instance, but the lower limit of their guess at population isn't so far off the mark. America has seen vast reforms in medicine, sanitation and food since 1900 (not so much athletics), so much so that their prediction for life expectancy turns out to be pessimistic. The "forts on wheels" and "aerial war-ships" are amusing in detail, but are basically predictions of the importance of aerial and mobile armoured warfare. Submarines do play an important part in warfare (even if they haven't totally supplanted surface navies). People don't "telegraph" photographs but do indeed have a massive data-transfer and global telephone network, even videoconferencing, and it is indeed normal to broadcast concerts and even (to some extent) to have government funding of the arts. Genetic manipulation has made huge fruit possible, if not quite on the scale they imagined. They get a lot of stuff just wrong, of course, and sometimes hilariously so, but I've seen worse.
That they thought the elimination of all wildlife was a utopian goal seems weird and alien, though.
Having now actually followed the link, I'm with DS. Sure, there are some hilarious misses, but all in all that holds up pretty damn well.
Somehow no one predicted that rocket-packs would be repeatedly stymied by the Ass-Burn Conundrum.
As it turns out, those giant strawberries were only nine years away.
Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.
Spot on, in other words.
I would have been a lot more impressed if they had predicted Wild Strawberries instead of giant strawberries.
Here's some more predictions for ya.
There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.
Such a quixotic dream...
54 is cause for celebration.
52, meet the post to which you are a reply.
Here are some more... rather less successful predictions from fifty years later.
I used to work on a state agricultural extension farm that specialized in vegetable research. One of the doctors had a huge hit with a breed of tomato that retained flavor while being enormous. For years afterwards almost every experiment was focused on producing enormous varieties of everything: squash, blueberries (weighing the blueberries was the best because we also had to rate them on taste!), garlic, onions, everything, including strawberries. We grew some fucking huge strawberries, some the size of a softball, but they weren't so fun when it came time for the taste test. I also hated them because a part of the experiment was seeing how long they'd last in the field and so I'd get to go through and visually sort them then pick only the rotten ones to carry them out of the patch and dump in a ditch. So very yum.
Also, I do not at all believe that those predictions are legit. "Screens?" We'd view things we'd telegraphed to one another on "screens?" A bit too prescient to be believable.
In 100 years the top 75% of the US economy will be controlled by the top 0.000000000001% of our population and rather than rise up against them we will be enthralled by their starring roles in entertainment disguised as reportage.
59: "Screens?" We'd view things we'd telegraphed to one another on "screens?"
Why not? The practice of projecting moving pictures onto screens was already twenty years old at that point.
59: Damn, that 1/10,000th of a person had better be damn entertaining.
59: For 0.000000000001% to be one person, the US population would have to be a trillion. And you think real estate prices are bad now.
Edward Bellamy's horribly written, but bestselling, novel Looking Backward (1887, I think) imagines a 2000 in which music will be available to everyone in their homes, except there's no data storage: it's live performed music transmitted through some kind of piping system from a central location.
This is all IIRC; I haven't gone back and checked.
re: 63
That was Bell's vision for the telephone, I believe, which predates Bellamy's novel by 10 years.
Also, re: their predictions that there would be colour photography reproducing 'all nature's colours' wasn't really much of prediction since colour photography already existed in 1900 in crude form and the Lumiéres patented the (rather beautiful) autochrome process only a couple of years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Prokudin-Gorskii-09-edit2.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Prokudin-Gorskii-19.jpg
[Prokudin-Gorskii's colour photos from that period are pretty amazing]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mikhailovich_Prokudin-Gorskii
re: 66
That's the one. I think I first heard of Gorskii from an on-line writeup of that exhibition.
ttaM, those photos are truly awesome.
They really are. I can't help liking this guy, even though he was doubtless a complete asshole. You can really see why fatness was admirable back when people dressed like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Prokudin-Gorskii-08.jpg
with plates of pickled cabbage too!
Imagine if Edward Curtis, who was working at the same time, had Prokudin-Gorskii's technique.
re: 72
I'd never heard of Curtis, but his images look good to me.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/guides.html
Although I suppose it would be nice to see colour in some of them.
Something like nuclear power, for example, was more or less unthinkable, and even if something like it had been conceived, it would have been indistinguishable from saying "And then, magic!"
"woooowwww! it's almost exactly like normal electricity and yet miraculously ... three times the price! and unsafe! how do these wizards manage it!"
Well, the good news about 9 is that "What's Killing the Bees" was killing bees in 1896, and we seem to have survived.
Nicaragua? Well, Panama was essentially part of the US for most of the century, and that's where the canal was.
Suburbs, height, gym class: AOK. Missed obesity though..
Predictions 4 and 6: there will be no streetcars, because the streets will be full of cars - curious that they didn't spot the contradiction.
7: Very true. 90 per cent of international trade goes by sea.
8: Cracking. They even predicted Key Hole satellites..
9,10: OK.
11: Not actually that bad as mozzies go, but ecologically pretty stupid.
12, 13, 14: Slightly surreal, but not bad in a general sense (plant breeding).
15: You could put it like that.
17: Not bad, but then, there was a major current of opinion in the Edwardian period that was keen on social services and a welfare state to fend off "the degradation of the race"
18, 19: SYN. ACK...SYN-ACK!
20: Not a bad prediction at all in terms of time. It looks like we'll have to stop burning coal for CO2 reasons afore we run out. Of course, we don't use it for heating or cooking, we use it for electricity. Marine power could be big in the near future.
21,22: OK. A lot of cities were actually building pneumatic tube networks at the time for postal service between businesses.
25: Reefer shipping had just come it...
27: A cracker, again.
28: Generally right, except for rats.
29: Strangely contradictory with the predictions of aviation.
AND FINALLY:
16: No C, X, or Q? WTF?
26: What is it with this guy and outsize fruit? Fortunately, Dr. Freud was alive and practising, so if he ever wandered through Vienna, he might have got it sorted out.
54:
What do you mean, yay? So much for 110% manliness...
I like
Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations,
It's possibly what led to the construction of this :-
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
61, 62: Bitches. I dropped out of being a math major for a very good reason, it would appear.
70: what swayed me finally to picking this handle is that he's the most common result of a Google Image search.
What is it with this guy and outsize fruit?
He's imagining the future!
Do any of you English major types know a poem by a 19th-C or so English poet in which he compares the object of his affections to a heliotrope? I am googling around and found a nice poem by RMRilke but it is not exactly what I'm looking for.
William Combe. The Tour of the Reverend Doctor Syntax in search of a wife. Canto II. Lines 49-53.
"If I should dare to snatch a kiss, While I taste th'ambrosial bliss,
The loves to which the plants are prone,
And Dr. Darwin's verse has shown, I must implore to be her own:
I must implore to let me hope That I may be her Heliotrope,
And in return that she may be A smiling Heliotrope to me."
My impression is that British science-fictional predictions of the future from the same era tended to be extremely grim.
British SF has always had a strong apocalyptic and pessimistic bent, actually; a lot of this comes from Wells but some aspects predate it--many 19th century British proto-SF stories about the future were cautionary tales about Britain being conquered by nasty foreigners if we don't watch out. As I've said before, even Doctor Who had the Earth overrun by Daleks in the second season--practically the first thing you see in that story is a poster forbidding dumping bodies in the river. Pretty heavy stuff for an early 1960s kiddie show. The techno-optimism with godlike engineers is more the American tradition.
I could give all kinds of pessimistic predictions--certainly there are big challenges ahead, and our lives are going to change in ways we can't predict now, some of which will be scary to us geezers. But, really, does one have to be completely hopeless about a decent future to be a progressive person? It seems kind of contradictory.
"Something like nuclear power, for example, was more or less unthinkable"
In 1900? Nonsense. The original version of The Skylark of Space, by E. E. "Doc" Smith (and his original colloborator of the first draft, Lee Harkins Garby), was written in 1918, for instance, and is accurately described:
"The beginning of the story, The Skylark of Space, describes in relative detail the protagonist's research into separation of platinum group residues, subsequent experiments involving electrolysis and the discovery of a process evocative of cold fusion (over fifty years before Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann). He describes a nuclear process yielding large amounts of energy and producing only negligible radioactive waste - which then goes on to form the basis of the adventures in the Skylark books. Smith's general description of the process of discovery is highly evocative of Röntgen's descriptions of his discovery of the X-ray."
This process is proven to be capable of directly powering a space drive; later discoveries reveal that the process operates by generation of and manipulation of gravity fields, suggesting that the drive is an early fictional development of the space warp concept.Atomic power was imagined earlier than you apparently realize. (Atoms were a concept of the ancient Greeks; speculating that there might be great power in splitting them wasn't a complicated idea, really.)
By the 1920s, magazines like Hugo Gernsback's Science And Invention were full of articles about atomic power in the future.
A lot of folks don't realize that Leo Szilard patented the atomic bomb in 1934, for that matter.
4: "I suspect that by most measures, life's going to be pretty good still for Westerners"
Or maybe, by 2100, that will be as accurate as such a prediction for the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the Ottoman Empire, would have been in 1900; at the least, it seems an unsafe assumption. Maybe life will be more like China Mountain Zhang. Or perhaps something more radically different: who the heck knows?
59: "We'd view things we'd telegraphed to one another on "screens?" A bit too prescient to be believable."
Good lord, no. The late 19th century is full of stories with people in the future using screens. After all, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884. By 1900, television was "prescient" only in the sense that the word means "had already been written about in magazines for decades."
Matt McIrvin's observations are as sound and accurate as ever.
Atoms were a concept of the ancient Greeks; speculating that there might be great power in splitting them wasn't a complicated idea, really.
A very different concept, though, than the one named "atom" by more recent scientists. It would have been unthinkable to the ancient Greeks to split the atom; that was the whole point of the atom, to be the thing that wasn't divisible.
True; I wasn't arguing that the Greeks invented the concept of nuclear power; only that the concept of "atoms" was ancient, and that by the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th, the notion of some form of atomic power wasn't at all radical for speculators, let alone unheard of. Science, and new concepts of physics, were abunduntly discussed widely by the second half of the 19th Century.
On the other hand, I'll note that a lot of speculation was opened up in 1905, and thereafter, via Einstein.
Kudos to Gary for referencing China Mountain Zhang in 85, BTW. That book should be much better known than it is.
