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July 22, 1961, Weekend Magazine |
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Posted on 01/05/2005 5:40:12 PM PST by fo0hzy
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July 22, 1961, Weekend Magazine |
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What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom. You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space.
Your house will probably have air walls, and a floating roof, adjustable to the angle of the sun.
You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail. You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room. The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.
Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets. Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form. At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift. Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile. There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other. It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.
The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion. Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains.
By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond. Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.
Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100. There's a lot more besides to make H.G. Wells and George Orwell sound like they're getting left behind. And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists. It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left!
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" five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space."
Perhaps that should have read ... five per cent of the Mexico population will have illegally emigrated into the USA.
It's all true for Bill Gates!!!
The only people free in America now are the illegal aliens.
Free healthcare, free benefits, no taxes....
"when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it."
That's why they wanted those 30 foot strides, 200 mph monorails, and 1000mph planes, to get back to the little woman with the glow in the dark undies. And of course that also explains the 24 hour work week.
A forty year old woman in the 60's was old, old, old, she even acted old. I remember my MIL, She was old at 39 when I first met her. She was talking retirement at 39, and not investing, just retiring, and she had that goofy hair-do and was just plain old. That was 1982, she was 39, do the math. You can't compare a forty year old women today, born in the late 50's early 60's to then. And you know what, we are on tail end of the baby boomers. Most 40 year olds don't consider themselves boomers because we were 10 when woodstock happened. We are the tweeners.
I remember watching science fiction of the 50's and we aren't even close to where they thought we would be in many areas, specifically space travel, but are ahead in others such as size of computers. Jet aircraft are in many ways not that much more advanced. For instance an F104 of the 1950's is about as fast as or faster than an F-16. The real improvements are in electronics and targeting.
Seeing people in an avanced society traveling through galaxies while using computers which have large tape reels is a amusing.
They had no clue about how well transistors and miniturization would work...
Segway, a rocket jetpack designed by democrat party saftynazi's who will out law it anyways because they can't tax it.
I do note the last little remark, "if there's any world left." A lot of that stuff went down back then. The air car, the robot maid, the 1000 mph penny-a-mile transport, that was all imaginable, but the U.S. winning the cold war without blowing up the world? If they'd printed that the article would have been laughed off the page.
Personally I want my death ray and I want it now!
"Nope."
Here ya go:
Okay, why are you hiding that from me?
Michael M. Bates: My Side of the Swamp
And if she ever reads this I'm dead meat.
MY mother still does it when my niece and nephew come home.
Not for ME though!
yeah, but we're talking stuff that can't go down the disposal... steak bones, rib bones, chicken carcasses and the kind...
Throw them in the garbage can and they stink in a few days and attracts bugs and animals.
Hey, I don't have all these things!
It must be Bush's fault!!!
My apartment's lease states that I agree not to put "stringy items" or rice in the disposal.
I wish I'd read that part before I started eating in here.
RE # 66 - I remember my elementary teacher asking the class to imagine what life would be like in 2000, and how old we would be then. When I did the calculation, I was horrified - to be in my 40's was unthinkable!
Close to 80% of this is accurate if we leave out the transportation nonsense.
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oors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.
n commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour.