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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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"bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways."
If only it were so! The backups on the bridges across the bay here wouldn't affect my commute.
I don't write it, I just report it :P
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.
In 1961 I thought I'd be dead by 2000....Im way ahead of the game
>foodless foods (minus nutritional properties)
Now this is true. (as I munch on my Cheetos)
Well, no look, it is one think to muse about flying cars and spaceports...but timely public transportation? Now that truly is out there science fiction. ;)
Where's my helicopter? This article clearly states that I am to travel about by my own personal helicotper, and I want it now! And while you're delivering the chopper, go ahead and drop me off one of those rocket belt thingy's so I can increase my stride to 30' a step.
Oh, you get those, too?
I've often wondered, how they know, whom to send those ads to?
Machines will "talk" to each other.
Even foresaw spam & computer virus virii, oh heck them trojan thingies in the email.
Ain't progress wunnerful? ;OP
Spooky how accurate these things can be...
Wow you can get a pen#s enlarged!!! Wehn did that happen?
From an interview with science fiction author Larry Niven in response to the question, "What do you feel you got most spectacularly wrong, by way of failure to predict or just plain being wrong?":
"[...] The wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs."
"Vast numbers of people are microscopically better off for that, except that we all have less to aspire to."
"Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account [that being] "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
"We didn't understand how good we could get at communication -- when you have something that someone else doesn't, the whole damn planet knows it. [...]"
OK, verification that my wife of 22 years isn't crazy. She has always put garbage (food scraps, things that rot and smell) in the freezer in plastic bags, then clears it out on garbage day. Makes it an adventure when I go through the freezer looking for a quick meal to microwave when she's away.
Now that's a keeper!!
Ahhh.. what's a typewriter? I just wanted to check my engine size... and I've forgotten.
SFS
Ummmmm, let's not be too hasty on that initial conclusion, mmmmmKay?
I can't get over how bumpy the ride is on the Las Vegas monorail. For the cost you would expect an ultra-smooth, modern ride, but the thing is worse than a freight train. It's just rubber wheels over a concrete "rail", so I guess that's the best you can expect. It's somewhat useful - despite the fact you have to walk half a mile from the Strip through the east side hotels to get to any of the stations. But I don't think they should waste any more money expanding it.
I'm 40 and obtained the garbage-freezing habit from my folks. Every trash day (that was my job for many years) I'd lug a solid block or two of frigid funky food out to the can. I guess it keep nasty odors down in the fridge.
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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.