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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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"TV-telephones and room-to-room TV"
I've decided that picturephones are the gold standard of bad futurology.
"I like the one about there being no mental illness!! Bahhahahahaa"
only true because they have re-defined "mental illness".
Homosexuality USED to be a mental illness. now it's something to strive for . . ./rollseyes
of course I suppose you could say we have also re-defined the word "freedom" too. . .
Was this Dan Rathers "Practice" Memo?
Hey, they hit a few of 'em, LOL!
Speaking of futurism, back in '95 I was in the video production biz. I was videotaping a goofy feel-good waste-of-money seminar (attended by government workers at taxpayer expense) in which the featured speaker was a futurist. Bear in mind that this was 1995.
He told the audience that in the year 2000, there would be no need for live actors, that all movies would be 100% computer-generated. He said you'd be able to use your remote control to change a star from John Wayne to Tom Cruise, or even to yourself if you always wanted to be a movie star.
For 30 minutes of that tripe, which the attendees soaked up in slack-jawed wonder, this clown got paid $1000 and all expenses, including first-class airfare. I kid thee not. Been trying ever since to get someone to tell me how I can sign up to be a futurist, but nobody's talking.
MM
We have advanced technologies that prevent that.
Why is he smiling?
Back then? Typewriters were pretty big.
As in "Manhands, baby!"
To wit:
I loved this thread! I haven't laughed so hard in weeks. And the comments just topped everything. You guys are great.
BTTT
Perhaps the handle "Steel and Fire and Stone" is an indication of shortcomings elsewhere?;-)
"Amazingly they did get somethings right, or came terribly close."
What amazing? There is nothing amazing about it.
Many of those items, like pool, telephones, recorders and TVs were already known.
I probably read this article back in 1961.
Did it hurt too bad? (he asked afraid of the answer)
Yeah, but that indoor, jet-powered helipool thingie is new, I'm pretty sure.
And I want one soooooo bad.
ff
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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.