http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/

Totally off-topic, except for the references to transportation. Absolutely prescient in some regards-absolutely naive in others.

The worst part of this is that I have the original magazine artical when I subscribed to it back then! Where does the time go.

Even worse, why haven't you taken the trash out since 1968?


I once read a bit of satire that said the Library of Congress was sagging one one wing, due to the number of back issues of "National Geographic" that had been acquired.

It seemed like a terrible "waste"!

Want to see something really funny? Look into the Futurama, the 1939 World's Fair version of the future sponsored by GM. It showed a rather comical notion of what 1960 was going to be like.
I'm still waiting for flying cars. We're no where closer to that reality now than we were in the 30s. I handle auto accident claims for a living, and I can verify for certain that people cannot drive in two dimensions!

I sure like the idea of the self-maintaining home advanced in the article. Particularly if it takes out the trash for you. Around here the railroad enthusiast magazines and the job related stuff all just get mixed together in one continuous pile of paper.

MX

Scary that the article was so right-on on some issues but so-o-o far off on others. A four hour work day? How about working two full time jobs, one to keep the house the other to pay the escalating taxes?

Later!
Mr. Ed

The biggest insights of all tend to be not what they predict that doesn't appear, but what they totally miss: universal cell phones that make Dick Tracy's wrist-radio an obsolete joke; DNA testing that becomes the focus of entire TV shows; micro-surgery; GPS; online tracking of individual railroad cars and packages; etc.

"Where's my flying car, dammit?" has become a big inside joke with several of us when discussing the fallibility of future predictions.

"Individual futrue may vary. Future not available in India, Africa, or Central/South America."

The thing that surprises me the most about these future predictions is that they sound absolutely ghastly and unbearable. Your life would be a monotone plastic filled world of waste and total control by your General Electric Computer-O-Matic-House-Clean-O-Tron. You'd live in a dome and what remained of nature would be glimpsed as you sped to and from work in a bubble car. Blechhh. They did nail credit cards right on the head though, so props to them for that.

The past's idea of the future never incorporates any retention of infrastructure, tradition, or evidence of very poor ideas when planning for what tomorrow will be. That's why they those boring glass box office towers of the 1950's are such a blight on the landscape of cities to this day.

Oh well.............what will the next forty years bring!?! Hopefully it's nuclear powered and utterly unnecessary! Like a rocket car to jet down the Interstate at three miles an hour because every idiot ahead of you slowed way down to gawk at the rocket car that rear ended the hover plutonium waste tanker and vaporized bubble-domed Chicago II.

Thanks, Taylor

Can you imagine all the flying cars falling out of the sky after they collide? I don't know about you, but I hope we NEVER have flying cars. Give me a 300MPH bullet train from NY to LA, but please, no flying cars...

There was a very interesting presentation on Book TV yesterday by physicist Michio Kaku who had many ideas as to what we could find in the next few decades / centuries / millenia based on the current progress in science and comprehension. Time travel, teleportation, etc - fascinating, and based on real scientific progress. Arthur C Clarke was probably off by about 100 years with his 2001 A Space Odyssey, according to Kaku.....among other things.

dave