A New Jersey man was out walking his dogs on the beach recently when he came across something peculiar. It was a message in a bottle, with a note explaining that it had been sent adrift into the Atlantic Ocean by a man named Stuart, possibly from England.

There was a brief period in the 19th century when it looked like New Zealand might join the United States. And there were a lot of perfectly logical reasons for it.

Did Carl Sagan really warn about a time in the future when manufacturing jobs would slip away, when the average person would have virtually no control over their political lives, and when we would all cling to superstitions? Yes, Sagan did predict just that. The screenshot you may have seen floating around social media is real. And plenty of people are worried that Carl was talking about our era.

Seattle’s Space Needle is an icon of the paleo-future, constructed for the futuristic 1962 World’s Fair. But this relic of the past just collided quite violently with the future. And literally too, as you can see from video released this week.

In 1999, Davide Bowie sat down for a TV interview with BBC host Jeremy Paxman. Bowie explains that if he were a kid of the 1990s he wouldn’t have become a pop star. Instead, Bowie probably would’ve become obsessed with the internet. Why? According to Bowie, that’s where the potentially interesting—chaotic, nihilistic, and truly rebellious—stuff was really happening.

How did the people of the Soviet Union expect to live in the year 2017? A filmstrip from 1960 shows that their expectations were pretty similar to the futuristic predictions of Americans. With a touch more Communism, of course.

In the fall of 1917, a severe coal shortage hit the United States. Riots even broke out over the lack of energy as the nation went into the winter months. Some people were calling for conservation, but one snarky newspaper article insisted that conserving was for suckers. Why? People of the future—specifically, the people of 100 years hence—wouldn’t be using coal anyway.

Less than a month out from Election Day, the newspaper reported on an astrology convention with hundreds of participants. The International Society for Astrological Research’s conference in Costa Mesa, California featured at least half a dozen speakers who all made their emphatic predictions that Hillary Clinton was going to win.

Electrical Experimenter magazine was all the rage for tech nerds of the 1910s. And after the end of World War I, during which the magazine focused heavily on the war, the magazine was allowed to get back into more silly DIY projects—like this clever bottle opener alarm.

From tracking down teen hackers of the 1980s who are now living on the street, to investigating the myths behind the original self-help business guru, we looked at a lot of different stories in 2016. We even kept up my obsession with movies that have been screened by American presidents at the White House.

Larry Kudlow is best known as that talking head on financial TV who wants to cut taxes for rich people. He’s been saying the same thing for a long, long time. But now he’s in the running to become Donald Trump’s choice for the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. And if Kudlow’s predictions from a decade ago are any indication, he’s probably a really bad pick.

Bill Gates recently had a phone call with President-elect Donald Trump. And Gates was impressed. He even compared Trump to John F. Kennedy, explaining that JFK got the country to support the Apollo space program. According to Gates, Trump will get people excited about his initiatives. One of the many problems with Gates’ argument? Kennedy didn’t actually succeed at getting the majority of Americans to support Apollo.

In the 1930s, audio tech nerds were tinkering with everything. The most futuristic model homes of the day were wired for sound in every room, home audio recording was being introduced, and the LP was invented to use as audiobooks for the blind. And even things we’d consider mundane today got the radio treatment in order to make them high-tech. One of those things was the police line-up, seen above wired for sound in 1931.

Do you feel like you’re currently being inundated with too much information? People have been warning about the threat of “information overload” for decades. But a new poll by Pew Research Center shows that most Americans don’t feel overloaded at all. Unless you’re elderly or make very little money. Which, at the end of the day, makes the threat of information overload a workers’ rights issue.

Remember the year 2007? I bet you do. You were so young and vibrant and full of life. You had that thing you were going to do but then never did. And then there was that place you wanted to go but never went. You probably dreamed of what the world might look like in ten years time—filled with technological wonders and exciting opportunities. Well, it’s ten years later. How’s things?

Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the untold story of Hill’s fraudulent business practices, tawdry sex life, and membership in a New York cult that makes him so fascinating.

I haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s new screed, Thank You For Being Late. But if this graph from the book is any indication, it might be the dumbest thing ever committed to pixels and paper. Yes, that graph above is real. And yes, it’s completely meaningless garbage.

The company announced that Avatar Land will open at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park during the summer of 2017. And the fact that it’s opening long after anyone cares about Avatar shows precisely why it’s so hard to keep Disney’s Epcot theme park “futuristic.”

Today we take it for granted that we can bring music with us wherever we go. But that obviously wasn’t always the case. As just one example of how cumbersome portable music could sometimes be, take a look at this portable radio receiver from 1938. It was all the rage in France.

Past visions of the future are a fun escape from the drudgery of modern life. I’ve been writing about them for ten years now, and they almost always track with the prevailing mood and economic conditions of the people who were making them. When the national mood is one of hope you see more flying cars and jetpacks like those of the 1950s and 60s. When the nation is fundamentally depressed about its prospects, you get darker visions of the future like those of the 1970s: Soylent Green, Future Shock, and World War III. Even visions of the future from children become darker.

Do you remember that short film from 1967 titled 1999 A.D.? The film, produced by Philco-Ford, shows off the house of the future, complete with videophones and push-button kitchens. It was doing the rounds back in 2007, when I first posted a clip of it. Well, one of the stars of that obscure futurist film has officially endorsed a candidate. And it’s the candidate who wants to destroy the future.

Nobody knows what the future holds. That’s what makes it so interesting—and often terrifying. But it’s become increasingly clear that the person who knows the least about the future is the one that everybody has been turning to for answers about the future of American politics: Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.

Ever since Elon Musk unveiled his idea for a Hyperloop in 2013, we’ve been patiently waiting for it to become a reality. But some people have been waiting even longer. Just take a look at this Sunday comic strip from 1965, which features a train that looks almost identical to many plans for the Hyperloop.

In September of 1984, at least 751 people got violently sick in The Dalles, Oregon. At first, no one in the town could figure out why. Those sickened had all eaten at ten different restaurants in the area, but local health officials couldn’t find a common food that may have caused their illness. A year later, they finally figured it out: A local cult was trying to swing an election in its favor. The event remains the single largest bioterrorism attack on US soil.

After months of searching, a history museum in Ohio has finally found a time capsule that was sealed by a local church in 1866. But it’s missing a few items, including a check that was supposedly made out to “generations yet unborn.”

When the House of Tomorrow was completed in 1933 it gave visitors a sneak peek at the shiny, optimistic future that was to come—all twelve sides of it. Today, this relic of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair sits in disrepair. But preservationists are hoping to change that with the announcement of a new campaign to restore the house to its former glory.

Demolition crews in Albuquerque, New Mexico just discovered a time capsule from 1968 near a former elementary school. And based on the messages discovered inside, some kids of the late 1960s had a pretty creepy vision for the future. Or, perhaps, a creepy vision of their present.

When museum curators cracked open two time capsule drums in Dallas last week they didn’t know exactly what to expect. What they found were some amazingly well preserved pieces of World War II history—bombing technology that helped defeat the Nazis.