Welcome to the Paleofuture blog, where we explore past visions of the future. From flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias.
The February 25, 1966 issue of Time magazine included predictions for the year 2000. And with the benefit of of some distance, the article is an incredible artifact of prognostication. The predictions came at a time when the U.S. was experiencing a prolonged period of unprecedented technological and economic progress. And they had no idea that the postwar growth they’d been seeing since 1950 would start to find harsh limits in the 1970s and beyond.
What will movies be like 100 years into the future? That was the question tackled in 1924 by D.W. Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation (1915), a movie that was both a huge hit in the U.S. and a controversial one, given its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith published his thoughts on the subject of tomorrow’s movies in the May 3, 1924 issue of Collier’s magazine, which was trimmed down and republished in the June 1924 issue of Reader’s Digest.
In the mid-1930s, inventor Ray Gross wrote a newspaper comic focused on gadgets of the future titled Can It Be Done? And while its vision was decidedly more humble than the flying cars and jetpacks imagined in comic strips that would come later—like Closer Than We Think (1958-1963) and Our New Age (1958-1975)—it’s still an interesting artifact of retro-futurism filled with some clever ideas for tomorrow.
Do you remember late 2022 when just about everyone was confident the U.S. would see a recession within the next year? Economists predicted unemployment would have to soar if we really wanted to tackle inflation, which was at 7.7% in October 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Back in 1999, the best way to watch a movie outside of a theater was on DVD. But as the internet became more popular, some futurists imagined a world where everyone would be watching movies through the web. And an ad from Qwest, a major internet provider at the time, gave viewers a peek into that futuristic world, where every movie was available to anyone at any time.
New technologies can literally change the world. The railroad opened up America’s economy to the west, digital photography gave virtually everyone cameras in their pockets, and the atomic bomb ended World War II. But new technologies aren’t necessarily always used for the most practical or world-changing ends. And I was reminded of this while flipping through an old magazine recently.
The August 1965 issue of Science Digest magazine included predictions from the sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov, who by that time had written such classics as the Foundation series in the 1940s and ‘50s and I, Robot (1951), establishing himself as a household name in looking at possible futures. But Asimov’s predictions in this article, like so many of those we explore at Paleofuture, were completely earnest.
Why don’t we have a base on the Moon yet? As I’ve written before, it’s largely because you don’t need one to nuke Moscow—the primary reason we did pretty much anything during the space race of the 1960s. But back in the late 1940s you could be a little more honest about why the U.S. might want a base on the Moon. And the April 1948 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine did just that, complete with incredible illustrations.
Back in 1974, a major magazine asked experts from around the world what life in 2024 was going to look like. And one expert with extensive experience at the White House influencing policy was certain about the future of nuclear weapons. Specifically, he believed three major cities—one in the U.S., one in Russia, and one in China—would all be destroyed with nuclear bombs. And given everything we know about nuclear close calls during the Cold War, it’s a miracle his prediction didn’t turn out to be correct.
What will fashionable people of the year 2024 be wearing? The January 11, 1924 edition of the Fresno Bee newspaper in California tackled that question with both plenty of humor and it’s a great reminder that so many of our predictions for the future are influenced by the most pressing issues of our age.
The August 24, 1974 issue of Saturday Review World magazine was completely devoted to what the world of 2024 would look like. And given the simple fact that we’re only a couple of weeks away from that futuristic-sounding year, now feels like an appropriate time to see how they did.
When the health care company DocGo announced in 2022 it would be rolling out a new all-electric ambulance for transporting patients, promotional materials billed it as America’s first electric ambulance. And while that assertion wouldn’t necessarily seem immediately suspect to anyone alive today, since our lives have largely been dominated by the internal combustion engine, that would certainly be news to people at the turn of the 20th century. Because the electric ambulance is probably way older than you’d guess.
When the Pentagon started to become more public about its plans for artificial intelligence roughly a decade ago, there was a phrase that always came up: In the loop. It was shorthand for a person being involved in the decision-making process about whether to launch a strike that had the potential to kill people. Having a human being “in the loop” to decide when lethal action would be taken ostensibly allowed the military to retain some of its humanity, without completely surrendering decisions to cold and calculating machines. And while some people still consider AI to be a “future” problem in warfare since we don’t yet have Skynet, advanced computing is already playing an important role on today’s battlefield, for better and for worse.
If you’re an American, there’s a good chance you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today. It’s a holiday built on food, family, and more than a few founding myths about the country. But what will Thanksgiving look like in the future? That was the question posed to Ohio kids for a newspaper article in 1963. And there are quite a few interesting answers.
Back in July of 1969, a small but dedicated group of people at UCLA were working on a computer project that would have an enormous impact on the future. Thanks to money from the Department of Defense, they were working on a new kind of computer network that would eventually become known as the ARPANET, the precursor to our modern internet. And I’ve uncovered an unassuming press release that looks pretty damn interesting in retrospect.
Playboy subscribers who just read it for the articles opened up the October 1970 issue to a grand promise. In a piece titled “The Transport Revolution,” readers were told that exciting new modes of transportation were just over the horizon. And that by 1985, all our cars would be driverless, our long distance train travel would see us zipping across the U.S. at 215 miles per hour, and gigantic hoverboats would become the norm just off America’s coasts.
Physical media is an endangered species, with laserdiscs, DVDs, and even Blu-Rays joining the ranks of once-futuristic technology we don’t see much anymore. But the idea of playing a physical disk to watch a movie is much older than you might guess. In fact, one inventor had an idea for a practical disk-based movie player all the way back in 1923, a full 100 years ago.
Planning for the future is hard, no matter where you live. But there are challenges specific to living in a dysfunctional country that can make it impossible to imagine what your tomorrows will look like. And events of the past week are a stark reminder that Americans face issues that people in other wealthy countries don’t need to worry about.
When Sunday newspaper readers opened the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on October 21, 1923 they were greeted with an enormous two-page spread about the future of war in 2023. The violent battles of 100 years into the future, they were told, would feature precision guided rockets, rapid-fire guns, and drones that would be controlled by men pushing buttons far away from the action. Or, to put it another way, they saw a vision for the future of war that was incredibly accurate.
American football has gone through a number of changes since it was first invented in the 19th century. Players can now use their hands, there are just 11 players for a given team on the field at any one time instead of 25, and the game has gotten much safer. A whopping 19 football players died in 1905, if you can believe it.
