Posted on 12/27/2011 12:24:17 AM PST by Windflier
In the February 1952 issue of Galaxy magazine, Robert Heinlein offered his verdict on the conclusion of the twentieth century. He would later revisit these predictions in the 1966 short story collection The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein and discuss the challenges of predicting the future. Here's what the author gathered, six decades ago:
So let's have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong - but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.
1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.
2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.
3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.
1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.
Wonder what he'd think about Obama ceding space to the Russians and Chinese?
2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.
Pretty darn close.
3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.
Reagan was ahead of the game here, though the chattering classes and intelligentsia derided him. Space based attacks remain a threat, which we are choosing not to address.
4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.
Oops.
5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.
The subprime mortgage?
6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Dang. I'm hungry now. Of course, I'm going to fire up the smoker in a few hours.
7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists.
If only.
8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction.
LOL
9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.
Swing and a miss, though the artificial limbs are getting pretty good.
10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building.
I think he's just early on this one. Give capitalism time and it will happen. Wait on government and, well, wait.
11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.
Nailed it.
12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.
We still haven't discovered intelligent life inside the Beltway.
13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.
Hard to do on solar and wind.
14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.
No, it's to control the climate (or, at least government grants).
15. We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.
...and reappear in the Oval Office.
16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.
And around 2013, Texas will secede (assuming an Obama rigged re-election).
17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain."
Heading in this direction.
18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.
Clearly, he didn't see the rise of Islam.
19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed.
True.
That would be Chuck Hosea...a fine writer in his time. Did you read his short story about the neighboring farmer who stole two of his asses??? A barn burner, that one!
He was spot on with #6.
True, but he was by no means the first. The concept of a hand-held device serving as a computer terminal was described in the 1949 book "Giant Brains-or Machines that Think" by Edmund Berkeley.
Not to be picky, but to be picky, Edmund Berkeley wasn't precisely describing a handheld phone, which is what Heinlein predicted. Berkeley's prediction is pretty accurate, too.
I want to hear from the visionary who predicted the rise of the Welfare State that stunted much of the progress predicted by others...
I started reading RH in 1968 overseas in the military...fantastic books and I read everything he ever wrote in print. Over the years I noticed he had an unnatural obsession with incest (ala TEL) and some rather disturbing thoughts on religion (J, ACOE)...in the end, his books were tedious and single minded (CWCWTW)....I suspect dementia by then.
His best work was MIAHM and TEL (less the incest); I didn’t care that much for SISL, for which is he was most famous.
What Berkeley was describing was a technological leap above and beyond what Heinlein was talking about.
Berkeley described a multi-function computer-based device which had voice as well as data capability, and access to other computers (networking).
Berkeley loses points for not including imaging, which Heinlein mentions for the home phone of 2000, but predictions of video telephones go well back into the late 19th century, and image transmission by telephone (i.e. fax) was crude but operational technology by the 1920s, a time when real-time image transmission (television) was actively being pursued. Telephone answering machines came into being in the 1930s, though not for home use, but the technology to magnetically record and play back sound existed as early as the 1890s.
Without a doubt, Heinlein’s saw his pocket telephone as an analog device (think of Dick Tracy’s 1946 wrist radio).
Berkeley saw his as digital, at a time when any computing was either electromechanical, or vacuum tube based.
That's an excellent observation. Heinlein was at least partially correct, in that wise.
I probably began reading Heinlein around the same time, but I was just a teenager then. His writings were a catalyst that caused my youthful imagination to explode with futuristic possibilities.
Being that I was just a kid at the time, I didn't catch some of the more disturbing things in his works that you did. I haven't re-read any of his works in my adult life, but it's on my bucket list.
Berkeley described a multi-function computer-based device which had voice as well as data capability, and access to other computers (networking).
Interesting. That would make his the more accurate prediction.
I noticed another one of Berkeley's predictions at your link:
"Nowadays when we wish to send out announcements of an event, like going to South America for a year, we may copy the addresses of our friends onto the envelope by hand. In the future, we can see our address book as a spool of magnetic tape. When we wish to send out announcements, we put a stack of blank envelopes into the machine that will read the magnetic tape, and we press a button. Out will come the envelopes addressed."
Aside from the use of magnetic tape as a storage medium, he described a modern pc with printer. There are a few other uncanny predictions about computing at that link.
LMAO!!!! Based on Popular Mechanics in the 60s I already had my fuzzy dice and color picked out......
Anthropogenic Climate Change anyone?
Somewhere, Robert Heinlein is doing a major facepalm at the sheeples who've fallen for the AGW hoax.
I think he got at least four correct, and at least half of his predictions are mighty close.
I think Heinlein underestimated the level of mendacity and corruption and socialism that would take hold in the United States in the wake of the 1960's countercultural revolution. Many of the things on this list would have otherwise happened by now.
Like you said he was a Writer who made some spot on Predictions.
On the Flip Side Ayn Rand and George Orwell were Prophets who wrote good stories.
The jury's still out on that one, although I believe it's highly unlikely that there's intelligent life on Mars.
In the most hopeful scenario, I think we may find lower forms of life (molds, lichens, bacteria, etc.) and there's still the possibility that we'll find signs that other intelligent life has visited there.
We won't know until humans have fully explored the place.
Here's what Heinlein had to say about that particular prediction in his 1966 essay, "Pandora's Box".
"Here I fell flat on my face. There has been no breakthrough in housing, nor is any now in prospect."
I haven't found the full essay online, so I don't know if he expanded on that thought. He was a keen observer of modern culture and politics, so he may have agreed with your take on why this development stalled.
Excerpts from Pandora's Box , Heinlein's 1966 essay, in which he revisits his predictions from 1952.
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