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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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Oooo...glamour undies!
and a beautiful bust!
I want my flying car gosh darn it! How else can you get to the spaceport on time.
And that's just on Monday.
Some of the predictions were surprisingly correct.
I like the Man Zan ads myself!!!!!!
This sounds as if it was put together by several people, some up on the latest technology and some on the latest comic books.
Screw the flying cars. Where's my robot maid?
You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. 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.
Amazingly they did get somethings right, or came terribly close.
Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet,
Unfortunately my rocket belt is at the shop for repairs.
They lied...
Well, some of those are pretty close--but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Futurists have tended to be notoriously wrong over the years. In 1961, I bet they never imagined that the "machines that talk to each other" would be a means for accessing unlimited porn (along with the news). And that everyone would be constantly bombarded by ads for pen#s enlargement.
Actually, when you view the movie 2001, we are quite a bit further advanced than the movie predicted, especially in communications and computers. We could have done the space travel they showed in the movie had we been willing to spend the money. We have the technology to do everything they did.
They apparently didn't foresee the rise of Liberalism...
Should have taken public transportation like the rest of us.
Well, it is Australia....
Yeah. I'd rather be bombarded by ads for Glamour Undies.
If I answered all the adds for pen#s enlargement I get, we could use it to go to the moon on.
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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.