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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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I've had a few nights where that seemed to be the case.
Back in the mid 1960s when I was young I recall seeing a magazine cover. It was either Look or Life I think.
It showed on the cover four Presidents, three of the future. John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and John Kennedy jr.!
Oh, you get those, too?
I've often wondered, how they know, whom to send those ads to?"
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I've managed to de-spam my mailboxes, or at least reduce it, so I don't get 'em anymore. But for a while there, after hundreds and hundreds of 'em, I was starting to become insecure about things..ah...er.. I had never much thought about before. :-))
I mean, I was thinking to myself, WHO knows me THAT well?!! Crap! What happened to that "right of privacy" thingy they keep yapping about?!
Well, I guess there are more important things to worry about.
SFS
It's like a laptop, only fatter and noisier, and you can't surf the web or play games on it.
;)
Only a few years later than 1961, I thought I'd be OLD in 2000! (43)
I've found that's not the case! :-)
Ahhh.. maybe nightly, depending on certain factors, like age, the wife, the girlfriend..no, no .. ah, mostly the wife.
SFS
Everyone.
Even women.
I put that stuff down the garbage disposal.
I pay $30/month for sewage, and I'm gonna get my money's worth!!!
Awesome post.
LOL....Im ten years older than you and in 61 I thought my mother who was 40 at the time, ancient....
Don't know why that reminds me of a Seinfeld quote: "She had Man-Zans!"
Some were very, very close.
I like the one about there being no mental illness!! Bahhahahahaa..
My mother has always done that exact thing. She got tired of critters ripping into the garbage bags, so decided to freeze all edible garbage. She cuts used plastic gallon milk containers in half and uses the bottom halves as disposable garbage containers.
I'm still waiting for x-ray glasses that really work 8)...
Around the time this article was written, a strapping young genuis, a sage, a prophet for his time, was idly daydreaming in his ninth-grade algebra class when a magnifecent idea seized him. The idea for a global network of inter-connnected home computers, capable of transitting entire libraries of information at light speed, reproducing sound, data, and films across the globe in mere seconds...
The young man's name was Albert Gore, Jr. We know him better as the Inventor of the Internet!
I fully expect that when I'm 85, I'll be railing about those old 105-year-olds driving below the speed limit, in the left lane, with their turn signals permanently on.
Segway a.k.a. "IT"
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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.