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Will Life Be Worth Living in 2000 AD?":
Weekend Magazine ^ | July 22, 1961

Posted on 01/14/2005 4:26:11 AM PST by billorites

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.

DDoors 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.

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.

IIn 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.

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!

©1999 Pixelmatic



TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: 1961; 2000; predictions
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in the year 5555
your arms are hanging limp at your sides
your legs got nothing to do
some machines doing that for you

1 posted on 01/14/2005 4:26:12 AM PST by billorites
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To: billorites
I want my jetpack.
2 posted on 01/14/2005 4:31:54 AM PST by atomicpossum (I am the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.)
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To: billorites
to make ... George Orwell sound like they're getting left behind.

Au contraire, Orwell's devastating analysis of the left has been borne out time and again

3 posted on 01/14/2005 4:36:17 AM PST by agere_contra
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To: billorites
At work, Dad will operate on a 24-hour week day.

Dad is so hooked up with the laptop, pager, and cell phone that he can't get away from work.

4 posted on 01/14/2005 4:36:50 AM PST by Samwise (This day does not belong to one man but to all. --Aragorn)
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To: billorites

I'd write a long paragraph in response to this but the air-conditioning just failed in my chair so it's uncomfortable sitting here.


5 posted on 01/14/2005 4:38:58 AM PST by samtheman
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To: billorites
Actually some of it did sort of come true:

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.
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.

Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes ...juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form.
The office will be air-conditioned
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

6 posted on 01/14/2005 4:39:44 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
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To: billorites

Ya gotta love those old lingerie ads!!


7 posted on 01/14/2005 4:40:18 AM PST by Chi-townChief
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To: billorites

"foodless foods (minus nutritional properties)"

Sounds like Diet food/drinks to me. They taste downright nasty! :)


8 posted on 01/14/2005 4:41:56 AM PST by 1FASTGLOCK45
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To: billorites
There will be no...mental illness.

I guess these scientists didn't realize that both Islam and the DemonRats would still be around in 2000.

9 posted on 01/14/2005 4:43:34 AM PST by rickmichaels ("We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." - Toby Keith)
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To: billorites

Stuff they got wrong -- Well that list is pretty long, and more than a few of their predictions were just plain silly. For example -- How exactly does "remote control clothes hanging" work?

Stuff they got right -- Answering machines, computers and microwave ovens.

Stuff they mentioned that we should have, but still don't -- solar heating and power, energy efficient transportation, and high speed rail transport.


10 posted on 01/14/2005 4:45:03 AM PST by 9999lakes
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To: billorites

11 posted on 01/14/2005 4:45:39 AM PST by Huck (I only type LOL when I'm really LOL.)
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To: Behind Liberal Lines

12 posted on 01/14/2005 4:46:39 AM PST by billorites (freepo ergo sum)
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To: billorites
in the year 5555

Gee, thanks for that earworm!

13 posted on 01/14/2005 4:46:43 AM PST by SuziQ
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To: Samwise
My very same thought. By lunchtime Wednesday I've always worked more that 24 hours, In fact usually by dinnertime Tuesday. I'm not complaining, but it tends to wear on you when you are going in for that 27th straight Saturday in a row. And thanks (in part) to unions and the efficiency of government, my commute takes 1.6 hours per day and costs more like $3.00 per mile.
14 posted on 01/14/2005 4:48:56 AM PST by tcostell
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To: billorites

Half of this stuff probably would have come to pass if people weren't so worried about being sued...


15 posted on 01/14/2005 5:19:59 AM PST by Egon (Government is a guard-dog to be fed, not a cow to be milked.)
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To: billorites
In 1967, expert testimony was given to a committee of the United States Senate, and they said that technology--labor saving, time saving technology--was going to change the way that Americans work. That within 20 years people would be working 32 weeks a year on average, or they would be working 22 hours a week on average, or they would retire by the time they were about 40 years old, because we would be saving all of this time through our technology and so on.
They said to the United States Senate that in 20 years the number one challenge Americans would face with regard to time was what to do with their excess time.

Science can always predict what tomorrow will bring. What they always fail to predict is what God can do to change their forecast completely inside of an hour.
All the naysayers who tell us about the dangers of global warming and how we are destroying this planet are missing one vital piece of the puzzle... God is in charge. As a result, no one can't properly predict what will happen in one hour.
With the price of education, students should be able to sue their professors whenever their class lectures turn our to be wrong.
Why shouldn't professors pay as much for malpractice insurance as doctors do?
Where are the lawyers on this one?

16 posted on 01/14/2005 5:24:53 AM PST by The Brush
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To: Fzob

Thought you would find this interesting


17 posted on 01/14/2005 5:26:23 AM PST by Popman
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To: billorites
If your going to do a melody of their hit don't forget to Smoke the Rugs
18 posted on 01/14/2005 5:39:19 AM PST by sticker
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To: billorites

I pay no attention to these kinds of articles having been brutally disappointed by the failure of 'My Weekly Reader' to make good on it's lies about the future.

One future hope I do harbor...no RATs.


19 posted on 01/14/2005 5:41:35 AM PST by WorkingClassFilth (There's nothing wrong with this country that 1,000,000 executions won't straighten out.)
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To: billorites
Looking back at predictions is fascinating!

You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV.

Satellite and cable on the plasma tv, cell phones, and security cameras.

Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls.

GE came out with the Advantium oven several years ago. Cooks with bright halogen lights, with microwave option too. They didn't take to the market too well. They do bake (not microwave) potatoes and roast a chicken really fast.

20 posted on 01/14/2005 5:43:14 AM PST by NautiNurse (Osama bin Laden has more tapes than Steely Dan)
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