Why did people in the mid 20th century think the future was going to be super advanced? (WW2, war)
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I do to, but unfortunately most people can barely grasp driving in two dimensions. Imagine if you added a third. There would be cars falling out of the skies daily.
If you notice, the majority of the predictions revolve around transportation in some shape or form. Be it personal airplanes becoming as ubiquitous as cars, or interplanetary travel. This was predicated on the rate of advancements in the previous half century. Which had gone from horse and buggies to jet airliners. On the communications side, I would say many of the predictions have come to pass.
Excellent point! Transportation, energy, construction and mechanics in general had its period of burgeoning growth from 1800 to 1950 or so, beginning with the steam-engine and concluding with nuclear power. Since 1950, we basically use energy in the same form, and transportation in the same form, and construct things in the same form (composites and 3D-printing notwithstanding). We really haven't improved on the jet engine and the chemical rocket, or the fission reactor. Fusion as an energy source has been "just another 20 years away" for the past 60 years! Solar remains hopelessly inefficient. And oil remains king.
If future cars are radically different, it's because of electronic advancements, not mechanical advancements. Indeed, the contemporary age can be described as that of electronics and biology, not mechanics. For those of us working in the mechanical fields (I'm an aerospace engineer), it truly is disconcerting to see our once-glamorous professions be labeled "sunset technologies".
Excellent point! Transportation, energy, construction and mechanics in general had its period of burgeoning growth from 1800 to 1950 or so, beginning with the steam-engine and concluding with nuclear power. Since 1950, we basically use energy in the same form, and transportation in the same form, and construct things in the same form (composites and 3D-printing notwithstanding). We really haven't improved on the jet engine and the chemical rocket, or the fission reactor. Fusion as an energy source has been "just another 20 years away" for the past 60 years! Solar remains hopelessly inefficient. And oil remains king.
If future cars are radically different, it's because of electronic advancements, not mechanical advancements. Indeed, the contemporary age can be described as that of electronics and biology, not mechanics. For those of us working in the mechanical fields (I'm an aerospace engineer), it truly is disconcerting to see our once-glamorous professions be labeled "sunset technologies".
It takes close to 20 years to now design a new fighter jet whereas in the WWII period, a new fighter jet design would be built within a year or two and far outclass the previous design. Can you imagine using the P-51 for close to 40 years like how the F-15 is being used? And yes I am aware of the upgrades in the electronics of the F-15 over the years but it is amazing to me how long that air frame has been used. I agree with you about energy and I have been pretty disappointed that no new fuel source has been discovered or synthesized unless you count natural gas as new.
I remember going to DisneyLand in the early 60's. The house of the future had much of what we have today, but no flying cars. Maybe that is a good thing. We have enough accidents here on the ground.
If you are interested in what competent visionaries or prognosticators though what today might be like from the vantage point of the 1960s and early 1970s I recommend the following books from that time. (1) Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of the Future" published in 1962, (1) Arthur C. Clarke's "Voices from the Sky" from 1965, (3) Kenneth K .Goldstein's "The World of Tomorrow" from 1969 (A lot of the graphics shows exhibits that in GM Futurama exhibit at the 1964-5 World's Fair held in New York, NY and (4) The BBC 's "Tommorows World", by Raymond Baxter and James Burke Volumns 1-3 published in 1970,71 and 72. In Profiles of the Future Clarke spends the first two chapters of the book discussing two pitfalls that trip up a lot of experts who try to forsee the future even of their own fields of expertise. The first was what Clarke called :Failure of Nerve" which is where someone has all the facts or science but refuses to admit something might come of it. Clarkes example was the New York Times editorial in 1927 rediculing Dr Robert Goddard for wanting to fly a rocket in the vacuum of space saying Professor Goddard didn't understand that the rocket exhaust would have nothing to push against. Another was when the Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Wooley said in the Summer of 1957 that space flight was "Utter Bilge". The USSR lauched S. P. Korolyev' Preliminary Satellite (PS) also called Sputnik three months later. The Americans followed a few months after that.
The second gotcha is what Clarke called "the Failure of Imagination" . Those game changing bolts from the blue that change the world. Clarke for example admitted he misjudged the rapid advance of Integrated solid state electronics and the tremendous advances in computing power. Who in the 1960s forsaw Computed Axial Tomography or Magnetic Resenance Imaging and the impact it would have on medicine. The same with the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and the use of restriction enzymes to take apart DNA and rearrance its coding that made genentic engineering possible.
The same thing with the discovery of fullerenes, high Tc (metal oxide) superconductors or graphene.
Maybe quantum computing and quantum entanglment giving rise to teleportation of information will rise to the status of game changers.
Taking into the account as Clarke says theat any sufficently advanced technology would apear as magic (For example what would Da Vinci or Newton make of television or diagnostic x-rays). On the whole the serious futurists of 50 years ago didn't do so badly.
I remember going to DisneyLand in the early 60's. The house of the future had much of what we have today, but no flying cars. Maybe that is a good thing. We have enough accidents here on the ground.
Actually if you are rich enough, you can have your own personnel VTOL flying "car" . It would be a luxurious late model compact Bell, Westlake, Dassault, or United Technologies (Skikorsky Div) helicopter which you would use on a Friday evening to go from your Midtown Manhattan penthouse condo on the 50th Floor to the summer place in the Hamptons or further east to Rhode Island, the Vineyard or the Cape bypassing all that traffic crawling to the Eastern End of Long Island beaches along the LIE or the Parkways or ditto for that traffic on the major roads to the New England shores from NYC or Boston. Remember if you are rich enough the future arrived on schedule after all!!!
Thinking back. It does strike me that many probably most of the Sci-Fi fantasies of the 1950s did occur. but not with the results we wanted. We still have crime, We have not made contact with extraterrestrials, the environment is now a mess.
During the '50s Detroit was booming and production in the US was great. The US debt was low and so was unemployment. You know how sometimes you feel like the situation you're in feels as though it could last forever? The US's booming period seemed to be steady and the middle class was rising. Things were being invented and man was not far away from landing on the moon.
Now, however, we're in a recession (IMO depression), involved in many wars and skirmishes, and the US debt is skyrocketing. There just seems to be very little hope for the future. So people imagine the future as bleak and destroyed and apocalypse-like.
But not all people viewed the future as so positive back then. Just remember George Orwell's 1984.
We had skirmishes and wars in the 50s (Korea, "French Indo-China") and the improvements in production made possible by WWII processes and technology and a post-depression mentality helped the economy boom. At the same time, people were building fallout shelters in their backyards and practicing air raid drills in schools. If you watch television and movies produced during the era, many covered the topic of a post WWIII civilization (Twilight Zone series, movies with giant whatever that was irradiated).
The drive toward bigger and better peaked with the moon landing in 1969. At the rate that the moon program was developed, people were predicting interplanetary travel by the 1990s. They probably would have been correct if not for a bunch of things happening around the same time. Most notably, the energy crisis of 1973, the Watergate scandal, which led to a general mistrust of government, and the US economy gradually declining through the mid to late 70s. Government funding of the space program fizzled and all of the ancillary innovations from aerospace development fizzled along with them.
We still ended up with the microchip and integrated circuit, which let to more developments in techology that looked inward rather than skyward.
"1984" was written in the mid to late 1940s (published in 1948) as a commentary of post-war Europe more than the US. The booming economy and reconstruction of war-torn London hadn't really started yet. Many of Orwell's predictions in that book came true in a sense, but the major plot point of being able to erase history has been eliminated with the permanent nature of the internet. Once something is out there, wrong or right, it's impossible to erase.
Back in 1984 the back to the future movie promised us flying cars into the future from then. It has been 30 years, I agree where is my flying car???? How about hoverboards????? All those predictions from the last century and very few of them have come true.
If you notice, the majority of the predictions revolve around transportation in some shape or form. Be it personal airplanes becoming as ubiquitous as cars, or interplanetary travel. This was predicated on the rate of advancements in the previous half century. Which had gone from horse and buggies to jet airliners. On the communications side, I would say many of the predictions have come to pass.
The aim was to get out as fast as possible, hence Concorde. Computers and fast communications meant the world can come in to you. Concorde was made redundant.
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Originally Posted by Jude1948
I remember going to DisneyLand in the early 60's. The house of the future had much of what we have today, but no flying cars. Maybe that is a good thing. We have enough accidents here on the ground.
I recall going to EPCOT in the 1980s and they had mock-ups of cars running on coal dust. Pollution was not a big point then.
Last edited by John-UK; 05-18-2014 at 12:53 AM..
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