This is What The 1940's Thought 2011 Would Look Like
- Thread starter Steven Bogos
- Start date
Recommended Videos
In the year 3013, we'll all be wearing jumpsuits and we live in space. We'll run into another space faring intelligence, but our long, violent history makes every skirmish we had with them laughably one-sided, and slowly but surely, humanity is scattering across the stars, aided by our robotic brothers and sisters.
And since we are humans, we take our eco system with us. New Earths are being born, and for some reason the dominant life form in the galaxy is the humble brown rat, who came with us wherever we went.
And since we are humans, we take our eco system with us. New Earths are being born, and for some reason the dominant life form in the galaxy is the humble brown rat, who came with us wherever we went.
I think the human race will be long dead by then, if we haven't managed to colonize other planets. Also, why is it 1940 - 2011, which is less than a hundred years, but then it's suddenly 2011 - 3013, which is more than a thousand??
Yea...something tells me we are well beyond what they thought we would be at in 2011.
Sure we don't have flying cars everywhere but to be honest people have already created flying cars http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/diy-flying/top-10-attempts-to-build-a-flying-car?click=pp#slide-7 but they just aren't feasible, but they exist. I don't think anyone ever expected something like the internet to have been created that is one of those pieces of tech that I don't think we really saw coming. I think in 3013 if technology continues to innovate without some massive cataclysmic event halting progress, we will probably have the ability to manipulate matter at the subatomic level and literally transcend any idea of "human" or "technology" all together.
Sure we don't have flying cars everywhere but to be honest people have already created flying cars http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/diy-flying/top-10-attempts-to-build-a-flying-car?click=pp#slide-7 but they just aren't feasible, but they exist. I don't think anyone ever expected something like the internet to have been created that is one of those pieces of tech that I don't think we really saw coming. I think in 3013 if technology continues to innovate without some massive cataclysmic event halting progress, we will probably have the ability to manipulate matter at the subatomic level and literally transcend any idea of "human" or "technology" all together.
I wonder if people in the 1940s predicted The Jersey Shore, The Only Way Is Essex and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in the future? And by that I mean I wonder if people in the 1940s predicted the complete breakdown and collapse of society?
Hmmm, by the year 3013 the huddled survivors of humanity will be hunting each other for food through the mostly nature-reclaimed ruins of our cities and towns.
I say this because I feel the current left-wing sentiments will continue to dominate and retain a luddite stalemate where technology advances at a crawl for fear of too-rapid social change and being unfair to the lower classes ("The Digital Divide"), space travel will continue to be an anathema as people and politicians see it as a waste when there are "problems to be solved down here on earth" refusing to accept it as a solution. Growing populations will increase resource depletion of everything from wood to metal to food, clean water, and fossil fuels, until we wind up with so little in the way of resources that space travel and that avenue of salvation for more resources becomes impossible. The booming population and short sighted people will lead to humans literally hunting down and consuming every animal on the planet (a starving person will eat an animal in desperation as opposed to waiting for it to breed a herd). With no resources to hold things together societies will eventually collapse, decaying over the space of a few centuries as the privileged who also become the civilized in a very real sense retreat to smaller and smaller enclaves to escape the barbarian hordes before eventually being overrun. By 3013 I pretty much expect earth to be a resource depleted space rock where human barbarians will continue to degenerate for the next several billion years until the sun explodes, putting us all out of our collective misery.
See, the thing is that right now our population expands as a whole, while the planet is unable to produce the resources needed for the people that are here now. The environmentalists are pretty much right about that bit at least. Even if we solve some problems like overcoming the need for fossil fuels, things like wood and metal are in much higher demand than the planet can sustain, we're already strip mining the planet to death trying to find enough metals, and clear cutting forests faster than they can restore itself, and as more people are born, and the impoverished demand higher standards of living globally, simply producing the resources to build houses and such is becoming a serious problem. Things like recycling just don't cut it on this level given population growth.
For humanity to survive we pretty much need a drastic population reduction, like 8 out of every 10 people on earth right now to die and things to remain pretty much at that level. We also need a single world government/culture that everyone belongs to which can coordinate things, and ensure that all of our efforts can remain focused on progress, rather than duplication. Once we have that we will be in a position to move onwards into space, colonize other planets, and in the short term do things like mine asteroids for minerals to deal with the shortages here on earth. Not to mention that a single world government means we won't have to worry about blowing the living crap out of each other over who gets what resources coming down from space, and bombing each other's colonies over living rights, etc...
While I do see some steps in this direction, and people slowing coming together through the spread of ideas, it seems like most of the civilized world is unwilling to "pull the trigger" when it comes to warfare when it's necessary, not really getting that all other issues aside, anything that gets rid of vast quantities of people right now is good for humanity as a whole.
This is a very dark post, and I get that, I've said a lot of this before. I know many people will want to disagree with me, but realistically speaking this is just how things are. We know more about sociology and such than we did in the 1940s and modern communication technology lets us see the big picture with resources and the environment and such. People are inherently peaceful and don't want to deal with big issues like what I'm talking about, and just be left alone, letting the big issues take care of themselves, and really that's more or less killing us right now. As things stand now if the current trends continue we're pretty much dead. We need to seriously start getting off the planet in a scant few years (even Stephen Hawking seems to agree with this) if we have any hope at all, and truthfully I don't see even the most basic steps towards that being made. Your typical person thinks space exploration is a complete waste of time, money, and resources that could be spend staving off the effects of earthbound problems for the short term... not wanting to endure the discomfort of solving those problems in the long term. As I said your typical person will murder a cow for food right now when they are hungry, rather than holding out for a herd, enduring the discomfort and perhaps even starving to death so others can eat.... and that's going to be the end of us.
3013.... the barbaric remnants of a doomed humanity fight each other endlessly in a billions-year long cycle in which we will entirely forget what could potentially have been.
I say this because I feel the current left-wing sentiments will continue to dominate and retain a luddite stalemate where technology advances at a crawl for fear of too-rapid social change and being unfair to the lower classes ("The Digital Divide"), space travel will continue to be an anathema as people and politicians see it as a waste when there are "problems to be solved down here on earth" refusing to accept it as a solution. Growing populations will increase resource depletion of everything from wood to metal to food, clean water, and fossil fuels, until we wind up with so little in the way of resources that space travel and that avenue of salvation for more resources becomes impossible. The booming population and short sighted people will lead to humans literally hunting down and consuming every animal on the planet (a starving person will eat an animal in desperation as opposed to waiting for it to breed a herd). With no resources to hold things together societies will eventually collapse, decaying over the space of a few centuries as the privileged who also become the civilized in a very real sense retreat to smaller and smaller enclaves to escape the barbarian hordes before eventually being overrun. By 3013 I pretty much expect earth to be a resource depleted space rock where human barbarians will continue to degenerate for the next several billion years until the sun explodes, putting us all out of our collective misery.
See, the thing is that right now our population expands as a whole, while the planet is unable to produce the resources needed for the people that are here now. The environmentalists are pretty much right about that bit at least. Even if we solve some problems like overcoming the need for fossil fuels, things like wood and metal are in much higher demand than the planet can sustain, we're already strip mining the planet to death trying to find enough metals, and clear cutting forests faster than they can restore itself, and as more people are born, and the impoverished demand higher standards of living globally, simply producing the resources to build houses and such is becoming a serious problem. Things like recycling just don't cut it on this level given population growth.
For humanity to survive we pretty much need a drastic population reduction, like 8 out of every 10 people on earth right now to die and things to remain pretty much at that level. We also need a single world government/culture that everyone belongs to which can coordinate things, and ensure that all of our efforts can remain focused on progress, rather than duplication. Once we have that we will be in a position to move onwards into space, colonize other planets, and in the short term do things like mine asteroids for minerals to deal with the shortages here on earth. Not to mention that a single world government means we won't have to worry about blowing the living crap out of each other over who gets what resources coming down from space, and bombing each other's colonies over living rights, etc...
While I do see some steps in this direction, and people slowing coming together through the spread of ideas, it seems like most of the civilized world is unwilling to "pull the trigger" when it comes to warfare when it's necessary, not really getting that all other issues aside, anything that gets rid of vast quantities of people right now is good for humanity as a whole.
This is a very dark post, and I get that, I've said a lot of this before. I know many people will want to disagree with me, but realistically speaking this is just how things are. We know more about sociology and such than we did in the 1940s and modern communication technology lets us see the big picture with resources and the environment and such. People are inherently peaceful and don't want to deal with big issues like what I'm talking about, and just be left alone, letting the big issues take care of themselves, and really that's more or less killing us right now. As things stand now if the current trends continue we're pretty much dead. We need to seriously start getting off the planet in a scant few years (even Stephen Hawking seems to agree with this) if we have any hope at all, and truthfully I don't see even the most basic steps towards that being made. Your typical person thinks space exploration is a complete waste of time, money, and resources that could be spend staving off the effects of earthbound problems for the short term... not wanting to endure the discomfort of solving those problems in the long term. As I said your typical person will murder a cow for food right now when they are hungry, rather than holding out for a herd, enduring the discomfort and perhaps even starving to death so others can eat.... and that's going to be the end of us.
3013.... the barbaric remnants of a doomed humanity fight each other endlessly in a billions-year long cycle in which we will entirely forget what could potentially have been.
You are quite possibly right. The source article only had "Showa era" - I was unable to find an exact date. I had assumed it was pre-ww2 showa era going by the art style (it is very similar to a lot of WW2 propaganda posters)JSF01 said:
Well actually the whole idea of dystopian futures was old hat even by the 1940s. HP Lovecraft and some of the authors who collaborated with him on weird tales were big on science fiction where everything turned out badly in the end or the bleak attitude that we were all doomed to the point of likely having no future. I believe one version of "Doc Savage" defined him as being "The Man Of Bronze from a future so horrible he travelled back in time to prevent it from ever occurring" a counterpoint to versions of the character that typically had him simply being trained to the peak of physical and mental perfection on a remote island or whatever. Allegedly this version of the character was the inspiration for both "Bishop" and "Cable" in the 1990s X-men comics which is why I remember it.Hazy992 said:
That said, even Lovecraft was unable to envision anything as horrifying as modern reality TV.
I'll also say that now that I'm thinking in the right mode, modern television seems pretty much like Fu Manchu's predictions about the west coming true.... should we ever have stopped him? (Looks At Chinese and Japanese Cinema... recoiling in horror from a lot of Japanese strangeness in particular) ... no... no... we were doomed either way. >
Coreless said:Yea...something tells me we are well beyond what they thought we would be at in 2011.
Sure we don't have flying cars everywhere but to be honest people have already created flying cars http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/diy-flying/top-10-attempts-to-build-a-flying-car?click=pp#slide-7 but they just aren't feasible, but they exist. I don't think anyone ever expected something like the internet to have been created that is one of those pieces of tech that I don't think we really saw coming. I think in 3013 if technology continues to innovate without some massive cataclysmic event halting progress, we will probably have the ability to manipulate matter at the subatomic level and literally transcend any idea of "human" or "technology" all together.
Well, as I said in my response, I do not think humanity will survive long enough to make it to 3013 unless the world radically changes over the next few years, including some rather horrifying developments. Simple resource depletion and overpopulation growth will kill us off. Even Steven Hawking made this prediction about humanity being doomed if we don't get off the planet and take space exploration seriously in the very near future.
That said, science fiction has always influenced science-fact, some dreamer comes up with the idea and that tends to wind up inspiring people to find ways to make it real. Along the way other things are frequently discovered. An example of this would be laser technology, some guy, probably a century or more ago, was probably melting ants with a magnifying glass and figured "just imagine if we had guns that could do that to a person" and wrote stories about "laser guns". They captured the imagination. Despite there being far more efficient ways to kill, scientists have been gradually plugging away at making lasers smaller, more powerful, and more lethal. Along the way other uses for lasers have been discovered including surgery, holograms, information encoding, decoding and transmission, and similar things. This is also incidently why people who seem to think an alien race that masters space flight is going to be more advanced in all areas that one that doesn't have it... scientific discovery tends to be haphazard at best, and in the beginning comes from ideas and imagination. Someone who was never intrigued by focused beams of light would never have developed the things we could do with lasers. Likewise space flight and things like that could come about as a side effect of pursuing some vision that never really captured our imagination.
At any rate it's no mistake than when you look back at yesterday's science fiction you see people today making it happen, and in many cases it's intentionally designed to look like the inspiration, or named after it. Devices today that look a lot like ones from the past aren't just coincidental, along the way the guys making the stuff probably started with those ideas. Almost guaranteed if humanity survives to develop space travel we're probably going to see a lot of space ships that look a lot like ones from popular science fiction for that reason as well.
Otherwise, I had the same thoughts when looking at that picture, including the flying cars. To be honest the problem with flying cars isn't that they aren't practical, but that there is no way to police or control them. Most places have laws about flight for this reason. Popular Mechanics ran articles decades ago about making your own Gyrocopter, and it's just gotten easier since then, the reason why everyone isn't flying around is that legally speaking laws existing to prevent people from doing it and requiring pilot's licenses and such (which are made tricky/expensive to get and qualify for intentionally) for some pretty stupid things exist for this reason. The basic argument is that if someone is flying around, how do the police safely ground him if they are misbehaving? What happens if some drunken guy crashes his flying car into someone else's house? Is it trespassing if someone flies a gyrocopter over someone else's yard? Jet Packs and such also exist (they used one to promote Robocop 3 many years ago, and you can rent them at certain tourist places) but again are tightly controlled for the same reason, even in their relatively crude shape, the authorities couldn't maintain order with everyone zipping around 50' above street level.
I guess it goes to the same "isn't practical" place that you mentioned now that I think about it... but in short I agree, we pretty much have everything there, or better, including the potential for the flying cars. While that picture shows a flying car what it doesn't show is a viable three dimensional traffic system everyone could use (which couldn't be conveyed in a picture like that to be honest), which is really the important thing, and more of a social/societal construct than a technological one.
The discipline bot aside, I wonder if their school system would be more or less advanced than computers in classrooms now... or how it would compare to the classes some universities apparently taught through services like "Second Life".
In 3013:
- The flying car will be perfected, but the only people allowed to use them will be highly trained emergency response personnel.
- Advances in medicine will result in a cure for viral infections (like this damn cold I have right now).
- Projects to terraform the moon have been met with mixed results, but are improving, thanks in part to the recent development of a localised artificial gravity drive.
- The metric system is now universally adopted, and everyone drives on the same side of the road.
- With available land for building almost all taken, skyscrapers are much more common, including the use of 'vertical farms' situated within cities.
- While there have been great leaps in environmentally friendly power and energy efficiency, we didn't escape global warming unscathed- extreme weather events are much more common, and the seasons have become a lot more loosely defined, the changes in atmospheric pressures result in much more erratic weather patterns.
- Holy texts have swung back to being perceived as parable rather than thought of as fact. This has given rise to an era of great religious acceptance as well as the emergence of new religions based upon known-to-be-fictitious prophets.
- Disney currently owns 73% of the world's popular culture.
- The flying car will be perfected, but the only people allowed to use them will be highly trained emergency response personnel.
- Advances in medicine will result in a cure for viral infections (like this damn cold I have right now).
- Projects to terraform the moon have been met with mixed results, but are improving, thanks in part to the recent development of a localised artificial gravity drive.
- The metric system is now universally adopted, and everyone drives on the same side of the road.
- With available land for building almost all taken, skyscrapers are much more common, including the use of 'vertical farms' situated within cities.
- While there have been great leaps in environmentally friendly power and energy efficiency, we didn't escape global warming unscathed- extreme weather events are much more common, and the seasons have become a lot more loosely defined, the changes in atmospheric pressures result in much more erratic weather patterns.
- Holy texts have swung back to being perceived as parable rather than thought of as fact. This has given rise to an era of great religious acceptance as well as the emergence of new religions based upon known-to-be-fictitious prophets.
- Disney currently owns 73% of the world's popular culture.
It'd probably be best to wait for some other world-altering event of historical significance that we can reference instead, be it a mankind-smashing plague, first contact or the development of true artificial sentience.DVS BSTrD said:
diffidently not pre WWII, besides the technology on display in the pictures being very similar to the 50's and 60's technology, for the Japanese the war started in 1937 (with minor fighting going back to 1931). I would expect anything published between 1940(and probably even farther back than that) and 1945 showing what people would expect the future to look like, would have at least a little bit of the Japanese nationalism and/or propaganda on display. You don't even see a single flag in any of those pictures even in the background. As for the art style that was a pretty common art style used in magazines for a long time.Steven Bogos said:
This one is from the 1960's
and this one is from the 90's
I believe that art style was due to the limitations of mass printing colored images originally though it stuck around for longer just because that was the artists style who had been hired originally.
According to the prophecy of Battletech, the year 3013 will be a year of war across the Inner Sphere as the interminable third Succession War drags on with no real change in the battle lines.
We'll have near wiped ourselves out by 3013 so I expect we'll have largely regressed to medieval level tech though whatever scant resources are left will lead to a tiny minority have access to advanced tech.
The thing I love about these "70 years in the future" predictions is they never ever expect culture to move on. Predicting how it moves on is tricky but other than over-population and immigration the same topics won't be hot-button.
The thing I love about these "70 years in the future" predictions is they never ever expect culture to move on. Predicting how it moves on is tricky but other than over-population and immigration the same topics won't be hot-button.
That red truck in one of the pictures is surprisingly accurate. Plus I like that telephone picture in the other post. Oh wait, I have a cell phone with the greatest search engine built in, and I have thousands of applications as well as games on it. The current time sucks.
In 3013 men will be obsolete and the wealthy elite will hunt the poor for sport but they won't use guns. Instead they will simply film them doing embarassing things and then put the images on video billboards all around where they live.
Conventional agriculture will be outlawed and we will breed 23 story tall pigs that eat raw sewage.
The Second Coming will have His brain placed whitin a robot shell to once again make war upon the living.
We still won't have figured out an effective method of conveying electricity without wires.
Cancer will affect 100% of the population, but will become a "managed condition" rather than death sentance.
Formula 1 will be even more rubbish.
A form of olympics where atheletes are required to use performance enhancing drugs will become more popular than the previous thing.
The internet and television will be replaced by a new thing, worse than both.
Pharmacuticals and new social policies will render the concept of safe sex quaint, but radical changes in digital media and recreational pharmacuticals will also render it meaningless.
The United States military will have 1 aircraft that will have to be shared by the navy and the marines. The Army will only be allowed to have it on selected public holidays.
Conventional agriculture will be outlawed and we will breed 23 story tall pigs that eat raw sewage.
The Second Coming will have His brain placed whitin a robot shell to once again make war upon the living.
We still won't have figured out an effective method of conveying electricity without wires.
Cancer will affect 100% of the population, but will become a "managed condition" rather than death sentance.
Formula 1 will be even more rubbish.
A form of olympics where atheletes are required to use performance enhancing drugs will become more popular than the previous thing.
The internet and television will be replaced by a new thing, worse than both.
Pharmacuticals and new social policies will render the concept of safe sex quaint, but radical changes in digital media and recreational pharmacuticals will also render it meaningless.
The United States military will have 1 aircraft that will have to be shared by the navy and the marines. The Army will only be allowed to have it on selected public holidays.