Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two giants of 20^th cen­tu­ry sci­ence fic­tion: Robert Hein­lein and Isaac Asi­mov (see them togeth­er above, with L. Sprague de Camp in-between). Like every young sci-fi geek, I read them both assid­u­ous­ly, got lost in their dizzy­ing uni­vers­es that stretched across nov­els and sig­nif­i­cant teenage mile­stones. Even as an awk­ward kid, I could clear­ly iden­ti­fy an essen­tial dif­fer­ence in tone between their fore­casts of the future. Hein­lein, the Navy man forcibly retired from ser­vice by tuber­cu­lo­sis, had the dark­er vision, in which the brute force of mass mil­i­tarism con­tin­ued to thrive and hero­ic men of action car­ried the day. Asi­mov, the prac­tic­ing scientist—whose “Nor­by” series of kids books might be the cutest intro­duc­tion to sci-fi ever writ­ten by an American—favored a future that, if still quite dan­ger­ous, was man­aged by robots and their cre­ators, the tech­nocrats.

As we can plain­ly see, we are no less a bel­li­cose species than when these two authors wrote of the future, but Asi­mov seems to have had it right. The tech­nocrats came out on top; too many bat­tles are fought not by massed bat­tal­ions but by dead­ly fly­ing robots mak­ing (so we’re told) “sur­gi­cal” strikes. A few weeks ago, we brought you a series of tech­no­crat­ic pre­dic­tions of the year 2014 from Asi­mov, many of them sur­pris­ing­ly accu­rate. Today, we have a list of pre­dic­tions from Hein­lein, this time of the year 2000, and writ­ten in 1949 and pub­lished in 1952 in Galaxy mag­a­zine. How does his pre­dic­tive abil­i­ty stack up against his con­tem­po­rary? Well, I’d say that 2 (stripped of some exag­ger­a­tion), 8, and 11 either hit the mark or come pret­ty damn close. 19 is self-evi­dent­ly true, and 15 is arguably not ter­ri­bly far away, though it may not have seemed so in 2000. 4 is painful­ly iron­ic. The rest? Eh, not so much. Take a look and try to imag­ine your­self in Heinlein’s shoes in 1949. Not an easy task? Try to imag­ine what the world will look like in 2063. Which ver­sion of IOS will you be run­ning then?

1. Inter­plan­e­tary trav­el is wait­ing at your front door — C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.

2. Con­tra­cep­tion and con­trol of dis­ease is revis­ing rela­tions between the sex­es to an extent that will change our entire social and eco­nom­ic struc­ture.

3. The most impor­tant mil­i­tary fact of this cen­tu­ry is that there is no way to repel an attack from out­er space.

4. It is utter­ly impos­si­ble that the Unit­ed States will start a “pre­ven­tive war.” We will fight when attacked, either direct­ly or in a ter­ri­to­ry we have guar­an­teed to defend.

5. In fif­teen years the hous­ing short­age will be solved by a “break­through” into new tech­nolo­gies which will make every house now stand­ing as obso­lete as priv­ies.

6. We’ll all be get­ting a lit­tle hun­gry by and by.

7. The cult of the pho­ny in art will dis­ap­pear. So-called “mod­ern art” will be dis­cussed only by psy­chi­a­trists.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-sci­en­tif­ic, intu­itive pio­neer and psy­cho­analy­sis will be replaced by a grow­ing, chang­ing “oper­a­tional psy­chol­o­gy” based on mea­sure­ment and pre­dic­tion.

9. Can­cer, the com­mon cold, and tooth decay will all be con­quered; the rev­o­lu­tion­ary new prob­lem in med­ical research will be to accom­plish “regen­er­a­tion,” i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an arti­fi­cial limb.

10. By the end of this cen­tu­ry mankind will have explored this solar sys­tem, and the first ship intend­ed to reach the near­est star will be a‑building.

11. Your per­son­al tele­phone will be small enough to car­ry in your hand­bag. Your house tele­phone will record mes­sages, answer sim­ple inquiries, and trans­mit vision.

12. Intel­li­gent life will be found on Mars.

13. A thou­sand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be com­mon­place; short hauls will be made in evac­u­at­ed sub­ways at extreme speed.

14. A major objec­tive of applied physics will be to con­trol grav­i­ty.

15. We will not achieve a “World State” in the pre­dictable future. Nev­er­the­less, Com­mu­nism will van­ish from this plan­et.

16. Increas­ing mobil­i­ty will dis­en­fran­chise a major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion. About 1990 a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment will do away with state lines while retain­ing the sem­blance.

17. All air­craft will be con­trolled by a giant radar net run on a con­ti­nent-wide basis by a mul­ti­ple elec­tron­ic “brain.”

18. Fish and yeast will become our prin­ci­pal sources of pro­teins. Beef will be a lux­u­ry; lamb and mut­ton will dis­ap­pear.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “Civ­i­liza­tion” be destroyed.

Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:

– Trav­el through time

– Trav­el faster than the speed of light

– “Radio” trans­mis­sion of mat­ter.

– Man­like robots with man­like reac­tions

– Lab­o­ra­to­ry cre­ation of life

– Real under­stand­ing of what “thought” is and how it is relat­ed to mat­ter.

– Sci­en­tif­ic proof of per­son­al sur­vival after death.

– Nor a per­ma­nent end to war.

Curi­ous­ly, nei­ther Hein­lein nor Asi­mov fore­saw that most ter­ri­bly banal and ubiq­ui­tous phe­nom­e­non of real­i­ty TV, but real­ly, what kind of mon­ster could have imag­ined such a thing?

via Lists of Note/i09

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writ­ing in The New York Times, Asi­mov imag­ined a world that you might part­ly rec­og­nize today, a world where:

• “Gad­getry will con­tin­ue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will pre­pare ‘automeals,’ heat­ing water and con­vert­ing it to cof­fee; toast­ing bread; fry­ing, poach­ing or scram­bling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Break­fasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a spec­i­fied hour the next morn­ing.”
• “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the per­son you tele­phone. The screen can be used not only to see the peo­ple you call but also for study­ing doc­u­ments and pho­tographs and read­ing pas­sages from books. Syn­chro­nous satel­lites, hov­er­ing in space will make it pos­si­ble for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, includ­ing the weath­er sta­tions in Antarc­ti­ca.”
• “[M]en will con­tin­ue to with­draw from nature in order to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that will suit them bet­ter. By 2014, elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els will be in com­mon use. Ceil­ings and walls will glow soft­ly, and in a vari­ety of col­ors that will change at the touch of a push but­ton.”

• “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.”
• “The appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords, of course, for they will be pow­ered by long- lived bat­ter­ies run­ning on radioiso­topes.”
• “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sec­tions of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increas­ing empha­sis on trans­porta­tion that makes the least pos­si­ble con­tact with the sur­face. There will be air­craft, of course, but even ground trav­el will increas­ing­ly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
• “[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tions … that will then pro­ceed there with­out inter­fer­ence by the slow reflex­es of a human dri­ver.”
• “[W]all screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set; but trans­par­ent cubes will be mak­ing their appear­ance in which three-dimen­sion­al view­ing will be pos­si­ble.”
• “[T]he world pop­u­la­tion will be 6,500,000,000 and the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States will be 350,000,000.” And lat­er he warns that if the pop­u­la­tion growth con­tin­ues unchecked, “All earth will be a sin­gle choked Man­hat­tan by A.D. 2450 and soci­ety will col­lapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, there­fore, be a world­wide pro­pa­gan­da dri­ve in favor of birth con­trol by ratio­nal and humane meth­ods and, by 2014, it will undoubt­ed­ly have tak­en seri­ous effect.” [See our Walt Dis­ney Fam­i­ly Plan­ning car­toon from ear­li­er this week.]
• “Ordi­nary agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty and there will be ‘farms’ turn­ing to the more effi­cient micro-organ­isms. Processed yeast and algae prod­ucts will be avail­able in a vari­ety of fla­vors.”
• “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done bet­ter by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will there­fore have become large­ly a race of machine ten­ders. Schools will have to be ori­ent­ed in this direc­tion.… All the high-school stu­dents will be taught the fun­da­men­tals of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will become pro­fi­cient in bina­ry arith­metic and will be trained to per­fec­tion in the use of the com­put­er lan­guages that will have devel­oped out of those like the con­tem­po­rary “For­tran.”
• “[M]ankind will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom, a dis­ease spread­ing more wide­ly each year and grow­ing in inten­si­ty. This will have seri­ous men­tal, emo­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences, and I dare say that psy­chi­a­try will be far and away the most impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty in 2014.”
•  “[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!” in our “a soci­ety of enforced leisure.”

Isaac Asi­mov was­n’t the only per­son who peered into the future dur­ing the 60s and got it right. You can find a few more on-the-mark pre­dic­tions from con­tem­po­raries below:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

via Buz­zfeed