What are things that people in previous generations had either thought to be impossible (a black president, heart transplants, etc.) or inevitable (a dissolution of the union as a result of the Civil War, a less-than-Cold War).
I’m not looking for situations where things looked bad and then everything worked out in the end. In many ways, we’re still dealing with the Cold War (even the Civil War). I’m essentially asking for quotes and references to situations where people were in the thick of a certain conflict or facing a daunting task, and they didn’t believe that the conclusions would be generally positive.
Also, I’m not looking for instances where people might not have been able to imagine a certain situation. For example, I’m not interested in the fact that people a hundred years ago might not have been able to imagine me typing on a computer and sending information over the internet. More along the lines of people 15 years ago saying that this whole Internet thing is overhyped.
Here’s a list of folks who ought to have known better making such wrong predictions. My favorite is A. A. Michelson saying that all the fundamentals of physics were known, and that therefore “Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth decimal place.” This, when an experiment done by Michelson himself ended up paving the way for an entirely new fundamental field of physics.
I once saw a book my great grandmother still had about the moon. I think it was written sometime in the late 1880s, it talked about the moon and how little was known but one passage I read said “Although man will never be able to walk on the moon…”
My great grandmother. Saw the invention of the Airplane, computers, nuclear power, cell phones.
I wonder what I will see. All the tech around me seems to just be refining old tech to make it faster/smaller. I want transporters, I want trains that travel in a vacuum under the sea and get me to NY to London in a half hour.
I do not think I have seen any “NEW” inventions just refined ones, although I am still young a lot can come. One for sure that I think I will see is the mixing of humans and computers. We can already see peoples dreams and have them control remote arms with their brain
I want my flying car. I want to dress in togas and wander around art-deco cityscapes. I want a household robot, food pills (or replicators), and computers that can talk. I want Venus as a tourist destination. I want industry moved to orbital O’Neill colonies. I want the earth to be a giant parkland. I want to be able to talk with dolphins and friendly space aliens.
I do not want civilization to collapse, with the survivors fighting each other in the wreckage over the scraps of our world. I do not want genetically-engineered slaves. I do not want another Ice Age, or a disease that kills all species of grass, or to have the Arabs, or Japanese, or whomever buy up all of America.
These are just some of the things we expected back when the world and I were young.
The flying car is currently impractical. I see high speed mass transit to be the future.
Food pills may be ok but there are links to depression and not eating a balanced diet I have read. The protein intake may be hard with a pill as well. I am waiting for gene therapy. Make my body not need certain vitamins and chemicals
Nasa wanted to do a manned Venus flyby in the 70s but it cost to much
Talking to dolphins and even meerkats may not be to hard. With the meerkats we already know what basic sounds mean for danger, human, even gun if I recall correctly. Dolphins defiantly have a language
The Green Revolution (assuming you mean the one involving fertilizers to increase crop output) merely made us dependent upon oil as part of the food-growing process. We are now as vulnerable as our oil supply, and there are more of us. We need to get back to living within the carrying capacity of the land and sea (which is ultimately dependent on the input of energy from the sun), rather than relying on non-renewable inputs.
I sat there staring at that one thinking about this. In the end, I decided that, though the Green Revolution caused serious problems, the point is that just as Malthus didn’t forsee* new/different technologies/practices significantly changing the accuracy of his predictions, maybe we don’t either (I say this with great hesitation as someone who studies climate change and agriculture).
Like I said in the OP, the point isn’t necessarily that what happens is a solution to a problem (but I’m particularly interested in those cases), but that it is a significant divergence from what was predicted by people “in the know.”
I haven’t read his writing so, please correct me if I’m wrong.
These lists are usually copied from one another and rarely checked with an original source. Several of the ones on that list are debunked urban legends, misquotes, or taken out of context. I’m not really inclined to trust any of them.
Flying cars will always be impractical unless we invent a way to control gravity. And the reason is, anything that flies isn’t a car, it’s an aircraft. You can have an aircraft that can drive on surface streets and take off and land from a roof, but only with severe compromises on the aircraft’s ability to fly. This vehicle is possible from a technical standpoint, but it’s going to cost a bundle, and it’s not something a typical suburban dad is qualified to use to commute to work every day.
I’d love this to be true, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
AFAIK we can detect the difference between someone imagining a cube or imagining a face, say, but we can’t actually see someone’s imagination.
Agreed.
I think flying car is a misleading name. Usually people don’t mean “A driving machine, that can also fly”, I think they mean more “A flying machine, that can take the role of the family car(s)” – something like the cars that fly along paths in the sky in Star Wars, The Fifth Element et al.
And I agree with the rest of your point and I think it’s impractical without new physics and/or a much cheaper, more concentrated power source than we can practically harness right now (e.g. a mass-produced lightweight nuclear engine).
Yeah I would not want to get into an accident in a flying car. We could roll out high speed rapid transit if we wanted to. Just tell everyone to quit driving and make it law to use busses, although it is one of those things that would have to be done all at once.
As a kid in the 50s, I remember that some very reputable scientists believe space travel to be impossible . . . because in a vacuum, a space ship would have nothing to push against.
I think the idea of mass starvation due to overpopulation has been pretty much discredited, hasn’t it? It seems most of the articles I’ve run across recently predict a stabilized global population followed by population decrease some time by the end of this century.
ETA: Similar to what was said about Malthus above, but looking at the other part of the equation – not only are we producing more food, but there’s a limit on how many people we’re going to have to produce it for.