In 1950 we were in the midst of by far the greatest period of medical advance in history. It ended around 1975, which is why only about half the medical advances that might have been expected in 1950 have occurred.
Why? I believe it is because medical ethics have changed so as to make major medical advances unethical. For example, it took over 100 failures in a row before the first reasonably successful heart transplant occurred. Today fifty of these would, if in the U.S., have resulted in lawsuits, and ethical standards, although not enforced the same way, are similar in Europe. As for cancer, patients newly diagnosed with usually fatal cancers such as lung and pancreatic must be given standard treatments before or simultaneous with new treatments, creating all sorts of research barriers since unperfected new treatments are unlikely to have much effect on extremely sick pretreated patients.
The biography of Sidney Farber would give a good idea what is required to cure cancer, if anyone would ever write it.
Last time I posted on this, I was asked if I had ever heard of Dr. Mengele–and, shockingly, the man who wrote this was a distinguished contemporary cancer researcher. Of course I oppose forced experimentation. But many patients would gladly try something new in hopes it would help, if not themselves, future generations. Today these brave souls must wait until it is too late for much to be learned from their willingness to be experimental subjects. Dramatic medical advance usually requires both heroic doctors and heroic patients. Both are always in short supply, but nowadays the supply is almost completely dried up.
In 1950, everyone thought an ultra-high specific impulse atomic rocket engine was just a little R&D away. No such luck.
Dead on- the “Sexual Revolution”, etc.
A qualified hit, if you count ICBMs as nearly impossible to defend against.
Correct if he meant that the US would not preemptively attack the Soviet Union to prevent them from building or launching a nuclear arsenal.
Not sure what he meant, but the suburban building boom did relieve the housing shortage. No radical new technology though.
Dead wrong. McDonald’s is being sued for causing obesity.
No such luck.
Freud’s reputation has dropped considerably in recent years. Modern psychology has gone way past the id/ego/superego model. So I count this prediction as correct.
Tooth decay has been scaled back considerably. And cancer is no longer considered an automatic death sentence, at least for many types. That leaves the common cold, which is actually over 100 different strains of rhinovirus, making a “cure” very difficult.
See #1.
Essentially correct, only no one really wants video messaging.
:eek: You have to remember that this was 1950, and the old adage that “The probability of life existing on another planet is inversely proportional to our knowledge about that planet”.
Overblown, if he was referring to air travel. Dead wrong if he meant land or subterrainian travel.
Other than fringe science, not even in the works.
Essentially correct. And in fact a daring prediction considering that many believed that the Soviet Union would continue for centuries.
Out of state or no permanent address voters are still a very small percentage. Pretty much wrong.
This could be done, but no one feels comfortable having all air navigation be automatic. Wrong, but for social, not technological reasons.
See #6
If he’d been right, who would have able to comment on it?
Finally, there’s
Now that we can view the brain functioning in real time, we are learning more about cognition and how we process information every year than we used to in decades. How our brains evoke thought or even conciousness is now a legitimate venue of research.
I agree, these are some of the best predictions I have seen in a while! Far more accurate than Heinlein’s, especially considering when they were written.
Why the heck did Heinlein think we would find intelligent life on Mars? I think by the 50s all the ‘evidence’ of civilization on Mars was pretty thoroughly debunked.
Both lists are fascinating! I also find The Ladies Home Journal list to be more accurate.
Just this very week I read in the news that genetic engineering will soon produce those blue roses! Neat coincidence!
In recent years, the 100 year old time capsule in the cornerstone of the courthouse was opened. Part of what was contained was a list of predictions and questions. One question was something like this, “Did man ever learn how to fly?” It brought tears to the eyes of some who had flown in to be present for the opening.
Having read The Dymaxion World Of Buckminster Fuller I can’t find any practical reason why #5 hasn’t happened. Fuller devised a house that could be mass produced at nearly the same cost per pound as a good car (His first model of the house would have cost 25 cents per pound. Fords and Chevrolets were then 22 cents per pound). The house weighed 3 tons.
(correct me if my observations have been wrong) The average development contains from 3 to 5 different designs. The houses may not be assembly line, but they should. The result would appear the same but cost less.
Fuller's house could easily be modified to appear more conventional without losing any of the benefits. But, it seems that people looked at it, decided it looked bizzare(frankly it does. Something like a diner's rotating desert rack, or the buildings from The Jetsons.), and forgot about it.
Considering that Fuller was inventing in the 30's(car that get's 40 mpg and paralel parks in a space only one foot longer than the actual car-check. Bathroom sink with the faucet placed in the near edge and pointing toward the wall, putting an end to embarassing pants splashes-check) I still wonder why none were ever used.
Re-#15 And The End Of Communism
Um… what about Cuba and China?
On #15, he did pretty good. The Soviet Union and its sattelite states in eastern Europe are no longer communist; the other major communist power China, has openned up its economic systems to the point where I wouldn’t call it communist anymore; facist seems a better description. That does leave Cuba and North Korea, but they are only minor states.
They weren’t very far off. The official census population is nearly 300,000,000, and that doesn’t include everyone, especially illegal immigrants and anyone else who didn’t respond. Funny, I thought that Panama had been chosen as the site of the canal by 1900, but apparently they were still betting on Nicaragua.
Part of it is wrong, but this part is definitely true: “Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums.”
Again, it’s not “dead wrong”: “A few of high breed [horses] will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns.”
Doc, you’ll want to check out a copy of Bucky Works by J. Baldwin. It (and the PBS documentary which goes along with it) explain that what happened was that Bucky pulled out after his backers refused to allow him make changes to the design that were necessary.
Ah, yes, the “Omnidirectional Plummenting Device” version! That particular design had some problems, but I don’t recall exactly what they were at the moment, and I seem to have mislaid my copy of the book, dagnabbit!
If you had checked you would have found dozens of references to it on google, including reputable sources such as the Washington Post, PBS, and the Guardian.
Sort of like the list of wacky film translations given to American movie titles in other countries that turned out to be a topfive.com list of gag titles? (Not saying the piece isn’t legit, but folks like the Washington Post have been whooshed by the internet before.)
I’d just assumed that Bucky had already thought of all the problems I did-like the fact that instead of a rigid material you’re relying on a pair of balloons to hold the shape necessary to keep you in the air, popping, punctures etc. I don’t think Bucky discovered free energy and death rays and that the government supresses his discoveries or any similiar position. But, I wan’t to take a Dymaxion to the Shop N Bag. I want a tensegrity dining room set.
Other than unusual appearance, why wasn’t the Dymaxion Transport ever mass produced? Was something wrong with his Dymaxion house? Bucky predicted a world filled with his inventions. He was wrong and I don’t understand why.
Part of it was just bad luck on Bucky’s part. The Dymaxion car was being test driven by a group of investors (and even Studebaker was talking to Bucky about building the cars), when a drunk swerved into their lane, the dymaxion rolled and one of the investors was killed. The drunk happened to be the son of the mayor of Chicago (which is also where the accident happened), so you can imagine how the accident was treated. Many of Bucky’s concepts were way ahead of their time (he quit drinking because people thought it was booze giving him the wacky ideas he had). If you crawl around the bfi.org site, you can see that many of Bucky’s ideas have come to pass, but not in the way that Bucky designed them (nor as well thought out, either). His biggest success has been the geodesic domes, and the main reason that took off was because of military contracts and the exploding youth culture of the Sixties embraced nearly anything that wasn’t their parents. Folks are working on making some of Bucky’s designs real, but none of them are billionares, so it’s going to take some time before that occurs. (Plus, Bucky did have some ideas that were downright looney: Private property is a bad thing, and Pi does equal 3 [I’ve got a book where he makes that claim, but the math is so far over my head, I’m not even going to attempt to follow it.]!) I want a dymaxion car, too.
In the absence of some reason to doubt it, we should assume that reputable sources didn’t screw up. Add to the list of newspapers that reported this: Newsday, the Star Tribune, the Herald (Glasgow), the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Hartford Courant, the Toronto Star, the Australian, the Sunday Times (London), the New York Times, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the Independent, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News. It wouldn’t be that hard to go to a library and find a copy of the original, and I’m willing to trust that at least one of these journalists did that.
Anyway, if someone made this up for amusement, wouldn’t the predictions either be amazingly accurate or ridiculously off? Nothing here looks the slightest bit suspicious.
You would be surprised the number of times major news sources hvae just simply stolen stories off each other without any sort of check as to the integrity. Every time it happens, there is the inevitable talk about the declining standards of journalism and ra ra ra but nothing ever seems to be done about it.
