Eugenics could breed bigger brains but couldn’t do anything to fix their eyes. Nor, apparently, has there been any technology or medical advancement developed to replace eyeglasses.
I don’t think that’s supposed to be the results of eugenics. Successful eugenics programs were generally depicted in fiction as resulting in idealized physical specimens. Weak eyes were precisely something eugenics should breed out.
I think what we’re seeing in that illustration is a trope common in the pulps and comics (where it still occasionally shows up) of how natural evolution will supposedly shape human beings. Past Man was brutish, physically powerful, and small brained. Future Man will have vast mental capabilities, but be physically frail.
Don’t forget that science fiction is about the present. Keeler was writing satire, so his future extrapolated off of current events like eugenics and also kept the stereotypes of his day about academics, perfectly recognizable to his readers.
This inherent oxymoron is why so much old future extrapolation looks weird to us today, both prescient and hopelessly outdated.
It would only fix their eyes if they were purposefully breeding themselves for perfect eyesight. If they’re running their eugenics program with the specific goal of maximizing intelligence, a lot of physical imperfections are going to be carried on. If you’re trying to breed the smartest human possible, you’re not going to keep Stephen Hawking’s DNA out of the pool just because of that muscular dystrophy thing.
Heinlein noted that - his eugenically devoted folks (well, one set of them) were breeding for long life - and nothing else - which meant a fair percentage of long-lived, but otherwise unexceptional (and in some cases notably handicapped) people.
Especially since there was a fairly small pool of the long-lived folks, all of whom were mostly reproducing with each other, so there was a lot of recessive genetic diseases showing up, just like in any other small, insular breeding group.
That’s right.
While researching the Jetsons, I noticed that in one episode they had a sliding electric eye door several years before Star Trek.
I wouldn’t say this is the most prophetic, but it IS the latest one I ran across.
I’m re-reading Jules Verne’s The Floating Island (when I read it a decade ago the title was Propeller Island, which is closer to the original French L’Île à hélice), first published in 1895. It’s about an artificial floating island built by and for a community of American millionaires – the Jeff Bezos and Richard Bransons* of the day – with all the latest technology. And I stumbled across this (slightly edited) exchange as a resident is showing four guests around:
It sounds like a pantograph, but it’s clear in context that there’s a great deal of this communication going on, so this is equivalent to e-mail and, to some extent, the internet, with electronic signatures, no less.
In fact, Verne correctly points out that such long-distance shopping results in practically no customers at the brick-and-mortar stores. He doesn’t go on to the conclusion that such e-trade will ultimately kill off those stores. Although, this being an exclusive community of the wealthy, it’s probably not surprising that the anachronism of brick and mortar stores survive. I’ve noticed that such stores survive in the enclaves of the upper class, who like to be able to go into shops. I see that there are still bookstores in such communities today, when they have disappeared from the downtowns and shopping malls of the middle class, for the most part.
Forgot to add the footnote
*Yes, I know Branson isn’t American.
By the way – all the cars on Verne’s Floating Island are electric. And there are moving sidewalks.
That’s a nice set of extrapolations by Verne. Somebody once said something to the effect that it was easier to predict the automobile than the parking meter.
However, the moving sidewalk was introduced, with tremendous fanfare, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
I’ve traced television as far back as James Payn’s satire “The Fatal Curiosity” from 1877. One rich man gets “instantaneous reflections on my wall … of what all my friends are doing all over the world.” Doesn’t that bother them? “They ought never to do anything that they would be ashamed of seeing on my walls.” They also can get the Drury Lane pantomime “photographed” on the walls of their childrens’ rooms. Both of these examples to me imply moving pictures rather than stills. Payn had no other vocabulary and wasn’t the sort to coin futurisms.
Yes, I know. I didn’t mean to suggest that Verne had predicted it – he very frequently took some new innovation or development and used it and frequently extrapolated it into a new novel.
Thus, he used the Rubber Survival Suit popularized by Paul Boynton as the way his hero survives in Tribulations of a Chinaman, and he expanded the idea of the French submarine Plongeur into the Nautilus, and used the newly developed composite materials (used, in a very limited way in his day, for railroad car wheels) as the ideal construction material for heavier-than-air aircraft.
That last one, to my mind, shows Verne off at his best. He saw the clear advantages of composites (light weight, high strength) for airplane construction and used it in Robur the Conqueror. The rest of his aircraft design is hopelessly unworkable, but that one feature was an excellent idea that, as far as I know, no one else followed up on for almost a century. In the meantime, people generally forgot about composites altogether. The first aircraft were built of wood – spruce and bamboo – and fabric. The first aircraft I know of to be built of composites was the MIT Daedalus human-powered craft (actually, a whole series of them).
No offense, but you already talked about that in post #28.
Almost no inventions are first proposed by fiction writers, except for magical ones. What’s interesting is realizing the socio-cultural consequences of the inventions as Verne did.
Airships and visiphones are everywhere in the 19th century. What makes Payn interesting is that he realized that seeing life in real time could be embarrassing.
You can find it a half century later in the 1930 movie Just Imagine, in which a man calls up his girlfriend and catches her without her dress on. That was one reason why people kept predicting correctly for the entire 20th century that two-way screens would never catch on. And the endless number of reports about people being caught and embarrassed in zoom calls over the past year proves part of their point.
I don’t think that’s right at all. You have to answer a video call just like you have to answer a phone call. Sure, there are occasional mishaps with Zoom where people forget the camera is on, but the reason we didn’t have widespread video calling until fairly recently has nothing to do with “what if someone video calls while you’re naked?”, which has the same answer as “what if someone telephones while you’re on the toilet?” (call them back when you’re not). The reason is that the economics didn’t work out until digital cameras and internet bandwidth got cheap enough.
If people thought that issues with being seen in some inappropriate state were the reason we weren’t going to have video calls, they were totally incorrect about that reasoning, even if their conclusion that video calls were not around the corner was accidentally correct.
I won’t argue that claims about the technology kept running ahead of actual achievements. But in researching the subject I keep running into statements that the lack of social acceptance discouraged companies from putting money into it. Finding hard evidence of what the “public” thought is about the hardest thing to do with history. But since I said that the invasion of privacy issue was “one reason” rather the “the reason” I’ll stand on what I wrote.
Just for fun, here’s the illustration accompanying the 1927 reprint of the 1915 story, “John Jones’s Dollar,” by Harry Stephen Keeler. Perfectly captures Zoom teaching.
That’s the one Gyrate posted up thread.
Thanks for the recommendation of A Logic Named Joe, Andy L and everyone who seconded it - I’d never heard of it and love it.
It’s actually not, although they are quite similar.
@Exapno_Mapcase:
https://scontent.fcre1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/220818186_4301227919915883_5793133786875172620_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-4&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=5brvF5woZzcAX8crR3Q&_nc_ht=scontent.fcre1-1.fna&oh=8b5a78ba4fbd60ac392527be555b0bd2&oe=6132CF9D
I guess they are a tiny bit different, but they are illustrating the same point in the same way for the same story. I just assumed Exapno hadn’t noticed Gyrate’s post, because that can happen to anyone, even Exapno and Gyrate.
That was a month ago! How can you expect anyone to remember something from that era!