They thought the totalitarian future would be nice: A well-regulated economy full of well-regulated people all happily serving the state in a Platonic Republic. It was a modern reworking of the concept of the Philosopher-King, dethroned by Marx and given the superficial trappings of scientific thought.
When I was little, computers were going to be large centralized things that you went to to use, but they were going to talk and listen as well as any person. Cars and airplanes were going to merge together. Electric power was going to come from the atom and be “too cheap to meter”. When 1984 was a couple of decades away it was very scary, but when it was only one decade away it didn’t especially look like Orwell got it right, and when it passed we didn’t get too excited about it.
Some historians remark that the Renaissance changed the history of history, in the sense that it became obvious to western europe that the past and the future don’t keep looking the same. Prior to that time (and seemingly in spite of the way the Roman Empire grew and then diffused), people generally figured their ancestors had had, and their descendants would have, similar lives.
This isn’t entirely true, at least for the Classical period: Hesiod, for example, had his Ages of Man, consisting of the Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron, with the Iron Age of toil, misery, and distance from the gods to be the present. I don’t know if Hesiod expected the Iron Age to end, but he certainly believed that people lived differently in the distant past.
Additionally, and directly referencing a point you made, the term “Dark Age” was coined by Petrarch in the 1330s referring specifically to the decline of scholarship since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The people in Western Europe certainly knew about the changes that had occurred due to the barbarian invasions.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan:
Fact: I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. (total overcast)
Conclusion: Dinosaurs
I don’t know if I would say that they got it “wrong” just different. We have made enormous technological advances, just not the ones we thought we would make. While we don’t have flying cars and meals in pill form, they couldn’t even imagine the idea of the internet and cell phones.
Look at Back to the Future IIs vision of the year 2015 (made in 1990). Remember how fax machines were everywhere? Every room in the house, even the restroom, had its own fax machine. This was a prediction of less than 20 years ago that couldn’t see a paperless transfer of messages, but still had the general idea of limitless communication.
I think that we get it right, but are still short-sighted by our own reality.
This was probably the best thing about the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The future stuff there is based on the 1939 Worlds Fair, which featured “The World of Tomorrow”. So flying aircraft carriers and huge zeppelins and robots are the ‘norm’.
Visions of the future being formulated by advancing technology have existed for as long as there have been conquests. Jared Diamond touched on this in his remarkable “Guns, Germs & Steel” that should be required reading for all. In nearly every early civilization, Mesopotamian, Ayrian, Chinese, Mongolian, Persian, etc., there was a notion of developing better and more efficient methods of dispatching their enemies. Not only through better strategies, and tactics, but also better weapons. Gone were the days when sheer numbers could overwhelm all in the path of advancing armies; with better chariots, spears, swords, catapults, flaming liquids, explosives, and all kinds of imaginary super weapons the first arms races were on. The Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans in particular, had visions of the future where their brand of society would last for as long as their rules and their power could control the known world. Think of Archimedes and his defense of Syracuse.
Most, if not all, technological advances were for military applications, or were bastardized to suit the generals and emporers du jour. This held true even through the Renaissance where DaVinci’s study of the human condition and subsequent inventions were both hailed and punished by the powers that be. Of course this is grossly oversimplified; and things like the arts, musical advancements and pyramids of Egypt don’t fit the pattern, but I’m certain the predominate view of the future as being shaped by technology is directly related to the desire to “crush one’s enemies before me, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Criswell: Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you - in the future. You are interested in the unknown … the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here.
Must … not … damnit …
On a smaller scale, there were these:
In the “selling” stage, nuclear power plants were promised to make electricity so cheaply that nobody would even have an electric meter.
Hydroponic agriculture had been demonstrated on a small scale when I was a lad. It was the Next Big Thing. In cities, the roofs and south-facing walls of big office buildings would soon be green with hydroponic food gardens. In today’s reality, we all can buy fresh veg in the winter, but it’s grown in the ground, in some warmer place. Somebody is growing hydroponic tomatoes for sale, but it’s a small part of the produce department in most supermarkets.
Transportation is always a part of future dreams. Frankly, most of that has been a disappointment. Helicopters are better than in 1956, but the number of people who can hop on a whirlybird in the back yard and fly to work is very small. Cars are rather different from 50 years ago, but almost all of us drive something with four tires and a gasoline engine.
Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist television communicator. Today, it’s technically possible, but very few people actually use two-way video communication.
Ten years ago, a popular joke had rich men with surgically implanted cell phones and fax machines. What fool would have a surgically implanted device that’s guaranteed to be obsolete in two or three years?
I think the future used to be a hell of a lot quieter. Around here if it isn’t the gardeners and their leaf blowers, it’s car alarms going off. If it isn’t car alarms, then it’s backup warning beepers on trucks. And entirely too much through traffic on my street, when people could just as easily use the boulevard one block over.
Doesn’t all this mean we did, in fact, get it wrong? I’m accustomed to people tilting things in favor of the predictions by misconstruing them, current technology, or both, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone saying that them getting it wrong doesn’t mean they got it wrong.
They said we’d control the weather, but who would dare suggest that today? No domed cities yet either.
The Gernsback Continuum, a short story in the Burning Chrome anthology, talks about visualizing a disturbing white-bread retro-future based on Raygun Gothic architecture and Streamline Moderne industrial design.
Ten years ago, a popular joke had rich men with surgically implanted cell phones and fax machines. What fool would have a surgically implanted device that’s guaranteed to be obsolete in two or three years?
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I have noticed the same thing-the conservative nature of architecture. Back in the 1920’s, we had the Bauhaus, LeCorbusier, and FL Wright-giving us boldly designed buildings. Now, people are building Victorian houses, and replicas of 1600 styled houses. If only we could revive the Art Deco Era! I like streamlined stuff, and I don’t like Victorian houses-they make me ill.
I wonder when architecture will go back to modernism…can’t happen too soon for me!:smack:
Funny you should ask. There was a news teaser the other day that said Bill Gates wanted to control the weather. Hurricanes specifically.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/research/2009-07-15-gates-hurricanes_N.htm
Sounds like great theory, but I imagine it’s fairly easy to mess things up on a massive scale and wipe out all life forms. Fortunately, Bill has an unsullied reputation for bullet-proof technology.
What might be called the Era of Technological Futurism lasted from Jules Verne in the 1860s thru the 1970s, I’d argue. We could debate that, but I’m curious about examples of technological futurism that pre-date Jules Verne. (Here’s a link about Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century.)
That’s more along the lines of what I’m talking about, but I’d like to see some specifics. Then again, the military is fairly narrow aspect of society compared to broader questions of the way people live and commerce and so on.
The invention of paper ranks right up there with the wheel, in my book, for advancing civilization. The portable, lightweight material allowed communication, including decrees, laws, etc. to be spread, accurately, throughout a realm. Not much later, cartography was developed, and next maps of known lands, and those yet to be conquered were being commissioned by warrior/leaders.
The compass was originally used for divination, to read one’s destiny, by the ancient chinese. Soon afterward, it became a directional device that gave a distinct advantage to any army that had one. Knowing where you are, and where you are going sure makes travel and marchng into battle a lot easier.
Ancient Egyptians and Chinese used poison gas to rid their households of pests, but it wasn’t long afterwards those burning balls of mustard that gave off toxic gasses were used aginst enemy armies.
Building better spears with sharper stone points gave way during the early metal ages to really sharp and deadly devices that were soon turned into militasry applications as well as hunting for critters. A single arrow could bring down game, but when they started packing dozens of arrows into a crossbow capable of volley and rapid fire uses, the military again took the hunting device to an extreme.
Gunpowder was originally invented by the Chinese as a sort of alchemists “flaming medicine”, but we all now know the military seized on the mixture to start making grenades, mortars, hand cannos, etc. that had very little application outside of slaughtering enemy human beings.
In c.550 a.d. the Chinese also developed a wind driven, sail powered cart that carried as many as thirty men over 100 miles in a day; although it doesn’t say in the ancient record, I’ certain they weren’t just cruising for grins or girls. Imagine the mobility of an army that didn;t need a cavalry if the wind was blowing hard enough and in the right direction.
Sure the military is only a small sliver of the breadth of civilization, but other than astronomical and timekeeping technology, no other branch of engineering have developed technologies that advanced so much and survive to this day.
To nitpick for a second: according to your own examples, the military didn’t develop any of these technologies (at least in the sense of inventing them)–the only took existing technologies and expanded on them/adapted them for their own use. (Unless that was the meaning of develop you were going for.)