Predictions Of The Future From The Past
By Molly
People have always been fascinated by the future. Tarot cards, crystal balls and horoscopes are often laughed at but looking back, even sincere attempts at predicting the future seem laughable in 2021. But, on the other hand, some past predications of the future are unnervingly accurate. So, let's take a look at the good, the bad and the just plain silly predictions of the future made by people of the past.
In 1900, the world was entering into a millennium that would be full of change and advancement. To celebrate this new beginning, the artist Jean-Marc Côté and his team were commissioned to create a series of cards predicting what the world might look like in 2000. One of my favourite cards from this collection depicts a whale with a submarine type contraption attached to it. Basically, the whale acts as the engine moving people through the ocean. Another shows flying cars in many different shapes and sizes as they seemingly clogging up the nights sky. One of the images shows a man's hair being cut by a robot and another, my personal favourite, shows a teacher feeding textbooks into a machine which then feeds the information straight into the students' head's. While some of the predications are way off, some are more accurate with serval of the cards showing different types of industry that have been automated: a house being built by a robot, a machine that helps a farmer plough his field and a machine that turns eggs into chickens. The images all have the same childish imagination to them while at the same time having the slightly unnerving quality of making you rethink the state of modern society, but that might just be me taking things too seriously. You can view all the cards here
One of my favourite things about predictions of the future from the past is that you can often tell when they were made. For example, when commercial flight really took off in the 1940s lots of future predictions and cartoons focused on flight- everything from flying cars to cities that float in the air. In the 1960s, the common imagination was filled with images of living on Mars or exploring the moon as space travel was developing hugely at the time. The epic science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey was loosely inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel" which, as Clarke put it, "bears as much relation to the movie as an acorn to the resultant full-grown oak". If you haven't seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you really should. Released in 1968 and directed by Stanley Kubrick, the film depicts scientifically accurate space flight with its pioneering special effects. I was incredibly lucky to see the 50th Anniversary addition in the cinema and it blew my mind. It's a great example of how space travel and all the possibilities of a future filled with new technologies really captured and daunted audiences at that time. Go watch the trailer!
In 1927 the German expressionist science-fiction drama Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang broke boundaries and one of the first feature length movies of its genre. The silent film is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. The appearance of the city, that is heavily featured in the film, is based on New York which Lang visited for the first time in 1924. The film is also influenced by the Art Deco movement which was a large part of culture at the time. The film really clearly shows that predictions of the future are almost never completely disconnected from the time they were made which, to me at least, is absolutely fascinating. They act as little snapshots into the culture at the time even though they're trying to predict the future.
Let's end with something silly and a bit more modern, the Simpsons. Well known for its odd ability to predict the future, the Simpsons predictions range from sheer luck to really quite eerie. In a 1998 episode a short scene showed 20th Century Fox as "a Division of Walt Disney Co". 21 years later, in March 2019, Disney acquisitioned 21st Century Fox's film and TV assets. Did the Simpsons predict the future, or did they just give the people at Disney ideas? The one that really freaks me out is from an episode aired in 2000 titled "Bart to the Future". In the episode they predict that Donald Trump would become president, ruin the economy and be succeeded by Lisa Simpson. Of course, Trump's real successor isn't bright yellow, but he is inheriting a rather worse for wear economy.
People will always be fascinated by the future. It's fun to invent cities or new forms of transport but as a person who likes to look back at the past, I see predications of the future as a great markers for what was in the zeitgeist at the time. They offer little glimpses inside the brains of people from the past and so, however wrong they are, predications from the past will always be important. So make your wacky guesses of what the world will look like in a 100 years and write them down so the people of the future can use them to figure out what was going on in our heads!