January 12, 2016 • 40 mins
Science fiction writers have made some amazingly accurate predictions over the years, but in 1945 the pace of technological change created a field that spun off of sci-fi forecasting, futurology.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to you. Stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:43):
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here
and it's stuff you should know from the future, but
not really. How are you doing. I'm fine, Well, good,
that's good. I enjoyed. This was kind of neat, Yeah
it was. It was funny, like when you're reading about
(01:05):
futurology in futurologists a k a. Futurists, you tend to
want to make it like more than it actually is,
and when you look into the topic, it keeps having
to be beaten down just because of the name alone.
It sounds like a little bit like a I could
do a seer. And you know, sometimes they're thinking about
(01:29):
they're using these these really neat techniques to predict the future. Um,
they're talking about some really mundane stuff, boring stuff economic forecasts,
things like that how much oil will be left in
thirty years, that kind of thing. But then on the
other hand, if you're a futurologist, you may also be
tasked with figuring out what technology we're going to be
(01:52):
using in thirty years or you know what, what what
color the shiny jumpsuits were all gonna wear will be?
That kind this stuff. Yeah, I think one of my
favorite things is to look at past future predictions. It's fun. Yeah,
there's nothing that will make someone look less knowledgeable than
(02:12):
going back to what they thought the future would look
like in the year two thousand, like back in the
nineteen thirties or forties or sometimes some of those things happen. Yeah,
and then it's amazing. Yeah, that's like wow, you know,
because sometimes these guys are like really really dead on
And I was reading an article, Um, I think it
was in Harvard Business Review, and it was a post
(02:33):
by Paul uh Sappho, who runs a venture capital firm
I believe called Discern. Yeah, and um, Paul staff was
saying like he was, he was trying to get across
that sci fi authors and future ologists their paths overlap
(02:56):
quite a bit, but really there's pretty big distinctions. And
even in this article they got lumped in together because
sci fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But Paul
Cepo was saying, like, yeah, but a real futurologist you
have to use logic, whereas if you're a sci fi writer,
you can just use your imagination. You don't have to
(03:16):
back it up with anything. Creature ologists, you have to
use logic that makes sense to the whoever's hearing your prediction. Yeah,
And I think that's one reason why some sci fi
writers have uh been right on the nose with some
future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic and they
can just uh free form, you know. But then it's
(03:41):
just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I
think they're still applying a lot of the same rules
of uh futurology, but they're just not bound by you know,
the laws of uh not not the laws, but you
know the laws of logic. Yeah, exactly, I'm with you.
But that's the best. It's fiction, though, I think, is
(04:01):
something that logically makes sense. Yeah, because then it's it's
just fantasy. Yeah, that's true. So futurology is um recognizing
and assessing potential future events. Uh. I could have sworn
Jonathan Strickland wrote this by the way it read, but
it was not. It's very strickland desk. Nicholas Gurbus, Yeah,
(04:24):
that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if it is. I've
never met this Nicholas Curbus. But the point Gurbus makes,
which I think is good, is it's a product of
our times in many cases, like depending on where we
are as a society, um, And like he makes a
great point. During the Civil War there probably weren't a
lot of like rosy predictions for the future American Civil War.
(04:47):
But in the Gilded Age people a lot more optimistic, optimistic,
so they may have you know, it's a whole different deal.
Like during the Cold War, for instance, a lot of paranoia,
a lot of cynicism, probably not to be a rosy
outlook for the future, right like during the Gilded Age
when it was rosier. Yeah, way more optimistic than the
Cold War, which is kind of ironic because the Guilded
(05:10):
Age didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were
just pretending. Hence the name, Um the thing is. What
you've just said, though, is is kind of an argument
against future ology because one of the big critiques of
it is that a future ologist, they're not doing anything.
Even if you're commenting on the past or the future,
(05:31):
you're still really commenting about your present, your contemporary time,
because that's what you or recent past, that's what you
some what you've lived through and experienced. That's all you
can really reflect on is and and future ology seeks
to go beyond that. Well, yeah, that makes sense. So
if you like, look at this thing that is happening
(05:52):
now or just happened, then what is going to be
happening in that thing in ten years? And it's it's
a lot of times based on how the direction is
currently going. Yes, okay, so um gurbis makes a pretty
good gives a good example that the cell phone grew
out of the telegraph, which ultimately is related further back
(06:15):
to the smoke signal, sure, right, Yeah, But if you
were a future all just hanging out around somebody who
was sending smoke signals, would you be able to predict
the cell phone? Probably not or not. Could you predict
the impact of the automobile or the highway system? Maybe?
But would you predict that people would um have sex
(06:39):
in the back seat of a car because it provides
a little well, I don't think they did. Or urban sprawl? Yeah?
Could you predict excerbs and edge cities just because the
highways got built? Yeah, and not a lot of people did,
even though a lot of people said there's going to
be horseless carriages one day, and it's going They're going
to change things big time. People are going to be
(07:00):
able to move around a lot more. But that doesn't
mean that everybody saw every result of the automobile. Um,
it was a game changer. Yeah, has what you could agreed? So?
Um what we're saying here, And if it sounds a
little weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing future ology,
that's basically the fun thing to do when you talk
(07:23):
about future ology is um to criticize it and be
awed by it. Because a lot of times they really
are super right, that's right. Uh. Futurology has been around
for a long time. Um, I mean there since people
were writing fiction, there were people predicting the future, but
as far as um things didn't really get going as
(07:48):
far as being meaningful until after World War Two, when
the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically, like it was
really important to try and see you where things were
going militarily, right, because it was super expensive to develop
new technologies. Uh, it could take a long time. So
they started thinking, hey, we need to get some people
(08:10):
on board that can kind of hopefully predict where we're
headed here so we can make the right decisions. Yeah,
because if it takes a really long time, like you said,
to develop a weapon, by the time you have that
weapon in deployed in the field, you're gonna need to
know it's not already obsolete. The only way to do
that is to predict what kind of warfare you're going
to be engaged in. Because this is a time, like
(08:32):
at the end of World War two, so many inventions
came out of World War one and two war machine
inventions that that things were changing so quickly that there
was actually you can kind of put modern future ology
into the lap of one guy, an Air Force general
named hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing so
fast that his air force needed to basically predict the
(08:54):
future and see what direction it needed to go. So
he looked around and he started tapping people to do that.
One of the first people he tapped as a scientist
UM an aeronautical engineer named Theodore von Karmen. Yes, he
was a super smart dude, UM, and he led a
team that did predict a lot of stuff like drones.
(09:15):
UM and as far as you know, the military using drones,
not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood to
film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone, UH, target
seeking missiles, UM, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.
All of this was in one report to hap Arnold,
(09:35):
Like this is like and this guy knocked out of
the park. But um, he and his group were very
much limited to small academic and military circles. Like the
general public wasn't aware that this was going on, but
his group. Von Karmen's groups so accurately foresaw the direction
that that modern warfare was going that you can very
(09:59):
also very resially make the case that you know, he
basically created a roadmap to the future that the Air
Force followed. So is his prophecy were self fulfilling because
he said go this way, and the Air Force went
that way and created all this stuff. Yeah, and then
the UM the military and uh well, the Brand Corporation specifically,
(10:20):
it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglass
Aircraft in the mid forties. They said, well, having one
person to say these things was great, but what we
need is a team and a consensus among this team.
So they kind of, uh, well not kind of. They
very much patented a technique they called the Delphi uh
technique d E L p h I and that is
(10:42):
basically a technique where they're trying to get agreed on
consensus from a number of people. So there's there's this
very famous story about how UM the the Navy, I
think lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the Russians
had lost the submarine something like that. There is a
lost sub that they wanted to find and they had
(11:03):
no idea where it was. So the Navy pulled all
these different UM, different experts and all these different fields
that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, whether um,
aeronautics uh, people from Noah, all these people right and
asked them where do you think the sub is? And
(11:24):
no one hit it on the nose. But when they
when they basically used um uh statistical distribution of these
various opinions guesses of professionals, it led them right to
that sub And that's what the Delfi technique does too.
It it takes opinions of experts in various fields and
says what do you think of this? And everybody sends
(11:46):
in a questionnaire and anonymously, and there's no group meetings,
so the group doesn't bow to pressure, no leaders emerge.
They're giving their unvarnished opinion. And then after the those
opinions come in there they they take that information and
send it out again. So it goes in rounds and
rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group
(12:06):
consensus that in the future we're all going to be
wearing metallic blue jumpsuits. Yeah. And what they're doing is
generating what's known as a scenario. And a guy named
Herman Kahn k h N worked with Brand in the
nineteen fifties and he's the one that kind of coined
the term scenario as it applies to futurology. Uh. A
(12:29):
pretty good definition I found was a scenario is a
a detailed portrait of a plausible future world, one sufficiently
vivid that a planner can clearly see and comprehend the problems, challenges,
and opportunities that such an environment would present. So it's
it's you know, it's saying, uh uh. In the future,
we're gonna have a scenario where they're going to be
(12:51):
robots in every house. And one of the biggest ways
that they work on scenarios is with something called bat casting,
which is starting the end, which is you got a
robot in every house, and then go backwards. How you
got there? Yeah, how we how you got there? Yeah?
Makes sense? Yeah, and scenario. That's a pretty cool scenario.
They can also be as mundane as running a fire
(13:13):
drill um where you're envisioning the fire broke out in
the high school gym and so everybody needs to get out.
That's a that's a scenario. It's as simple as that.
There um the weather forecasts or economic forecasts that are
run through computer algorithms. The computer algorithms the model. The
process that it's going through is the scenario, and it
(13:35):
spits out a possible prediction. It's almost like an effect
then cause right, yeah, yeah, excellently, thank you. Uh So
Herman Cohn worked with Rand and uh and he had
did you look him up at all? Yeah, he's one
of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove. He was described as
a super genius. Yeah, he was super smart and he
um he kind of was a bit of a celebrity
(13:57):
at the time. He wrote a book um in nineteen
sixty one called on thermon Nuclear War uh and then
went on to form left Rand to form the Hudson Institute,
where he basically was like, we're a group that is
going to forecast the future. So he became It was
like super popular book, and he spawned a lot of
other books, similar books. We need to take a break,
(14:19):
but we're getting We'll get right back to this in
a second. So, Chuck, you're just talking about Herman Kahn
(14:40):
being the super genius who was something of a celebrity.
I read that Timothy Leary animated that he had taken
acid with him. I believe that he was a part
of the inspiration for Dr. Strange love and this book
that he wrote called UM the the Year two thousand,
a Framework for Speculation the next thirty three years. It
(15:02):
basically established this outlook that UM that America and capitalism
could do anything thanks to basically technological UM inventiveness. Yeah,
here's a let's hear some of these um. There was
a list in that book, one hundred technical innovations very
(15:23):
likely in the last third of the twentieth century. Hundred
Uh some of the first ten multiple applications of lasers, boom,
high strength structural materials nailed it, wouldn't you think hallois Uh,
new or improved materials for equipment and appliances. Now that's
(15:45):
that's easy. Yeah, anyone can say that it would be
better material and predict that now. Uh, longer range, longer
range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting. No, I don't
know about that one. I think that was us. How
about this here here are a few of the other ones.
(16:05):
New techniques for cheap and reliable birth control for sure. Yeah.
The pill I don't know if the pills around we
should do a whole thing may have been the same
year because it came out in sixty seven, was it? Yeah? Uh, Well,
This book came out in sixty seven, right, widespread use
of nuclear reactors for power duh, improved capability to change
(16:27):
sex of a children or adult gender reassignment. We did
a great episode on that pervasive business use of computers. Yeah,
they're all over personal pages. Yeah, they came in what
and then one of the other ones was home computers
to run households and communicate with the outside world. Yeah,
the Internet of Things. Yeah. They also predicted, um, the
(16:47):
rise of the credit economy really yeah, that we currently
are in interesting yeah, so um and that was just
like a list, like a sidebar basically in the book,
in this book, but the whole, the whole idea that
um America and capitalism in the West could invent its
way out of any problem we possibly ran across in
the future was the premise or the position of this book,
(17:11):
and it caused an enormous fewer in academic circles, and
not just academic circles, because this book was one of
the first to introduce to the public that there were
such things as think tanks like RAND and that. Yeah,
and that these people were sitting there thinking about the
future and we're writing books about it. And it kind
(17:32):
of became a hit thing, But the Club of Rome
was basically diametrically opposed to the UM the outlook that
Herman Khan had and the Club of Rome was a
business consortium that conspiracy theorist is basically the seat of
the new World Order. They are UM and the Club
of Rome basically said, no, we were. We were establishing
(17:54):
the gloom and doom camp that there's such thing as
resource depletion, over population and we are basically doomed. Yeah,
I mean we've we've covered this a lot on the show.
Different people that have made wild predictions about We're gonna
run out of this by this year. Thomas mathis, Yeah,
very mauthusian. One of the books that came out of
the Club of Rome UH in nineteen seventy two was
(18:15):
called Limits to Growth by Danilla H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows,
Jurgen Randers, and William Baron's at M I. T. And
they had a very dire apocalyptic outlook of the future UM,
as did a lot of other people at the time,
and a lot of these were way off base. A
lot of these dire predictions, you know, which happened over
(18:37):
and over again. Yeah, and so on the Club of
Rome's website. They defend them The Limits to Growth. No,
not the Limits to Growth, the UM Yeah, the Limits
to Growth book, basically saying that it's often mis cited
as predicting the collapse of civilization UM due to renewable
resource um overuse, and it doesn't do that. But they
(19:00):
did use the same kind of techniques that Herman Kahn
and some of his other colleagues were coming up with
by by taking population um information, food production data, industrial
production pollution, and non renewable resource consumption and then running
scenarios through this model that they built using computers and
(19:22):
coming up the scenarios they came up with. We're kind
of grim. The thing is is, even though they missed
the mark, they still helped establish a very young idea
that we we can't just you can't just throw your
McDonald's styrofoam on the ground, You can't drive a car
that gets two miles per gallon, like, we can't live
(19:45):
like everything is just forever abundant, that there's no such
thing as scarcity. Yeah, it's a double edged sword though,
Like I totally agree, but then it also when you're
wrong about these things, it gives cynics something point to say, well,
she we didn't run to oil in the early nineteen eighties,
like you said, we would do anything about it. Yeah,
(20:05):
I mean, man, that is a great point. It's a
it's a very great point. But at the same time,
what you're seeing here between the limits to growth and
the year two thousand um they we still see this
today with climate change. You know, it's like, let's do
something about climate change. The other people say, no, we
can invent our way out of it. And besides, if
(20:26):
we do something about climate change, it's gonna mess with
the economy. And these people are saying, forget about the economy.
We're all going to die, or not necessarily forget about
the economy. But maybe you can do both, you know.
You know, my whole deal with that has always been
just like why why take that risk? Well, we humans
aren't very good at like preparing for future risk, which
(20:49):
is I think one of the reasons why future alogists
are so revered and and odd but also mocked and scorned,
because they're doing something that's almost almost flies in the
face of human nature. Yeah, you're really putting yourself out
there when you predict the stuff. Uh, that was one
other episode that that just reminded me of the ten
thousand year clock. That was a great one. So um,
(21:13):
the military, the United States military obviously has used it
for years. Um then beginning uh when was this in
the sixties or seventies that business got into it. So
in V two, I think Royal Dutch Shell heard somebody
at the top heard that there wasn't gonna be any
oil in by five, and they went yeah. Businesses basically said,
(21:36):
wait a minute, there are people that can actually use
models to determine what the future might look like. How
can we use that to make money. Well, let's throw
money at him and find out exactly. A couple of
other places to um that that were nascent think tanks
and like grand was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group
(21:56):
in the California Institute of Technology. UM, early like kind
of think tank breeding grounds, just smart people walking around
thinking about the future. But that wasn't enough. Um, you
can't just say this is what I think it's going
to be like, you have to back it up. And
we'll talk about how they back it up right after this.
(22:32):
How do they back it up? Well, they use different techniques.
If you're a futurist or a future ologist. You're going
to be using techniques that um are pretty recognizable. But
the way you put them together and the things you
sort out, um, is what's going to make you successful
or not successful. Right, So you're you like brainstorm ideas, Yeah,
that's probably where you start. Yeah, just just like Blue
(22:55):
Sky Territory as they say, yeah, you um imagine things
using scenarios are games apparently game theory, but we got
to do that at some point. Yeah, I've been avoiding it,
like we could mess it up really bad, but we'll
do it. Um. That that changed the the futurism feel
(23:16):
tremendously when they came up with game theory, because it's
a pretty good way of predicting how people will work.
And that's one of the big confounding factors is you
can predict something, follow every single one of these steps
that we're talking about right now, um, and then people
will just cut to the left all of a sudden,
and your prediction just fell to the wayside because humanity
(23:39):
went this way real quick. Or somebody invented a game changer,
a game changing product or innovation that nobody saw coming. Yeah,
what's that called disruptive technology, is it? Yeah, that's a
good not like that, Uh, not a bad band name.
Oh I wonder if it's not there. If so, it's
made of like Silicon Valley, rich guy, it's like my
(24:00):
side band. Right. Um, do you want to gather professional
opinions using say the Delphi technique. You want to do
historical analysis. Current trends are very huge and can help
you as well. And then like you were saying, I
think you call it back masking. No, that's uh, turn
(24:22):
me on dead man, right, Yeah, that's what they do.
They listen to the Beatles backwards. Uh where what it
was it? It's not back masking, I know, but where
they where you envision the future and then you work
your way backwards from it. When you do this, you
do all this stuff together and again back cast, back casting.
(24:45):
And when you're when you're using this along with the
computer algorithms that can model like the economy or the weather,
um oil consumption or something like that, you can come
up with something that you could rightly say is a
prediction or forecast for the future where we're going to
be again, though, um, just things happen, like for example,
(25:07):
Herman Kahn did not predict the UM the oil crisis
that came the year after he wrote another famous book
in nineteen seventy two. Um he wrote a response, I
think to limits the growth and just totally missed the
oil crisis. Man. But how could he predict that? Because
the oil crisis came out of the OPEC oil embargo
(25:29):
that was punishment for the US is being involved in
the Yam Kipper War. So you couldn't see that coming. No,
And that's the big problem with futuro ology. Yes, exactly,
our own US government has been wrong with the U
s Department of Interior announced twice in nineteen thirty nine
and then in nineteen fifty one that we only had
thirteen years of oil left. So weird that both times
(25:51):
it was thirteen years. They don't like to bother people,
so they wait until there's thirteen years left, and they
sound it's just such a specific number. Uh. What else, Well,
we we've talked about More's law before. That has aged
a little better than some other futurology predictions because, uh
it is been revised over the years, which is sort
(26:13):
of a cheat a little bit. But still, what I
really meant was, I think he went from eighteen months
to two years or something like that. But what's funny
is Gurbis stakes his position in this article. He's saying,
like the limits to growth and the other Club of
Rome stuff, they missed the mark um because they predicted
catastrophe and Moore's law predicts um technological innovation, so it's successful.
(26:39):
So clearly Gurbas agrees with the Herman Kahn group rather
than the Club of Rome group. I don't think it's subtle.
I think you uh, you can't just say, like the
gloom and doom camp has just been completely eradicated or
proven wrong. Agreed, you know, yeah, Moore's law, I don't
even think we said specifically. It predicts the number of
transistors on integrated circuits and computers doubles every two years.
(27:02):
And like we said, it's been updated and it's been
pretty consistent. And so with Herman Khan's popularity and then
the big high profile m book publishing argument that he
got in with the Club of Rome that led to
like a spade of other future ology books that we
can remember it being a big deal. When I was
(27:23):
a kid, I remember a lot of people talking about
the near and far future. The one that I ran
across in this article that I had heard of, but
I didn't know anything about Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. I
can't remember that. I think, did you read it? The cover?
I guarantee would just give you a nostalgia I'm sure. Um,
but it came out in nineteen seventy, and it predicts
(27:43):
a future where too much rapid change technological change in advancement,
it happens too quickly, and people get all sorts of
stressed and just worn out and um basically have all
all manner of terrible um reactions to it. And I'm like, oh,
like I predicted two thousand fifteen, so like a person's
(28:06):
emotions couldn't handle. Yeah, we're just overwhelmed through too much
rapid technological innovation happens too quick. Do you think we're overwhelmed?
Like I get stressed out by like say social media
or something like that. Yeah. I wonder if it's a
people of a a certain age maybe, Yeah. I would guess
if you're born into it, you're used to it, so
(28:27):
it would probably more more likely apply to a transition population,
like the transitional generation. Is that what we are? Don't
you get stressed by social media. Don't you get like
this tents and uh yeah, I mean I kind of
just hate it or having like having information and all
this information and all if it's just so thin content
(28:48):
wise or value wise, but there's tons of it and
it's always coming at you. Wears me out. I got
the future shock chuck at the Jimmy legs. Uh no,
I totally agree. I'm like that. I just want to
shut it all down, just everybody, not podcasts that should
(29:14):
live on. Uh. So we talked about science fiction writers
and how they are easily off the hook because they're
just writers, right, They're not supposed to predict the future. Um,
but they have been. You can't dismiss it because they've
been on the money or close to it a lot
over the years. Because, like we said, they're not hampered
by the rational laws of today. They can just say
(29:36):
whatever they want and if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,
I'm just writing stuff. Yes this is fiction. Um. But
a few of the highlights, um. Jules Verne mid nineteenth
century predicted uh, going to the moon and a spacecraft.
Not only that, so he predicted it would be shot
out of a cannon basically. Um. But the thing that
(30:00):
he really got though, was that he placed the moon
shot in Florida, like a hundred and thirty seven miles
from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch rockets to the moon.
Not bad now And for the same reason to like that,
it was it's close to the equator. Oh is that why?
It's one of the reasons why. Plus Cape Canaveral is
largely protected um by the Gulf Stream from hurricanes. Like
(30:24):
as a hurricane comes ashore right before it starts to
get to Canaveral, it goes out again and then hits
North Carolina. Interesting, that would be an interesting conversation to
have been in on when they were picking place, like
where should we launch this? I mean, where should we
put all of our money in? Right? Uh h g Wells.
(30:44):
He predicted tanks. Yeah, he was. Supposedly he was the
first guy to really think of himself as a futurist.
He predicted adam bomb in nineteen eight, aerial bombing in
nineteen o eight. What the name robot is actually coined
by a science fiction writer, a check writer name Carl
Kopeck and Um in nineteen one he named robots I
(31:10):
think the all time winner, though is Hugo Gernsbach and
Hugo Gernsbach. If you're into science fiction, you recognize his
first name because he's who the Hugo Award is named after.
You may also recognize his last name too, if you're
a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in uh, I think
the nineteen tens. Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph
(31:32):
one to four C forty one plus. He predicted everything
in this Yeah you know what that means. It's actually
a play on words. Uh one two It means one
to four ce for one another. You get it? Wow? Yeah,
that's great. One to four C for one and then
(31:54):
another is the plus sign that that alone, I was sold, like,
I love this guy. It's just like that Van Halen
album Oh You eight one two exactly. So what has
he predicted? He predicted solar power, like the realistic use
of solar power. He predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders,
(32:15):
um jukeboxes, loudspeakers, tinfoil, rustpous steel, synthetic fabrics, all in
one book. And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named
after him because he wanted to make science fiction more
science based, you know, using that same logic, So he
would have been a very um like almost a father
(32:37):
of future ology. Oh yeah, for sure. You know, here's
a few other things that from that book. Um, this
one to me, I'm surprised no one's done this yet.
The appetizer, which is at a restaurant in an in
an advanced scientifically advanced restaurant, will be a room that
you wait in before you get your table that's flooded
with gases that make you hungry. Oh, not bad, Just
(32:59):
have a the appetizer room, right, we'll be ready shortly.
It's like bloody fingernails and scratched into the walls that
people are trying to get to the other room where
the food is. Uh. The telt, the telautograph, which is
basically a fax machine. Uh. The telefot which was a
picture phone. UM had a universal translator where they translate
(33:21):
any language right there on your in your hand. Not bad.
And then this one I love. The vacation city was
a suspended city and a domed suspended city twenty feet
in the air that used the device that nullified gravity.
And in vacation City, no mechanical devices are permitted because
(33:42):
it was supposed to be a true escape. That's aweso
from the mechanized world waiting for that one. And this
was in nineteen eleven. He predicted just that there would
be a need for that. That's like that town in
um West Virginia, Green something, West Virginia where the people
who have electromagnetic sensitivity ago because you're not allowed to
have any electromagnetic stuff because there's like a radio telescope
(34:05):
where there's something there could be interfered with, and you
co could be amish. Can you just be amish? Like, hey,
I want to be amish. If you're Harrison Ford, you
could be yeah. Or Woody Harrelson, Yeah right, you got
anything else? How about these predictions for the future, There's
a couple in here. They are kind of funny. Ten
(34:26):
predictions that missed the mark, and these are real predictions.
UM In nineteen seven, U. S. News and World Reports
said that by the end of the century, we will
launch our freight across the continent with missiles. Like you
order something from Amazon in New York, instead of having
a fulfilment center nearby, they just put it in a
(34:46):
missile and shoot it to you. Didn't happen, um No,
But drones are coming. I really are they still on that? Probably?
A guy named Alex LeWitt predicted nuclear power vacuum cleaners. Uh,
this one I think would be pretty great dissolving dishes,
(35:07):
and uh asked what it would be like in the
year two thousand. A science writer named Valdemir come Forth.
There's a lot of man. He's a fabulous science writer
with the funny name Consonance in a row. Um, he said,
you would basically, uh, put your plate in two and
(35:28):
fifty degree water at the end and it would just
dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Uh. Bucky Fuller predicted that
Canada would be a subtropical climate because we've build a
dome over it. That didn't happen. No, it didn't, which
is strange because Bucky Fuller was pretty sharp. Dude. Here's
(35:49):
another one, Um, was he really? Yeah? Buck Minster Fuller?
Oh I didn't pick up on that. He's who Bucky
balls who are named after? Really? Why? I don't? He
may have invented him. I'm not sure. It's the those
little balls that are magnetic spheres that like you shape in. Uh.
(36:10):
Here's one a Scottish geneticist that um said in the
nineteen twenties that in the future, one third of the
babies would not be born, only one third would be
born as a result of pregnancy, and the other babies
would be born in a lab. Would they be grown
basically exogenesis? Uh, here's the last one. Check you already.
(36:33):
The Research Institute of America, which sounds pretty smart, said that, um,
by seventy five, I'm sorry, this is several years before that,
we would all be driving. Um. Personal helicopters did not
pan out, Probably never will. I don't know if i'd
want a personal helicopter, you know. I was, uh, for
(36:55):
Emily's birthday. I rented a cabin in the North Georgia Mountains.
Did you take a personal hell copter there? No? But
I was sitting on the deck we all were, and
way across the valley on the side of a mountain
was this huge, huge house, and I heard a sound
of a helicopter. It was like and I saw blinking light.
I got up the binoculars and this dude had a
(37:16):
helicopter and he took it and he flew it down
about two miles to the lake at the bottom of
the valley. And uh, I guess he has a lake
house and a mountain house in the easiest way to
get there, just to make the four minute elicopter flight.
That's crazy. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Wow. I want
to know who that guy is. And that guy could
(37:37):
be a lady. Yeah what am I saying? It could
be Carly Fiorina. Yeah, is that she's the woman who's
running for GOP president candidate? Oh right, Fiorina, that's right, gotcha?
Go ahead? Oh sorry, Uh, let's see. Well, if you
want to know more about futurology, you can type that
(37:59):
word into the search part how still works dot com?
And since Chuck had an anecdote about helicopters, it's time
for the listener mail. Uh it sort of looked like
one of those Magnum p i ones too. Well, if
I did have a personal helicopter, it was look an
awful lot like that. I'm sure what Hey, guys, my
name Michelleby. I'm honored for you to be reading this.
(38:19):
My husband and I love your show, and you've solved
our dilemma. So what to listen to in our car together?
I want to let you know you did a great
job on the HIV AIDS podcast. However, I think you
miss telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis.
Just before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating
hemophilia called the clotting factor concentrate was developed. I finally
let those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and
(38:41):
completely change the landscape of the disorder. By the time
HIV was discovered to be a blood borne virus, many
of those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to
mention that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies
did not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of
their knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong
public outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story
(39:03):
is not told often enough, and the injustice that these
individuals suffered at the hands of big Pharma is undoubtedly
one of the greatest our country has seen. Uh. There's
an extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called
Bad Blood Colon Cultionary Tale. Anyway, that's about it, uh,
And I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out there is
(39:23):
from Shelby. Shelby thank you for not only that illuminating email,
but also the documentary recommendation. We're always looking for those. Absolutely.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can tweet to us at s y s K Podcasts.
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(39:44):
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So the name of their tour is talking is hard.
It's not that hard, guys. I'm doing it now. Most
of the time. I can't stop talking. I mean you
literally would have to cut me off one time. I
told yeah, yeah, yeah, Alec Baldwin, we get it, you
(00:21):
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Welcome to you. Stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:43):
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here
and it's stuff you should know from the future, but
not really. How are you doing. I'm fine, Well, good,
that's good. I enjoyed. This was kind of neat, Yeah
it was. It was funny, like when you're reading about
(01:05):
futurology in futurologists a k a. Futurists, you tend to
want to make it like more than it actually is,
and when you look into the topic, it keeps having
to be beaten down just because of the name alone.
It sounds like a little bit like a I could
do a seer. And you know, sometimes they're thinking about
(01:29):
they're using these these really neat techniques to predict the future. Um,
they're talking about some really mundane stuff, boring stuff economic forecasts,
things like that how much oil will be left in
thirty years, that kind of thing. But then on the
other hand, if you're a futurologist, you may also be
tasked with figuring out what technology we're going to be
(01:52):
using in thirty years or you know what, what what
color the shiny jumpsuits were all gonna wear will be?
That kind this stuff. Yeah, I think one of my
favorite things is to look at past future predictions. It's fun. Yeah,
there's nothing that will make someone look less knowledgeable than
(02:12):
going back to what they thought the future would look
like in the year two thousand, like back in the
nineteen thirties or forties or sometimes some of those things happen. Yeah,
and then it's amazing. Yeah, that's like wow, you know,
because sometimes these guys are like really really dead on
And I was reading an article, Um, I think it
was in Harvard Business Review, and it was a post
(02:33):
by Paul uh Sappho, who runs a venture capital firm
I believe called Discern. Yeah, and um, Paul staff was
saying like he was, he was trying to get across
that sci fi authors and future ologists their paths overlap
(02:56):
quite a bit, but really there's pretty big distinctions. And
even in this article they got lumped in together because
sci fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But Paul
Cepo was saying, like, yeah, but a real futurologist you
have to use logic, whereas if you're a sci fi writer,
you can just use your imagination. You don't have to
(03:16):
back it up with anything. Creature ologists, you have to
use logic that makes sense to the whoever's hearing your prediction. Yeah,
And I think that's one reason why some sci fi
writers have uh been right on the nose with some
future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic and they
can just uh free form, you know. But then it's
(03:41):
just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I
think they're still applying a lot of the same rules
of uh futurology, but they're just not bound by you know,
the laws of uh not not the laws, but you
know the laws of logic. Yeah, exactly, I'm with you.
But that's the best. It's fiction, though, I think, is
(04:01):
something that logically makes sense. Yeah, because then it's it's
just fantasy. Yeah, that's true. So futurology is um recognizing
and assessing potential future events. Uh. I could have sworn
Jonathan Strickland wrote this by the way it read, but
it was not. It's very strickland desk. Nicholas Gurbus, Yeah,
(04:24):
that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if it is. I've
never met this Nicholas Curbus. But the point Gurbus makes,
which I think is good, is it's a product of
our times in many cases, like depending on where we
are as a society, um, And like he makes a
great point. During the Civil War there probably weren't a
lot of like rosy predictions for the future American Civil War.
(04:47):
But in the Gilded Age people a lot more optimistic, optimistic,
so they may have you know, it's a whole different deal.
Like during the Cold War, for instance, a lot of paranoia,
a lot of cynicism, probably not to be a rosy
outlook for the future, right like during the Gilded Age
when it was rosier. Yeah, way more optimistic than the
Cold War, which is kind of ironic because the Guilded
(05:10):
Age didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were
just pretending. Hence the name, Um the thing is. What
you've just said, though, is is kind of an argument
against future ology because one of the big critiques of
it is that a future ologist, they're not doing anything.
Even if you're commenting on the past or the future,
(05:31):
you're still really commenting about your present, your contemporary time,
because that's what you or recent past, that's what you
some what you've lived through and experienced. That's all you
can really reflect on is and and future ology seeks
to go beyond that. Well, yeah, that makes sense. So
if you like, look at this thing that is happening
(05:52):
now or just happened, then what is going to be
happening in that thing in ten years? And it's it's
a lot of times based on how the direction is
currently going. Yes, okay, so um gurbis makes a pretty
good gives a good example that the cell phone grew
out of the telegraph, which ultimately is related further back
(06:15):
to the smoke signal, sure, right, Yeah, But if you
were a future all just hanging out around somebody who
was sending smoke signals, would you be able to predict
the cell phone? Probably not or not. Could you predict
the impact of the automobile or the highway system? Maybe?
But would you predict that people would um have sex
(06:39):
in the back seat of a car because it provides
a little well, I don't think they did. Or urban sprawl? Yeah?
Could you predict excerbs and edge cities just because the
highways got built? Yeah, and not a lot of people did,
even though a lot of people said there's going to
be horseless carriages one day, and it's going They're going
to change things big time. People are going to be
(07:00):
able to move around a lot more. But that doesn't
mean that everybody saw every result of the automobile. Um,
it was a game changer. Yeah, has what you could agreed? So?
Um what we're saying here, And if it sounds a
little weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing future ology,
that's basically the fun thing to do when you talk
(07:23):
about future ology is um to criticize it and be
awed by it. Because a lot of times they really
are super right, that's right. Uh. Futurology has been around
for a long time. Um, I mean there since people
were writing fiction, there were people predicting the future, but
as far as um things didn't really get going as
(07:48):
far as being meaningful until after World War Two, when
the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically, like it was
really important to try and see you where things were
going militarily, right, because it was super expensive to develop
new technologies. Uh, it could take a long time. So
they started thinking, hey, we need to get some people
(08:10):
on board that can kind of hopefully predict where we're
headed here so we can make the right decisions. Yeah,
because if it takes a really long time, like you said,
to develop a weapon, by the time you have that
weapon in deployed in the field, you're gonna need to
know it's not already obsolete. The only way to do
that is to predict what kind of warfare you're going
to be engaged in. Because this is a time, like
(08:32):
at the end of World War two, so many inventions
came out of World War one and two war machine
inventions that that things were changing so quickly that there
was actually you can kind of put modern future ology
into the lap of one guy, an Air Force general
named hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing so
fast that his air force needed to basically predict the
(08:54):
future and see what direction it needed to go. So
he looked around and he started tapping people to do that.
One of the first people he tapped as a scientist
UM an aeronautical engineer named Theodore von Karmen. Yes, he
was a super smart dude, UM, and he led a
team that did predict a lot of stuff like drones.
(09:15):
UM and as far as you know, the military using drones,
not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood to
film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone, UH, target
seeking missiles, UM, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.
All of this was in one report to hap Arnold,
(09:35):
Like this is like and this guy knocked out of
the park. But um, he and his group were very
much limited to small academic and military circles. Like the
general public wasn't aware that this was going on, but
his group. Von Karmen's groups so accurately foresaw the direction
that that modern warfare was going that you can very
(09:59):
also very resially make the case that you know, he
basically created a roadmap to the future that the Air
Force followed. So is his prophecy were self fulfilling because
he said go this way, and the Air Force went
that way and created all this stuff. Yeah, and then
the UM the military and uh well, the Brand Corporation specifically,
(10:20):
it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglass
Aircraft in the mid forties. They said, well, having one
person to say these things was great, but what we
need is a team and a consensus among this team.
So they kind of, uh, well not kind of. They
very much patented a technique they called the Delphi uh
technique d E L p h I and that is
(10:42):
basically a technique where they're trying to get agreed on
consensus from a number of people. So there's there's this
very famous story about how UM the the Navy, I
think lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the Russians
had lost the submarine something like that. There is a
lost sub that they wanted to find and they had
(11:03):
no idea where it was. So the Navy pulled all
these different UM, different experts and all these different fields
that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, whether um,
aeronautics uh, people from Noah, all these people right and
asked them where do you think the sub is? And
(11:24):
no one hit it on the nose. But when they
when they basically used um uh statistical distribution of these
various opinions guesses of professionals, it led them right to
that sub And that's what the Delfi technique does too.
It it takes opinions of experts in various fields and
says what do you think of this? And everybody sends
(11:46):
in a questionnaire and anonymously, and there's no group meetings,
so the group doesn't bow to pressure, no leaders emerge.
They're giving their unvarnished opinion. And then after the those
opinions come in there they they take that information and
send it out again. So it goes in rounds and
rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group
(12:06):
consensus that in the future we're all going to be
wearing metallic blue jumpsuits. Yeah. And what they're doing is
generating what's known as a scenario. And a guy named
Herman Kahn k h N worked with Brand in the
nineteen fifties and he's the one that kind of coined
the term scenario as it applies to futurology. Uh. A
(12:29):
pretty good definition I found was a scenario is a
a detailed portrait of a plausible future world, one sufficiently
vivid that a planner can clearly see and comprehend the problems, challenges,
and opportunities that such an environment would present. So it's
it's you know, it's saying, uh uh. In the future,
we're gonna have a scenario where they're going to be
(12:51):
robots in every house. And one of the biggest ways
that they work on scenarios is with something called bat casting,
which is starting the end, which is you got a
robot in every house, and then go backwards. How you
got there? Yeah, how we how you got there? Yeah?
Makes sense? Yeah, and scenario. That's a pretty cool scenario.
They can also be as mundane as running a fire
(13:13):
drill um where you're envisioning the fire broke out in
the high school gym and so everybody needs to get out.
That's a that's a scenario. It's as simple as that.
There um the weather forecasts or economic forecasts that are
run through computer algorithms. The computer algorithms the model. The
process that it's going through is the scenario, and it
(13:35):
spits out a possible prediction. It's almost like an effect
then cause right, yeah, yeah, excellently, thank you. Uh So
Herman Cohn worked with Rand and uh and he had
did you look him up at all? Yeah, he's one
of the inspirations for Dr Strangelove. He was described as
a super genius. Yeah, he was super smart and he
um he kind of was a bit of a celebrity
(13:57):
at the time. He wrote a book um in nineteen
sixty one called on thermon Nuclear War uh and then
went on to form left Rand to form the Hudson Institute,
where he basically was like, we're a group that is
going to forecast the future. So he became It was
like super popular book, and he spawned a lot of
other books, similar books. We need to take a break,
(14:19):
but we're getting We'll get right back to this in
a second. So, Chuck, you're just talking about Herman Kahn
(14:40):
being the super genius who was something of a celebrity.
I read that Timothy Leary animated that he had taken
acid with him. I believe that he was a part
of the inspiration for Dr. Strange love and this book
that he wrote called UM the the Year two thousand,
a Framework for Speculation the next thirty three years. It
(15:02):
basically established this outlook that UM that America and capitalism
could do anything thanks to basically technological UM inventiveness. Yeah,
here's a let's hear some of these um. There was
a list in that book, one hundred technical innovations very
(15:23):
likely in the last third of the twentieth century. Hundred
Uh some of the first ten multiple applications of lasers, boom,
high strength structural materials nailed it, wouldn't you think hallois Uh,
new or improved materials for equipment and appliances. Now that's
(15:45):
that's easy. Yeah, anyone can say that it would be
better material and predict that now. Uh, longer range, longer
range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting. No, I don't
know about that one. I think that was us. How
about this here here are a few of the other ones.
(16:05):
New techniques for cheap and reliable birth control for sure. Yeah.
The pill I don't know if the pills around we
should do a whole thing may have been the same
year because it came out in sixty seven, was it? Yeah? Uh, Well,
This book came out in sixty seven, right, widespread use
of nuclear reactors for power duh, improved capability to change
(16:27):
sex of a children or adult gender reassignment. We did
a great episode on that pervasive business use of computers. Yeah,
they're all over personal pages. Yeah, they came in what
and then one of the other ones was home computers
to run households and communicate with the outside world. Yeah,
the Internet of Things. Yeah. They also predicted, um, the
(16:47):
rise of the credit economy really yeah, that we currently
are in interesting yeah, so um and that was just
like a list, like a sidebar basically in the book,
in this book, but the whole, the whole idea that
um America and capitalism in the West could invent its
way out of any problem we possibly ran across in
the future was the premise or the position of this book,
(17:11):
and it caused an enormous fewer in academic circles, and
not just academic circles, because this book was one of
the first to introduce to the public that there were
such things as think tanks like RAND and that. Yeah,
and that these people were sitting there thinking about the
future and we're writing books about it. And it kind
(17:32):
of became a hit thing, But the Club of Rome
was basically diametrically opposed to the UM the outlook that
Herman Khan had and the Club of Rome was a
business consortium that conspiracy theorist is basically the seat of
the new World Order. They are UM and the Club
of Rome basically said, no, we were. We were establishing
(17:54):
the gloom and doom camp that there's such thing as
resource depletion, over population and we are basically doomed. Yeah,
I mean we've we've covered this a lot on the show.
Different people that have made wild predictions about We're gonna
run out of this by this year. Thomas mathis, Yeah,
very mauthusian. One of the books that came out of
the Club of Rome UH in nineteen seventy two was
(18:15):
called Limits to Growth by Danilla H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows,
Jurgen Randers, and William Baron's at M I. T. And
they had a very dire apocalyptic outlook of the future UM,
as did a lot of other people at the time,
and a lot of these were way off base. A
lot of these dire predictions, you know, which happened over
(18:37):
and over again. Yeah, and so on the Club of
Rome's website. They defend them The Limits to Growth. No,
not the Limits to Growth, the UM Yeah, the Limits
to Growth book, basically saying that it's often mis cited
as predicting the collapse of civilization UM due to renewable
resource um overuse, and it doesn't do that. But they
(19:00):
did use the same kind of techniques that Herman Kahn
and some of his other colleagues were coming up with
by by taking population um information, food production data, industrial
production pollution, and non renewable resource consumption and then running
scenarios through this model that they built using computers and
(19:22):
coming up the scenarios they came up with. We're kind
of grim. The thing is is, even though they missed
the mark, they still helped establish a very young idea
that we we can't just you can't just throw your
McDonald's styrofoam on the ground, You can't drive a car
that gets two miles per gallon, like, we can't live
(19:45):
like everything is just forever abundant, that there's no such
thing as scarcity. Yeah, it's a double edged sword though,
Like I totally agree, but then it also when you're
wrong about these things, it gives cynics something point to say, well,
she we didn't run to oil in the early nineteen eighties,
like you said, we would do anything about it. Yeah,
(20:05):
I mean, man, that is a great point. It's a
it's a very great point. But at the same time,
what you're seeing here between the limits to growth and
the year two thousand um they we still see this
today with climate change. You know, it's like, let's do
something about climate change. The other people say, no, we
can invent our way out of it. And besides, if
(20:26):
we do something about climate change, it's gonna mess with
the economy. And these people are saying, forget about the economy.
We're all going to die, or not necessarily forget about
the economy. But maybe you can do both, you know.
You know, my whole deal with that has always been
just like why why take that risk? Well, we humans
aren't very good at like preparing for future risk, which
(20:49):
is I think one of the reasons why future alogists
are so revered and and odd but also mocked and scorned,
because they're doing something that's almost almost flies in the
face of human nature. Yeah, you're really putting yourself out
there when you predict the stuff. Uh, that was one
other episode that that just reminded me of the ten
thousand year clock. That was a great one. So um,
(21:13):
the military, the United States military obviously has used it
for years. Um then beginning uh when was this in
the sixties or seventies that business got into it. So
in V two, I think Royal Dutch Shell heard somebody
at the top heard that there wasn't gonna be any
oil in by five, and they went yeah. Businesses basically said,
(21:36):
wait a minute, there are people that can actually use
models to determine what the future might look like. How
can we use that to make money. Well, let's throw
money at him and find out exactly. A couple of
other places to um that that were nascent think tanks
and like grand was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group
(21:56):
in the California Institute of Technology. UM, early like kind
of think tank breeding grounds, just smart people walking around
thinking about the future. But that wasn't enough. Um, you
can't just say this is what I think it's going
to be like, you have to back it up. And
we'll talk about how they back it up right after this.
(22:32):
How do they back it up? Well, they use different techniques.
If you're a futurist or a future ologist. You're going
to be using techniques that um are pretty recognizable. But
the way you put them together and the things you
sort out, um, is what's going to make you successful
or not successful. Right, So you're you like brainstorm ideas, Yeah,
that's probably where you start. Yeah, just just like Blue
(22:55):
Sky Territory as they say, yeah, you um imagine things
using scenarios are games apparently game theory, but we got
to do that at some point. Yeah, I've been avoiding it,
like we could mess it up really bad, but we'll
do it. Um. That that changed the the futurism feel
(23:16):
tremendously when they came up with game theory, because it's
a pretty good way of predicting how people will work.
And that's one of the big confounding factors is you
can predict something, follow every single one of these steps
that we're talking about right now, um, and then people
will just cut to the left all of a sudden,
and your prediction just fell to the wayside because humanity
(23:39):
went this way real quick. Or somebody invented a game changer,
a game changing product or innovation that nobody saw coming. Yeah,
what's that called disruptive technology, is it? Yeah, that's a
good not like that, Uh, not a bad band name.
Oh I wonder if it's not there. If so, it's
made of like Silicon Valley, rich guy, it's like my
(24:00):
side band. Right. Um, do you want to gather professional
opinions using say the Delphi technique. You want to do
historical analysis. Current trends are very huge and can help
you as well. And then like you were saying, I
think you call it back masking. No, that's uh, turn
(24:22):
me on dead man, right, Yeah, that's what they do.
They listen to the Beatles backwards. Uh where what it
was it? It's not back masking, I know, but where
they where you envision the future and then you work
your way backwards from it. When you do this, you
do all this stuff together and again back cast, back casting.
(24:45):
And when you're when you're using this along with the
computer algorithms that can model like the economy or the weather,
um oil consumption or something like that, you can come
up with something that you could rightly say is a
prediction or forecast for the future where we're going to
be again, though, um, just things happen, like for example,
(25:07):
Herman Kahn did not predict the UM the oil crisis
that came the year after he wrote another famous book
in nineteen seventy two. Um he wrote a response, I
think to limits the growth and just totally missed the
oil crisis. Man. But how could he predict that? Because
the oil crisis came out of the OPEC oil embargo
(25:29):
that was punishment for the US is being involved in
the Yam Kipper War. So you couldn't see that coming. No,
And that's the big problem with futuro ology. Yes, exactly,
our own US government has been wrong with the U
s Department of Interior announced twice in nineteen thirty nine
and then in nineteen fifty one that we only had
thirteen years of oil left. So weird that both times
(25:51):
it was thirteen years. They don't like to bother people,
so they wait until there's thirteen years left, and they
sound it's just such a specific number. Uh. What else, Well,
we we've talked about More's law before. That has aged
a little better than some other futurology predictions because, uh
it is been revised over the years, which is sort
(26:13):
of a cheat a little bit. But still, what I
really meant was, I think he went from eighteen months
to two years or something like that. But what's funny
is Gurbis stakes his position in this article. He's saying,
like the limits to growth and the other Club of
Rome stuff, they missed the mark um because they predicted
catastrophe and Moore's law predicts um technological innovation, so it's successful.
(26:39):
So clearly Gurbas agrees with the Herman Kahn group rather
than the Club of Rome group. I don't think it's subtle.
I think you uh, you can't just say, like the
gloom and doom camp has just been completely eradicated or
proven wrong. Agreed, you know, yeah, Moore's law, I don't
even think we said specifically. It predicts the number of
transistors on integrated circuits and computers doubles every two years.
(27:02):
And like we said, it's been updated and it's been
pretty consistent. And so with Herman Khan's popularity and then
the big high profile m book publishing argument that he
got in with the Club of Rome that led to
like a spade of other future ology books that we
can remember it being a big deal. When I was
(27:23):
a kid, I remember a lot of people talking about
the near and far future. The one that I ran
across in this article that I had heard of, but
I didn't know anything about Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. I
can't remember that. I think, did you read it? The cover?
I guarantee would just give you a nostalgia I'm sure. Um,
but it came out in nineteen seventy, and it predicts
(27:43):
a future where too much rapid change technological change in advancement,
it happens too quickly, and people get all sorts of
stressed and just worn out and um basically have all
all manner of terrible um reactions to it. And I'm like, oh,
like I predicted two thousand fifteen, so like a person's
(28:06):
emotions couldn't handle. Yeah, we're just overwhelmed through too much
rapid technological innovation happens too quick. Do you think we're overwhelmed?
Like I get stressed out by like say social media
or something like that. Yeah. I wonder if it's a
people of a a certain age maybe, Yeah. I would guess
if you're born into it, you're used to it, so
(28:27):
it would probably more more likely apply to a transition population,
like the transitional generation. Is that what we are? Don't
you get stressed by social media. Don't you get like
this tents and uh yeah, I mean I kind of
just hate it or having like having information and all
this information and all if it's just so thin content
(28:48):
wise or value wise, but there's tons of it and
it's always coming at you. Wears me out. I got
the future shock chuck at the Jimmy legs. Uh no,
I totally agree. I'm like that. I just want to
shut it all down, just everybody, not podcasts that should
(29:14):
live on. Uh. So we talked about science fiction writers
and how they are easily off the hook because they're
just writers, right, They're not supposed to predict the future. Um,
but they have been. You can't dismiss it because they've
been on the money or close to it a lot
over the years. Because, like we said, they're not hampered
by the rational laws of today. They can just say
(29:36):
whatever they want and if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,
I'm just writing stuff. Yes this is fiction. Um. But
a few of the highlights, um. Jules Verne mid nineteenth
century predicted uh, going to the moon and a spacecraft.
Not only that, so he predicted it would be shot
out of a cannon basically. Um. But the thing that
(30:00):
he really got though, was that he placed the moon
shot in Florida, like a hundred and thirty seven miles
from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch rockets to the moon.
Not bad now And for the same reason to like that,
it was it's close to the equator. Oh is that why?
It's one of the reasons why. Plus Cape Canaveral is
largely protected um by the Gulf Stream from hurricanes. Like
(30:24):
as a hurricane comes ashore right before it starts to
get to Canaveral, it goes out again and then hits
North Carolina. Interesting, that would be an interesting conversation to
have been in on when they were picking place, like
where should we launch this? I mean, where should we
put all of our money in? Right? Uh h g Wells.
(30:44):
He predicted tanks. Yeah, he was. Supposedly he was the
first guy to really think of himself as a futurist.
He predicted adam bomb in nineteen eight, aerial bombing in
nineteen o eight. What the name robot is actually coined
by a science fiction writer, a check writer name Carl
Kopeck and Um in nineteen one he named robots I
(31:10):
think the all time winner, though is Hugo Gernsbach and
Hugo Gernsbach. If you're into science fiction, you recognize his
first name because he's who the Hugo Award is named after.
You may also recognize his last name too, if you're
a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in uh, I think
the nineteen tens. Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph
(31:32):
one to four C forty one plus. He predicted everything
in this Yeah you know what that means. It's actually
a play on words. Uh one two It means one
to four ce for one another. You get it? Wow? Yeah,
that's great. One to four C for one and then
(31:54):
another is the plus sign that that alone, I was sold, like,
I love this guy. It's just like that Van Halen
album Oh You eight one two exactly. So what has
he predicted? He predicted solar power, like the realistic use
of solar power. He predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders,
(32:15):
um jukeboxes, loudspeakers, tinfoil, rustpous steel, synthetic fabrics, all in
one book. And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named
after him because he wanted to make science fiction more
science based, you know, using that same logic, So he
would have been a very um like almost a father
(32:37):
of future ology. Oh yeah, for sure. You know, here's
a few other things that from that book. Um, this
one to me, I'm surprised no one's done this yet.
The appetizer, which is at a restaurant in an in
an advanced scientifically advanced restaurant, will be a room that
you wait in before you get your table that's flooded
with gases that make you hungry. Oh, not bad, Just
(32:59):
have a the appetizer room, right, we'll be ready shortly.
It's like bloody fingernails and scratched into the walls that
people are trying to get to the other room where
the food is. Uh. The telt, the telautograph, which is
basically a fax machine. Uh. The telefot which was a
picture phone. UM had a universal translator where they translate
(33:21):
any language right there on your in your hand. Not bad.
And then this one I love. The vacation city was
a suspended city and a domed suspended city twenty feet
in the air that used the device that nullified gravity.
And in vacation City, no mechanical devices are permitted because
(33:42):
it was supposed to be a true escape. That's aweso
from the mechanized world waiting for that one. And this
was in nineteen eleven. He predicted just that there would
be a need for that. That's like that town in
um West Virginia, Green something, West Virginia where the people
who have electromagnetic sensitivity ago because you're not allowed to
have any electromagnetic stuff because there's like a radio telescope
(34:05):
where there's something there could be interfered with, and you
co could be amish. Can you just be amish? Like, hey,
I want to be amish. If you're Harrison Ford, you
could be yeah. Or Woody Harrelson, Yeah right, you got
anything else? How about these predictions for the future, There's
a couple in here. They are kind of funny. Ten
(34:26):
predictions that missed the mark, and these are real predictions.
UM In nineteen seven, U. S. News and World Reports
said that by the end of the century, we will
launch our freight across the continent with missiles. Like you
order something from Amazon in New York, instead of having
a fulfilment center nearby, they just put it in a
(34:46):
missile and shoot it to you. Didn't happen, um No,
But drones are coming. I really are they still on that? Probably?
A guy named Alex LeWitt predicted nuclear power vacuum cleaners. Uh,
this one I think would be pretty great dissolving dishes,
(35:07):
and uh asked what it would be like in the
year two thousand. A science writer named Valdemir come Forth.
There's a lot of man. He's a fabulous science writer
with the funny name Consonance in a row. Um, he said,
you would basically, uh, put your plate in two and
(35:28):
fifty degree water at the end and it would just
dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Uh. Bucky Fuller predicted that
Canada would be a subtropical climate because we've build a
dome over it. That didn't happen. No, it didn't, which
is strange because Bucky Fuller was pretty sharp. Dude. Here's
(35:49):
another one, Um, was he really? Yeah? Buck Minster Fuller?
Oh I didn't pick up on that. He's who Bucky
balls who are named after? Really? Why? I don't? He
may have invented him. I'm not sure. It's the those
little balls that are magnetic spheres that like you shape in. Uh.
(36:10):
Here's one a Scottish geneticist that um said in the
nineteen twenties that in the future, one third of the
babies would not be born, only one third would be
born as a result of pregnancy, and the other babies
would be born in a lab. Would they be grown
basically exogenesis? Uh, here's the last one. Check you already.
(36:33):
The Research Institute of America, which sounds pretty smart, said that, um,
by seventy five, I'm sorry, this is several years before that,
we would all be driving. Um. Personal helicopters did not
pan out, Probably never will. I don't know if i'd
want a personal helicopter, you know. I was, uh, for
(36:55):
Emily's birthday. I rented a cabin in the North Georgia Mountains.
Did you take a personal hell copter there? No? But
I was sitting on the deck we all were, and
way across the valley on the side of a mountain
was this huge, huge house, and I heard a sound
of a helicopter. It was like and I saw blinking light.
I got up the binoculars and this dude had a
(37:16):
helicopter and he took it and he flew it down
about two miles to the lake at the bottom of
the valley. And uh, I guess he has a lake
house and a mountain house in the easiest way to
get there, just to make the four minute elicopter flight.
That's crazy. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Wow. I want
to know who that guy is. And that guy could
(37:37):
be a lady. Yeah what am I saying? It could
be Carly Fiorina. Yeah, is that she's the woman who's
running for GOP president candidate? Oh right, Fiorina, that's right, gotcha?
Go ahead? Oh sorry, Uh, let's see. Well, if you
want to know more about futurology, you can type that
(37:59):
word into the search part how still works dot com?
And since Chuck had an anecdote about helicopters, it's time
for the listener mail. Uh it sort of looked like
one of those Magnum p i ones too. Well, if
I did have a personal helicopter, it was look an
awful lot like that. I'm sure what Hey, guys, my
name Michelleby. I'm honored for you to be reading this.
(38:19):
My husband and I love your show, and you've solved
our dilemma. So what to listen to in our car together?
I want to let you know you did a great
job on the HIV AIDS podcast. However, I think you
miss telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis.
Just before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating
hemophilia called the clotting factor concentrate was developed. I finally
let those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and
(38:41):
completely change the landscape of the disorder. By the time
HIV was discovered to be a blood borne virus, many
of those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to
mention that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies
did not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of
their knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong
public outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story
(39:03):
is not told often enough, and the injustice that these
individuals suffered at the hands of big Pharma is undoubtedly
one of the greatest our country has seen. Uh. There's
an extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called
Bad Blood Colon Cultionary Tale. Anyway, that's about it, uh,
And I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out there is
(39:23):
from Shelby. Shelby thank you for not only that illuminating email,
but also the documentary recommendation. We're always looking for those. Absolutely.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can tweet to us at s y s K Podcasts.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com, and, as always,
(39:44):
ting us at home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com
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