Yesterday's Tomorrows
Read about some of the futuristic technologies predicted in the past, then watch this video that shows how those predictions evolved across the 20th century. Some of them seem fantastical—an Olympics on the moon in the year 2020?—but others may already be within our reach, or just slightly beyond (where they may or may not get stuck). With your team, consider: what can we learn about the past from where people thought we were going? Are any of the things that people predicted about the 21st century things you might now predict for the 22nd?
A 1930 painting imagines the world to come; a 1950s ad pictures a dashboard navigation system; somebody once seriously predicted a Moon Olympics in 2020. These 'retrofuturist' visions — flying cars, robot servants, meals in a pill — turn out to reveal far more about the people who dreamed them than about the future that actually arrived.
Key concepts
- Retrofuturism
- Looking back at how the past imagined the future — the flying cars and ray-guns of old magazines, charming now precisely because we know how the future actually turned out.
- Predictions As Mirrors
- A forecast says more about its forecaster's hopes and fears than about what's coming — 1950s dreams of atomic leisure reflect postwar optimism; today's dystopias reflect today's anxieties.
- Golden-age Optimism
- The early-20th-century faith that technology would keep making life cleaner and grander — the mood behind space colonies and robot butlers, why old predictions overshoot in the same hopeful direction.
- Calibrating Optimism
- Sorting which of today's predictions are realistic from which are fantasy — studying past misses isn't to mock them but to judge our own confident forecasts better.
What to know
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01
Old predictions are primary sources about their own time — a 1950s vision of atomic leisure reveals postwar confidence more than it predicts 2020, so a 'wrong' prediction is evidence of what its era valued and feared.
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