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Miracles You’ll See in the Next Fifty Years (1950)
- rienbdj 7y agonoise pollution does not seem to have occurred to the writer
- ghaff 7y agoWhile true, ubiquitous personal air transportation was pretty much a staple of a lot of futurism. I suspect that part of it may be that this is from a time when air travel was nowhere as widespread as it is today--at least normally. As a result, people were probably not nearly as exposed to issues around noise from aircraft as they are today. ADDED: And, yes, an implicit assumption is presumably that these personal vehicles are quiet but it's unclear what the mechanism for that would be.
- bluGill 7y agoA plane ticket today is 5 times less money for the same distance. Note that doesn't account for the vast amount of inflation between then and now.
- ghaff 7y agoCertainly. But that's not personal helicopters or whatever. We ended up without supersonic flights everywhere (expensive or otherwise) but with pretty cheap ubiquitous jet travel.
- saagarjha 7y agoPresumably all the engines are fairly silent.
- Rerarom 7y agoI'd like to read a breakdown on this - what is actually impossible, what is infeasible but will be in the future, and what is something we don't aim towards anymore.
- drapred7 7y agoI think aiming to be a responsible housewife has been looked down upon by American elites for a while now.
- Rerarom 7y agoI meant the non-obvious stuff.
- joezydeco 7y agoI can give you a data point on one. I used to work in a factory/office building that had a water-retaining roof like the one described in the article. I'm wondering if the architect was reading this magazine - the structure was built around the same time. Suffice to say, having hundreds of thousands of gallons of standing water on the roof was not a good thing in the long term. Nor was it good in the short term. The extra weight. Algae. Mold. Icing. Leaks everywhere. Just awful. The new way is to plant a garden up there, which seems a lot more reasonable and probably gives a similar thermal load.
- mdorazio 7y agoHere are some mentioned things we don't often see: Sun lamps on 200ft towers - definitely possible with modern lighting options, but horribly energy wasteful and likely to annoy people more than help them. Thorium power generators - research is ongoing as you can see from the articles that often pop up on HN. The main barrier is still materials science. Atomic "liners" (passenger vessels) - easily possible if not for general distrust and extreme regulation of nuclear power. For example, there are a number of nuclear powered ice breakers in service today. Metal-walled houses - also possible, but so ridiculously expensive no one actually does it. Worth noting is a lot of commercial construction uses metal studs today. Plastic modular houses - also possible (see mobile homes as an example), but the large majority of people don't want them because of the "cheap" factor. Also in many places the property costs a lot more than the house itself, so construction material savings is low priority. Chemical hair remover for shaving - turns out this is harder than it seems. Chemicals that can break down hair have a rather annoying tendency to also be really harsh on skin. Controlling weather - The amount of energy needed to do this is ridiculous, as are the environmental impacts of things the article suggests (covering the ocean in oil and lighting it on fire...) Supersonic/rocket planes - The tech has been available for many decades, but the market demanded cheaper tickets rather than faster planes, so development went in that direction instead.
- lsh 7y ago"is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson’s, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
- jariel 7y agoIt's really amazing how certain writers wax on about the future but are unable to describe the social change which is quite more fundamental. Many social changes that have happened were basically unthinkable in the 1950's, the words literally did not exist to describe them.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThey never thought we'd be poor enough that both parents would need to work to maintain a middle class standard of living.
- jariel 7y agoThis isn't fully true though. 'Middle class' means something vastly more dramatic than it did in 1959. Homes are 2x bigger, 2x nicer, they are fully automated (washing machine, dishwasher, microwave), we have internet, cellphones, 2.5 cars per home instead of 0.8, we travel farther and more often, there's infinitely more variety in food and every other commercial product etc.. Aside from real-estate - a family could live on one income if they wanted to give up all of those things. I'm not entirely disparaging your point, other than to say the entire system has changed, it's not like 1950's standards now cost 2x. But yes, surely it's a weird artifact of classical liberalism that 'freedom' is somehow implied to be 'now you have to work for money or starve'. Edit: I should add, that by any economic definition, if during one era only 'one parent' is working, and during a different era 'both parents' tend to be working, it's just a mathematical reality that those with only 'one parent working' will move down the economic ladder relative to others. This would be true before a single sociological artefact contextualised the fact.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- irrational 7y agoI don't know if that is true. I would say we are solidly middle class (our neighbors on our street include a paramedic, an elementary school teacher, a hospital receptionist, a paralegal, a yoga instructor, a non-profit office manager, etc.). My wife is a stay-at-home mother to our 7 children (though the 2 oldest are away at college) and hasn't had a paycheck since we were in college. We have 2 cars, a house with all the automated amenities, etc. I just work as a programmer making about $100k a year. After taxes, we live on about $4k a month.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThe part they got really right was the progress in material/chemical science and industrial automation (though we don't use paper media for that). The bit about electronic communication (video conferencing and online shopping) seems particularly correct too.
- ghaff 7y agoOne fairly subtle point the writer gets more or less correct is how people will travel more but supersonic flight will be mostly for the rich. (Obviously supersonic commercial flight doesn't exist today but, if it does get resurrected at some point, that will almost certainly be the case.)
- gok 7y ago"shop by picture phone" yep 2 hours New York to San Francisco: we had planes for this in the 1970s but it was killed by regulatory hysteria. Shaving by chemical: chemical depilatory actually already existed for over a century by 1950, not sure why they included this A microwave oven? As the captions says, that was already on its way. Water soluble plates: how could this possibly be a good idea? Waterproof furniture: unclear how this actually makes cleaning easier. Electron microscopes, yep, although again these were really invented in the 1930s. Replacing steel with aluminum in construction: never really happened although unclear why this would be a good idea. The reference to a battery powered automatic insulin dispenser is painful. The technology to do this is trivial today but it's not really available due to onerous medical device regulations.
- mmaunder 7y agoWasn't regulatory hysteria. We just chose a more environmentally friendly and quieter technology to focus our energy. See my other comment about high bypass turbofan engines in this thread.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Symbiote 7y agoI think gok refers to the American (and others) ban on supersonic flight over land, which significant restricted the routes Concorde could fly.
- ghaff 7y agoWell, yes, but I don't call it regulatory hysteria to ban planes from making sonic booms over land so that wealthy people can get from one coast to the other faster.
- gok 7y agoIf you want to be extremely kind to American regulators, you could argue that they banned sonic booms out of an overabundance of caution and wanted to see how bad of a problem it was. But it was clear after years of Concorde flights over Asia and Europe that it was non-issue. They kept the rules on the books as a favor to Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas.
- mmaunder 7y agoThey predicted us traveling by rocket much quicker across the globe. I see this mentioned now and then with disappointment that the one thing close to a rocket - the Concorde - was discontinued. But what happened in the aerospace industry is that we instead focused on fuel efficiency and lower noise, which lead to the high bypass turbofan engine. Instead of accelerating a small amount of air to supersonic speeds, which is both extremely noisy and fuel inefficient, we moved to a system that takes that small amount of air and uses it to drive a much larger fan which then takes a large volume of air and accelerates it to subsonic speeds. That's why 'jet engines' of the old days were much thinner and noisier than the really fat engines we have today. This led to much cheaper and quieter air travel. This is a huge benefit - just not quite as spectacularly "space age" as the sci fi authors of the 1950s envisioned.
- cwmma 7y agoCharles Stross wrote a whole thing on why we point to point rockets weren't a thing that would work https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/01/why-were-not-going-to-see-sub-.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/01/why-wer...
- martythemaniak 7y agoLet me try to break it down: 1. Expensive. For sure, it inherently uses a lot more energy. There's not going to be an economy class on these and they'll never replace jets en masse. 2. Security. Not really. He talks about hijacking/terrorism, but these things won't have pilots or free movement on board. Everybody's going to be strapped into their seat for 45 minutes to withstand the forces and the rocket's gonna do all the flying. 3. Spaceports. See my sibling comment, these will have to be build on water far away from cities. 4. Inconvenient. No, these will be massively convenient if you can afford them. It takes 90 minutes to complete an orbit around the earth, so any two points will be at most 45 minutes away. Spending a bit over an 1hr flying New York-Sydney downtown-to-downtown is incomparable to the slog that exists today.
- FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
- sailfast 7y ago"Nobody in the year 2000 would consider building a house to last more than 25 years" seems so odd to my "modern" ears. Is that because housing at that time was focused on industrialized pre-war / baby-boom production to meet demand and not on dwelling? Mortgages were still 30 years, right? So interesting to read these things. A true time capsule.
- ghaff 7y agoProbably born of thinking of housing as basically a manufactured somewhat disposable consumer good. Something like Levittown was probably not that far off.
- outworlder 7y agoA house, as in the building itself, may be getting closer to being "disposable" if we start 3d printing them more often.
- ur-whale 7y agoIf you think about it for a while, it's actually not such a bad idea provided it could be made environmentally friendly.
- derekp7 7y agoThe problem is that typically you buy a house attached to a piece of property. So if the house is 20 years into a 25 year life, you have an issue of trying to 1) dispose of the house at the 25 year mark, and 2) finding a place to live for several months while the house is demolished and rebuilt. The only way this would work is with manufactured homes. Even then, I haven't heard of anyone having their existing home hauled away while a new one is wheeled in place the same day (except on the lower end, with park model campers).
- jcelerier 7y ago> seems so odd to my "modern" ears. isn't that pretty much the case in Japan ? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
- ozten 7y agoYou'll eat food from sawdust! - Shitake mushrooms! Mass mushroom consumption started in the mid 80s has grown steadily. Not what the 50's author meant, but strangely accurate.
- contingencies 7y agoNot only is it better for the environment (less land and energy use, less greenhouse emissions) but this week in Australia, interestingly as a result of COVID-19 panic buying, meat (particularly mince; also rice, pasta, cereals, toilet paper and hand sanitizer) have been sold out in most retailers whereas mushrooms remain available. Still more evidence of my personal opinion that mass psychology effects of the current scenario are far more dangerous than the disease.
- zaptheimpaler 7y agoI wonder how much of the perceived lack of innovation today is because we now have to divide the same resources among 7.8bn instead of 3bn. In those days I feel like pop culture thought of innovation as 50% better everything, but we had to shift to making 50% cheaper, less resource-intensive everything instead. examples: - making furniture out of sawdust not better wood furniture - tiny scooters and fuel-efficient cars not faster cars. - plastic not shiny metals/wood for most household items - tiny apartment high-rises not better houses
- rexpop 7y agoThese constraints aren't, I don't think, evidence of an impoverished world, but of wealth disparity. After all, there are many people who have better wooden furniture, but market forces squeeze all innovation into cost-cutting measures.
- fallingfrog 7y ago“Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.“ Well we do have edible undies, please don’t give them to your kids as snacks though..
- dilippkumar 7y ago> One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann. The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the computer’s instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950, meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance. Made me smile.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago50-odd variables. Wow.
- lobster45 7y ago“It is a crime to burn raw coal and pollute air with smoke and soot. “ Well, 70 years later we are still burning coal!