6 ms·

Space: 1999 was made in the 1970s, and it's remarkable how optimistic they were about what could be achieved in a little over 20 years. 2099 may have been a mor

Space: 1999 was made in the 1970s, and it's remarkable how optimistic they were about what could be achieved in a little over 20 years. 2099 may have been a more realistic date.

dragonwriter 3y ago
The date, I would imagine, wasn't chosen because it was a reasonable technical projection, but because 1999 is a high-value “pending-odometer-turnover” year.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Actually, I suspect that everything in that show was possible in 1999 (the base, the equipment, etc). But no-one wanted to pay the gazillion dollars it would have required.
  - gvurrdon 3y ago
    Perhaps not the "stun gun". It would be interesting to know if a properly-qualified engineer has ever taken a look at the Eagle and determined if it would be possible (e.g. with nuclear thermal rockets).
- em-bee 3y ago
  maybe the explosion was caused by a Y2K bug
narag 3y ago
It took less than 30 years for the V2 to evolve into Saturn V and moon landings. It wasn't crazy to think that in another 30 years, a full moon base could be built, if only some economic or military incentives had existed.
- hliyan 3y ago
  Perhaps we're going through something similar with computing today. More likely that we're in a brief summer than at the foot of perpetual growth.
  - incompatible 3y ago
    It feels more like "is civilisation as we know it even going to survive for another 30 years?"
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      It felt like that in the 70s too.
      - bregma 3y ago
        I think it was more like "will civilization last another 10 years?" in the 1970s. The atomic bomb was a button press away and the finger was hovering. The population bomb was constantly hovering. The draft saw your friends shipped off as cannon fodder and shipped home in boxes. Heroin addiction was rampant and violent crime was high in the bankrupt inner cities. State-sanctioned racism, sexism, and homophobia caused untold suffering domestically. Inflation was in the double digits until double-digit interest rates caused double-digit unemployment. The air was so polluted in cities you couldn't see, and the water so polluted rivers literally caught fire and burned for days. Then I think of my parents' generation. They grew up with literal Hitler dominating the news. For them, it was "will civilization last the year?". These are better days. Better days are shining through.
      - pgeorgi 3y ago
        The difference is that in the 70s, it was "civilization as we know it survives if only a few people at key points of power manage to keep themselves together" (i.e. not pull the trigger to MAD), while today "civilization as we know it survives if the society at large manages to refactor its consumption habits." The latter seems harder to get buy-in for.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Which is pretty much the plot of the excellent For All Mankind - basically how I expected things to progress when I was a young kid in the early 1970s.
shiroiuma 3y ago
It wasn't just them, it was lots of sci-fi. Just look at the 1968 blockbuster "2001: A Space Odyssey": it predicted much of the same stuff, including a huge moon base, a huge rotating space station, regular transit flights by Pan Am, etc. Or Blade Runner in 1983: it was set in the year 2017, with biological humanoid "replicants", flying cars, colonies on other worlds, etc. Star Trek in the late 60s predicted the "Eugenics Wars" in the late 1990s, along with deep-space spacecraft (one of which carried Khan Noonien Singh so far away that it took centuries for his ship to be discovered by the Enterprise on its deep-space mission). (edit) Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man".
- notahacker 3y ago
  > Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man". Best I can think of was a surprisingly sophisticated 1970 young adult book by John Christopher, which had a mid 21st century Britain run by a Brave New World style low key authoritarian surveillance state divided between overcrowded cities that had very modest use of technology like electric cars and "holovision" and well to do rural areas that have an Amish style renunciation of technology like cars (but really the continued existence of their society depends on tech). Particularly because it lampshaded all the sci fi that was coming out at the time by having a teacher tell the kids "we stopped spending money on the space programme because it was a waste of money"... (Oryx and Crake is very good too, though the sequels lose a bit because it turns out all the cliches about the world outside their gated community are actually true...) The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW Not really. "Inspired by", yes, but I wouldn't say it was "based on" it at all. The plot had almost no similarity. The future predictions were all made by the script writer AFAIK.
euroderf 3y ago
Hah, UFO was set in... 1980!

Space: 1999 was made in the 1970s, and it's remarkable how optimistic they were about what could be achieved in a little over 20 years. 2099 may have been a more realistic date.

dragonwriter 3y ago

The date, I would imagine, wasn't chosen because it was a reasonable technical projection, but because 1999 is a high-value “pending-odometer-turnover” year.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
Actually, I suspect that everything in that show was possible in 1999 (the base, the equipment, etc). But no-one wanted to pay the gazillion dollars it would have required.
- gvurrdon 3y ago
  Perhaps not the "stun gun". It would be interesting to know if a properly-qualified engineer has ever taken a look at the Eagle and determined if it would be possible (e.g. with nuclear thermal rockets).
em-bee 3y ago
maybe the explosion was caused by a Y2K bug

narag 3y ago

It took less than 30 years for the V2 to evolve into Saturn V and moon landings. It wasn't crazy to think that in another 30 years, a full moon base could be built, if only some economic or military incentives had existed.

hliyan 3y ago
Perhaps we're going through something similar with computing today. More likely that we're in a brief summer than at the foot of perpetual growth.
- incompatible 3y ago
  It feels more like "is civilisation as we know it even going to survive for another 30 years?"
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    It felt like that in the 70s too.
    - bregma 3y ago
      I think it was more like "will civilization last another 10 years?" in the 1970s. The atomic bomb was a button press away and the finger was hovering. The population bomb was constantly hovering. The draft saw your friends shipped off as cannon fodder and shipped home in boxes. Heroin addiction was rampant and violent crime was high in the bankrupt inner cities. State-sanctioned racism, sexism, and homophobia caused untold suffering domestically. Inflation was in the double digits until double-digit interest rates caused double-digit unemployment. The air was so polluted in cities you couldn't see, and the water so polluted rivers literally caught fire and burned for days. Then I think of my parents' generation. They grew up with literal Hitler dominating the news. For them, it was "will civilization last the year?". These are better days. Better days are shining through.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      The difference is that in the 70s, it was "civilization as we know it survives if only a few people at key points of power manage to keep themselves together" (i.e. not pull the trigger to MAD), while today "civilization as we know it survives if the society at large manages to refactor its consumption habits." The latter seems harder to get buy-in for.
arethuza 3y ago
Which is pretty much the plot of the excellent For All Mankind - basically how I expected things to progress when I was a young kid in the early 1970s.

shiroiuma 3y ago

It wasn't just them, it was lots of sci-fi. Just look at the 1968 blockbuster "2001: A Space Odyssey": it predicted much of the same stuff, including a huge moon base, a huge rotating space station, regular transit flights by Pan Am, etc. Or Blade Runner in 1983: it was set in the year 2017, with biological humanoid "replicants", flying cars, colonies on other worlds, etc. Star Trek in the late 60s predicted the "Eugenics Wars" in the late 1990s, along with deep-space spacecraft (one of which carried Khan Noonien Singh so far away that it took centuries for his ship to be discovered by the Enterprise on its deep-space mission). (edit) Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man".

notahacker 3y ago
> Overall, I'd say the most accurate sci-fi I've ever seen, as far as predicting things, is the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Running Man". Best I can think of was a surprisingly sophisticated 1970 young adult book by John Christopher, which had a mid 21st century Britain run by a Brave New World style low key authoritarian surveillance state divided between overcrowded cities that had very modest use of technology like electric cars and "holovision" and well to do rural areas that have an Amish style renunciation of technology like cars (but really the continued existence of their society depends on tech). Particularly because it lampshaded all the sci fi that was coming out at the time by having a teacher tell the kids "we stopped spending money on the space programme because it was a waste of money"... (Oryx and Crake is very good too, though the sequels lose a bit because it turns out all the cliches about the world outside their gated community are actually true...) The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >The Running Man was based on a psuedonymous Stephen King novel, FWIW Not really. "Inspired by", yes, but I wouldn't say it was "based on" it at all. The plot had almost no similarity. The future predictions were all made by the script writer AFAIK.

euroderf 3y ago

Hah, UFO was set in... 1980!