Authors, scientists, philosophers, and countless dreamers have envisioned the future and often their visions are insane...

>So Veeky Forums I challenge you to find a crazy future dreamed up by those long dead.
>EIN

pfft poppycock

Much easier to read now, thanks

Neato. I guess he didn't account for the fact that people are retarded and afraid of anything that might be radioactive.

Fun fact, the stuff they stick in barrels to come out of nuke plants isn't all waste water. Most of it is just trash. Duct tape, gloves, scraps of metal, stuff like that. It's technically unsafe to dump because it was in a "hazardous area" and could have been exposed to even the remotest amount of radioactive contaminants, so it gets canned and shipped like the waste water does. Fucking sad, man.

t. a nuclear engineer who wishes people didn't act like he was some atomic god of destruction when he goes to see his parents in Commiefornia

Yea, kinda the best part of these old predictions for the future since they never had the knowledge of the people becoming afraid towards nuclear energy.
Loved the interpretation, makes me think of this quote. “To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth – all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

>1 outlandish prediction came true therefore mine will

I wish airships would make a comeback. They're actually really safe.

>ywn take a skycruise over the American Southwest

helium will run out

Yea, makes me wish for the old concepts from the 1920 when all the buildings would have blimp docking areas and aircraft landing zones. Pic related.

Sure and on that day the earth will have stopped producing natural gasses because the radioactive decay in the core will have ceased altogether.

Hydrogen is plentiful and safe, the Hindenburg was an avoidable accident and most of the passengers survived.

Presenting the Lockheed CL-1201, a nuclear powered flying aircraft carrier/transporter with a crew of 845, 182 lift-jets to reduce takeoff distance to within a reasonable figure, a 1,120ft wingspan, endurance of 41 days flying time, 11.85 million lbs weight, and a capacity of 22 tactical fighter jets.

h-haha

>we could be working 20 hours a week

Well she wasn't WRONG...

Dunno why, but that concept seems amazing.

>The second most abundant atom in the universe will run out

Statistics would like to have a word with you

This is literally cyberpunk levels of development. If only.

so not enough development? too much? not understanding the comment here. Also if you have a better example then please share.

This is approaching Landkreuzer levels of huge. It would be trivial to track and shoot this monster down. It's the nuclear-fueled version of a dirigible.

Farming in the 21st century.

Huh pretty much every point there came true.

The idea appears to have been more of a support-craft kind of concept. The CL-1201 would never actually go anywhere near combat, but instead would be a kind of quick-reaction-force that would allow you to ferry fighters and supplies anywhere in the world on very short notice.

I wish Walt had lived just a few years more. E.P.C.O.T would have likely been a mess years down the road as American industry declined and the excitement of the bright “American future” descended into today’s apathy eventually.

Would still love to take a peek at an alternate EPCOT timeline and see if any of their urban planning ideas would have worked.

True but that is what makes it interesting. How much they got correct and to what degree along with how far they were off from reality.

Man the ideas of EPCOT, it reminds me of the other failed Disney ideas like Disney's America and the S.S. Disney which would have been a massive floating theme park that traveled from port to port. Wish it had come true.
Pic related

Bus stations of the future

The concept of building and then burying buildings in Lunar soil seems to have stuck.

Well something like that really isn't all that hard to predict by the late '40s/early '50s.

Space travel had been demonstrated possible, and with it the ability to place a nuke anywhere in the world. SAM development had begun in the US before WW2 had ended, and by 1952 the Nike Ajax was in service. Miniaturization and general progressive improvement of both electronics and nukes were also pretty well known at the time, so the general trend of "everything gets more accurate and nukes will get better" is a pretty obvious conclusion. Same goes for radios. The airlift part is a bit different, but it too just follows the trend towards ever-increasing aircraft weights - something Hap Arnold would have been very familiar with.

The fun thing is that a lot of those trends haven't stopped. Missile technology is reaching the point nowadays that people would be mad if they showed them realistically in movies or games because they'd seem unrealistic. Take AIM-9X for example. This is test footage from the turn of the millennium.
youtube.com/watch?v=6YMSfg26YSQ

The one thing that people really seemed to get wrong with those predictions was the trend towards less destruction rather than more. Sure, we can build and deploy a 50+ MT nuke, but 50 1MT nukes at 50 different targets do the job a whole lot better. Warheads have shrunk rather than grown, and we've already hit the point where air forces have slapped guidance kits onto concrete to kill tanks because they can finally be that precise.

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It's true that predicting the lunar landing in the 1940s/50s was a little easy but I don't think that many believed it would happen so quickly. When Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the decade was out the world thought he was mad, mainly because it took so long to reach outer space and reaching the moon seemed like a goal that would take decades to complete.

Also, it is interesting to see how much the scientists of the past decades thought our lust for war would dissipate and our need to build an amazing society would increase but then again that's just a better view of the future, one without war.

“Dear Mr. President: The canal system of this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as ‘railroads’ … As you may well know, Mr. President, ‘railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” — Martin Van Buren, Governor of New York, 1830(?).

are you trying to break my neck motherfuck

I'm lazy. Last one's oriented right, though.

How is this disk a prediction of the future?

what do you know about the future

I know what a prediction is and a disk with a message to an alien life form is not a prediction of the future.

“Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.” -– Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

That's from the 60s, man. It's a an artist's pediction of what info we'd send to aliens if we ever found any. Back when it was up to debate what info we'd send them. Clearly the guy drawing it has no idea what concepts to put, so he's made some stuff up to slap on a gold disc.

Educate yourself.

>The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.
>The selection of content for the record took almost a year.
>The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977.

I know what they are dickweed and I can tell you that they aren't predictions they are simple messages. They aren't predicting anything.

Didn't carriages also go faster than 15 MPH?

Pretty terrible bait desu

wat.
A decently fit guy can run 15mph.
I dont wanna say I can because I haven't timed myself, but I'd bet I could hit 15..
Horses have been easily been taking regular people twice that speed for centurys.
Skiing has been around for a long time, and you can easily hit 60 mph on a nice slope.

It hurts my soul knowing I'm not living in a retro futuristic scifi universe

The fact remains that this is not a photo of those.

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Me too brother, me too. Post em if you got em

There is a reason it's a failed prediction, plus like all governors, you don't have to be smart to be elected. Example: Joe Barton

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If I could find a way to drive on those roads without suffocating I'd be down

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Then he became a president

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Kek

>we could be working just 20 hours a wekk
>15 weeks holidays and retirement at 50

Love this one

I seriously love pictures of Atomic Age visions of the futures. Even the Soviet stuff is so bright and positive about humanity's future.

>O'Neill cylinders will never be a thing
>Gundam will never come to pass
>My great-grandchildren will never shoot down filthy Zeeks

Stuff like EPCOT is why I'd love a Fallout set in Orlando/central Florida (beyond homerism). So much you could do with that concept just between that and Cape Canaveral alone.

The domes over crops aren't that far off. Greenhouses increase the yield on land 10 fold.

Helium running out was literally part of the reason why they stopped with airships.

Are you fucking retarded? We send that thing into space and a lot of very smart people thought very hard about what to put on there.

a horse can gallop at 25 mph easily

>because it's prevalent in the universe, it's prevalent on earth

>the old visions of future France
LMAO how wrong they were

Keynes had the same thought back in the 30s. Since productivity was skyrocketing at the time, he figured workers would become so insanely productive from SCIENCE that they would run out of work and be sent home after like 3 hours a day. At some point recently productivity stopped going up, and nobody agrees what the fuck happened.

Last time I checked productivity was still going up as fast as ever, but sometime in the 70s that decoupled from wage development so that real wages stayed roughly the same since the 1980s, while profits for capital holders went to the moon.

The only reason why we live better now than in 1985 is because technology is ridiculously cheap. You can get a smart phone containing unimaginable high technology for the same price as a steel bar and a couple pieces of cast iron that are early 1800s technology. It really blows my mind how cheap computer stuff is.

There hasn't been a war between civilized countries in over 70 years, so that peaceful vision of the future has come true at least. People dislike war more than ever and mostly reject it as a legitimate proposition.

Cute hands :3

Veeky Forums user getting laid by 2017

I'm so glad we've moved past all that insane pseudo medical bullshit like "nerves" and "bad blood"

What happened is that people would rather reap the benefits of the increased productivity at 40 hours/week than work 20 hours/week and live with a 1930's standard of living and technology.

Yes you can work 20 hours a week, but then you also need to consume like someone would consume in the 1930's. So no smartphones and PC's, not massive color TV's, no 2 cars per household, etc etc.

>Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners
I need that shit.

Eh, it's just an airfield with a dock under it, we could do this if space was actually short, but it isn't.

a) In most jobs you can't choose how many hours you work.
b) At the higher end of the pay scale, sure, you could survive on less. A labourer wouldn't be able to make rent.

Makes sense in theory but that's not how it is in practice. Maybe for upper middle-class and higher, you can get away with working fewer hours if you're fine living a more austere lifestyle, but for a lot of people even a 40-hour work week isn't an option. I was talking to a manager of a Dollar Store whose contract stipulated 60+ hour weeks including one day of working open to close (14 hour day) for only 36k a year. Back when I was a kid working a fast food job for the summer, one of my managers was working three jobs with pretty much all of her non-sleeping time going into them and still only barely scraping by.

The issue very much seems to be wage stagnation, not that people are willing to keep working for more luxuries.

Holy shit

Imagine a flying hotel, regardless of helium

The price of these luxuries is insignificant. People invest less than 10% of their yearly income in high tech devices. That is such a red herring. If you really wanted to live with 1930s technology, you would barely safe any money, since rent, food and transportation have not gotten any cheaper since then.

The indefinite cold war, what an awesome future.

Imagine a future without burning coal, photographs sent by telegraph, and that horses will cost less than A CAR. The future sure is bright.

desu I miss the old fanciful visions of the future, it seems all to often people don't dream big anymore and that prevents us from fixing our issues

That's why I like novels like The Expanse or Walkaway. It really is a continuation of old style dreaming of a better and more just world SF

I think we still dream big but often they use computer-generated images to make it seem so real and so people view it as a future, rather than a goal we must strive for. Pic related

Wouldn't that thing flip over?

Not if you have enough weight in the bottom to counterbalance it.

I've seen the Airlander 10 flying around my area (Bedfordshire, it's based in Cardington) quite a bit in the past few months, it looks really nice sailing through the sky at a relatively low altitude, like a huge man-made cloud. IIRC it's the largest aircraft flying today.