Welcome to the Paleofuture blog, where we explore past visions of the future. From flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias.
All in 1980s
U.S. senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was asked on the radio program “Who Said That?” in 1949 what she’d do if she woke up in the White House one day. The senator replied: “Well, I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.”
The world of organ transplants has come so far since the year 1954 when a kidney was transplanted between twins. But if you take a look at the predictions of the late 20th century, we’re not nearly as far along as we imagined we could be.
G. Gordon Liddy is best remembered today as an architect of the Watergate break-in who, after a few years in prison, turned his infamy into a lucrative conservative media career. But Liddy seemed to have aspirations as a futurist, judging by an article in the January 1989 issue of Omni magazine.
Going to the right college is the surest shot at American success. The group most likely to be making America’s decisions in the year 2024 are the freshmen entering Harvard, Yale and a few other schools this September.
There’s a scene early in the new film Civil War that probably won’t strike many people as weird, but it stuck out to me like a sore thumb. Journalists are sitting in the lobby of a New York hotel talking about their plan to leave the city and viewers see one of the reporters is smoking a cigarette. Indoor smoking in most states within the U.S. is a big no-no here in 2024 and this choice was probably made to establish just how far things had crumbled within American society. But it got me thinking about not only whether this was a realistic prediction. I started looking back at how many other times indoor smoking has been represented in movies about the future.
Vernor Vinge, a sci-fi author and former math professor at San Diego State University, died on Wednesday at the age of 79. Vinge will be remembered for his sci-fi novels, including Fire Upon the Deep (1993) and Rainbows End (2007), but the man will also be etched into the history books as a visionary thinker who famously helped popularize the concept of the technological singularity.
Shel Silverstein’s “The Homework Machine” tells the story of a child with what would have been an incredible mechanical contrivance when the poem was first published in the early 1980s.
Playboy subscribers who just read it for the articles opened up the October 1970 issue to a grand promise. In a piece titled “The Transport Revolution,” readers were told that exciting new modes of transportation were just over the horizon. And that by 1985, all our cars would be driverless, our long distance train travel would see us zipping across the U.S. at 215 miles per hour, and gigantic hoverboats would become the norm just off America’s coasts.
It’s become virtually impossible for people here in the year 2023 to deny that climate change is happening, with most climate deniers now insisting there’s simply nothing that can be done about any of it. But the science is settled. Humans are causing the planet to warm through our actions. And watching a TV episode from 1988 lay out all of the facts is pretty shocking in retrospect.
The Kosmos Cafe in Minsk, Belarus was filled with space imagery celebrating the Soviet Union’s leap into space. The social media account Soviet Visuals shared the photo above on Facebook and Twitter in 2020 and it’s included in the Soviet Visuals book.
Jeane Dixon was a celebrity psychic who first became a household name after supposedly predicting President John F. Kennedy’s assassination as early as 1956. Dixon died in 1997, but her 1969 book was filled with predictions for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Dixon predicted everything from the assassination of Fidel Castro to a comet hitting the Earth in the mid-1980s. Needless to say, neither of those things happened.
he predictions of kids can offer a unique view of any given era’s hopes and concerns for the future. And it’s interesting to see how kids of the 1980s imagined their own futures, which were supposed to be filled with robots that could do everything from emptying the dishwasher to helping with your homework.
Peter Usborne, the British publisher of children’s books that were highly coveted by kids in the 1980s, has died at the age of 85, according to a report Thursday from Bookseller.
In 1981, the U.S. Department of Defense compiled a list of nuclear accidents that had occurred since 1950. The list only includes unclassified information, meaning there were likely many more accidents, given the highly classified nature of nuclear weapons. But this list is still a chilling reminder that we don’t just face danger from foreign adversaries like North Korea or Russia sending a nuclear missile to U.S. soil. Our own weapons could create a nuclear disaster.
Many years ago, we looked at the disco-blasting robot waiters that served Chinese food in Pasadena, California all the way back in 1983. The robots, known as Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2, were a star attraction at Two Panda Deli, where they helped deliver food to customers, gaining international attention for their novelty. But when I first wrote about these robots I’d never truly seen them in action. Until now.
Have you ever seen those viral images on Twitter or Facebook that show Time magazine covers warning of global cooling? I see them at least a few times a month, but I’m never sure whether they’re real. As it turns out, most don’t depict what they claim to depict.
Were you alive in the 1980s to see the rise of the kiwi as a brand new fruit hitting supermarket shelves in the U.S.? I have a vague memory of precisely that during the my childhood, learning that this “new” fruit from New Zealand was all the rage. But there were other fruits that were supposed to become mainstream in U.S. grocery stores, according to newspapers of the late 1980s.
Years ago, the entire run of the TV show Computer Chronicles, which aired from 1982 until 2002, was put online at the Internet Archive. But it was incredibly difficult to parse the videos without watching them in their entirety. But now, the GDELT Project has added new functionality that allows user to essentially skim through the episodes based on topic with a new thumbnail interface.
The early 1980s was a rough time for a lot of Americans. The recession of 1981-1982 saw unemployment peaking at 10.8% and GDP falling 2.8%. And it’s with that in mind that a columnist from the year 1983 wondered: Will people of the future—specifically 40 years into the future—think of the early 1980s fondly?
If you were creating humans from scratch, imagining for a second that you were a God-like creature who was building a new planet, what would you want humanity to look like?
