Believe it or not, we are living in a sci-fi movie RIGHT NOW!
I have 42 reasons and even a quote from Steve Jobs to prove it
Have you noticed how extremely advanced the world around us has become over the past century? Even the so-called Third World has seen major technological adoption over the past 30 years.
The 20th century was a period of exponential technological growth and our grandparents remember a time devoid of color televisions, cell phones, the internet and many other objects and services we now consider commonplace. Let’s take a look at some of the technologies that people had previously only read and heard about ONLY in science fiction. Things we consider obvious or even obsolete!
42. The Rocket
First mentioned by Jules Verne in 1865
41. Submarine
Also first mentioned in scifi literature by Jules Verne in his book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, where Captain Nemo (inspiration for Disney cartoon) travelled around under the sea in a ship called the Nautilus. Just to note, there was a submersible single-persion military vehicle developed in 1775. In 1800, a submarine called the Nautilius was built by the French based on a design by American Robert Fulton, but the project was later abandoned. There are also mentions of submersibles in the early 17th century [Source]
40. Taser
Believe it or not, Jules Verne also predicted the taser in his 1870 book book about undersea exploring. It was then called a Leyden Ball and it was a bullet, which
contains a capacitance charge of electrical energy, which discharges instantaneously upon the bullet’s impact — Leyden ball on Wikipedia
39. Newscasts
In 1889, the following promotional card was released documenting how transmitting an opera in the theater might be possible using a complex system of mirrors and lights, which would show the images and sounds in distant locations. This can be likened to the first tv broadcasts or newscasts. We didn’t see a major broadcast like this until December 1941 after the Pearl Harbor attacks, although some broadcasting tests were conducted in the early 1930s.
38. Skype/Facetime calls
Today, we can easily turn on a computer or other digital device and have a face-to-face conversation with people, who are located thousands of miles away; however, in 1889 Jules Verne dreamed up the Phonotelephone, which also used a complex system of wires and mirrors to transmit images over long distances. This was featured in a short story called In the Year 2889.
37. Escalator/Moving stairs
And early form of escalators was featured at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900. The Expo featured many technologies, which at the time were completely brand new and wouldn’t get into the hands of the general public until years or even decades after. The following picture shows a moving sidewalk, which would move people forward like horizontal escalators we now see in airports.
36. Aerial Warfare
The following picture on the left was featured in the Duluth Evening Herald (Duluth, Minnesota) in 1900 with the following description:
Count Zeppelin, the great German balloon-builder, is responsible for a wave of aeronautic enthusiams spreading rapidly over the United States. Our artist has drawn a stirring picture of an aerial battle of the not-distant future. — Paleofuture
On the right, we can see a picture from just 14 years later, when the fictional picture became reality.
35. Streetlights
Although we are today used to the idea of walking outside after the sun sets with relative ease because of street lights in all major cities. This wasn’t the case in the late 19th century when only a few cities had electrical streetlights (gas lamps were still being used through a major part of 20th century). If they did, they would have only been in the city center like Mosley Street, in Newcastle upon Tyne, which was lit in 1879 as the first UK city with electrical lights.[Source]
Previously, only Paris had electrical lighting, which was predominantly demonstrated at the aforementioned Exposition Universelle in 1900. Suddenly lighting up a major part of the city like you can see on the photograph above must have been a fantastical and marvellous sight in the city, which would come to be known as the City of Lights.
34. Flying Buses
The picture below was part of a series in 1900, which tried to imagine what life would look like in a hundred years. Kinda looks like helicopters (or planes) today, doesn’t it?
33. The Segway
The Segway was released in 2001 but the idea for it appeared back on December 28, 1900 in a newspaper called Brown County Democrat (De Pere, Wisconsin). The name for the device was Footomobile. Notice the comical situation in the background.
32. Jetpacks
In yet another picture from the early 20th century, the following 1901 picture is slightly similar to the look of modern-day jetpacks.
31. The World of tomorrow
In 1901 Arthur Palm, a fourteen-year-old student from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, published the following article in his school newspaper (the Excelsior) describing the world of 2001.
How it may appear a hundred years hence, when modern inventions have been carried to their highest point of development that even Edison would feel jealous of the great inventions in the year 2001. In the year 2001 you will see sky-scrapers sticking far above the clouds over 200 stories high. On the streets there will not be any room for street cars, so they will build lines way up in the air, and there will be landings fastened to the high skyscrapers, where the people will wait for the cars. The carlines will have different kinds of names and you will see the name “Manhattan Air Line” many hundreds of feet above the ground. You see air-ships and carriages fastened to balloons for the transportation of the people through the air, and you will often see collisions in the clouds. In one of the sky-scrapers on the 119 story you will see a sign, ‘Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait. — Paleofuture
Apparently, the 14-year-old was inspired by the following picture printed in Collier’s Weekly on January 12, 1901.
30. Maglev trains
Today, Maglev trains use magnetic levitation for propulsion at very high speeds but back in 1901,a similar looking technology (though propulsion type is different) was imagined:
The object figured in the accompanying illustration may be termed either an aerial automobile or a terrestrial aeroplane, for, while it derives its means of propulsion from gigantic air screws, or propellers, it travels along a double set of rails. It has an inclosing aeroplane, or horizontal shield to maintain its equilibrium and support in the air. It is cigar shaped, made of aluminum, hardwood and glass. Electricity will drive the propellers and it is expected that the frightful speed of 600 miles an hour will be attained. — Paleofuture
29. Advertising
The following picture on the left was a political cartoon in 1909 scrutinising the growth of advertising in public places. Well, how does it compare with the picture on the right taken a hundred years later?
28. The future of journalism
On August 10 1912 the following description of journalism in the future appeared in the Chicago Defender:
It will be written by advertisers, and it will contain nothing calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of the young person except cosmetics. — Paleofuture
Try opening up some of the articles in fashion and lifestyle magazine out there today.
27. Tanks
The following picture is an illustration for a H.G. Wells short story called “The Land Ironclads” from December 1903. A few years later, during the First World War, these tanks became a reality.
26. Family SUVs
Here’s a picture of a family SUV from 1916. At the time, they imagined it to be self-driving, which is now slowly becoming a reality thanks to initiatives like Google’s driverless cars.
25. Robots
The play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was written by czech author Karel Čapek in 1920, in which he coined the term robot (derived from the czech word “robota” = work). The story featured what we would now call Cyborgs or human-like robots, which would be hard to distinguish from regular humans. Today, we have dozens of robots although cyborgs in the traditional sense are only starting to become a reality. Try looking at this video to see how dentists are now using cyborgs to train.
24. Flying cars
Here you can see an illustration of a flying car from 1924 and a picture of a fairly recent prototype called the Moller M400 Skycar
23. Cell phones
Tesla first predicted cell phones (portable messaging service) in the Popular Mechanics magazine in 1909. He later even talked about mobile TVs (watching video over these devices) in the late 1920s.
“…such a hand-held device would be simple to use and that, one day, everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it … [the device] would usher in a new era of technology.”
22. Metropolis
The movie Metropolis is a motion picture classic from 1927, which explored the vast differences between the rich and poor classes in a futuristic dystopia. On the right you can see a picture from current-day Brazil.
21. Superman x-ray eyesight
The following tool on the right is called the Prism 200 (ironic considering the name of the NSA program PRISM), which enables you to see moving objects through walls. Kinda makes you feels like Superman, doesn’t it?
20. Apple headphones everywhere
In the 1953 book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury explored many topics concerning alienation, censorship and the sharing of knowledge; however, he also mentioned people wearing “seashells” and “thimble radios”. These could be compared to people sporting headphones in the streets today. This was demonstrated in a 2011 Motorola commercial, which tried to differentiate themselves from dystopian drones using characteristic Apple-like white earbuds.
Ray Bradbury also talked about a digital wall through which people communicated. Not that different from a Facebook wall, is it ?
19. Virtual worlds
In his 1956 book The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke described what we would now consider a video game or virtual reality:
Of all the thousands of forms of recreation in the city, these were the most popular. When you entered a saga, you were not merely a passive observer…You were an active participant and possessed—or seemed to possess—free will. The events and scenes which were the raw material of your adventures might have been prepared beforehand by forgotten artists, but there was enough flexibility to allow for wide variation. You could go into these phantom worlds with your friends, seeking the excitement that did not exist in Diaspar—and as long as the dream lasted there was no way in which it could be distinguished from reality.
I would also suggest a more recent book called Ready Player One by Ernest Cline for some more current predictions of the future of virtual reality.
18. The Cubicles
The 1909 short story The Machine Stops (made into a TV movie in 1966) is set in a world in which
… most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine — Wikipedia
Kinda feels like work cubicles today, right?
17. Braun Apples
This following is not necessarily an example of a scifi prediction but its nice to see that what the designers at the company Braun imagined to be futuristic design in 1960s later became pop-culture in the first decade of the 21st century via Apple products designed by Jony Ive.
16. Flip phones
Flip phones very popular in the late 2000s but became essentially obsolete in the early 2010s. Here is what the TV show Star Trek in the 1960s imagined cell phones would look like compared to a Motorola Razr.
15. iPad
Tablets didn’t reach mass consumer appeal until the release of the iPad in 2010; however, we first saw an iPad in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an iPad-like device was clearly seen in multiple scenes.
14. Automated waiters
There are now restaurants around the world, which completely automate the food delivery process by providing customers with tablets or touch-enabled displays, which empower them to order the food and have it delivered to their tables using an elaborate system of mechanical rails. However, something similar was seen in the 1968 musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
13.Blasters
Laser blasters have been seen in many movies over the past century; however, one of the most prominent is definitely Star Wars. Today, military is yielding many technologies, which use high-energy and sound weapons. We now even have ships, which can use lasers to shoot down drones.
The following picture shows a non-lethal directed energy weapon appropriately called the Active Denial System.
12. Talking cars
The early 1980s show Knight Rider featured a talking car called KITT. At the time, it was science fiction. 30 years later, we can now have Apple Siri, Microsoft Sync or many other systems in our car, which enable us to interact with a digital assistant. Our cars can’t drive themselves yet but it is already in the works (mentioned earlier).
11.PADD
Star Trek The Next Generation in the late 1980s envisioned so-called PADDs (Personal Access Display Device). Guess what? We now have iPads and iPhones.
10. “Laser” Surgery
The audiences of Star Trek The Next Generation were astonished how fast and easy skin healing or even operations were in the 1980s show. We now do some skin suturing using lasers (similar to the picture below) but we can now also do sub-skin vein surgery.
We also have the equivalent of hyposprays from Star Trek, which use high-pressure to push vaccinations through the skin (jet injecting). This technology was around prior to Star Trek but the creators of the show took a bet on the technology as something cool and futuristic. We will see if the technology achieves mass adoption and replaces traditional needles for vaccination purposes.
9. Multiple channels on one screen
The 1989 movie Back To the Future II was set in the year 2015 and predicted some of the technologies, which would be around 25 years later. One of those was a flat-screen TV with multiple channels playing at the same time.
8. Controller-less gaming
In Back to the Future II, a kid in 2015 was surprised when he saw an arcade machine, which required a controller to play the game. Presumably he already had a Xbox 360 Kinect-like controller at home, which tracks body movements to control the game.
7. Digital waiter
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the 1960s featured a mechanical device preparing food but the movie Back to the Future II featured a completely digitalized waiter. Today, there are digitalized interfaces for ordering in some high-end restaurants. Presumably, this will improve over time, so that digitalized celebrities or movie characters can be your waiters at a bar or restaurant.
6. Plastic surgery craze
Also in the movie Back to the Future II, we are told there is a plastic surgery craze in the year 2015.
5. Wikipedia and Multimedia devices
Although the internet was already an emerging technology in 1993, the following picture shows a futuristic multimedia device called the Cornucopia, which would be a stand-alone CD-ROM player working like Wikipedia works today (but you would have to buy CD-ROMs with data and content). This is what the creators Empruve said about the device:
Advanced multimedia systems will become as much an integral part of our lives as the telephone, the television, the typewriter and the book. “Cornucopia” demonstrates how ergonomic a multimedia system can be. The system uses DVI technology and a CDROM drive, and combines an A4 paper white screen and a colour screen (for stills and motion video) with a new control device called a “tadpole.” — Paleofuture
Would you buy something like this?
4. Invisibility cloak
There are now several teams around the world, which are trying out different ways to simulate an invisibility cloak. Active camouflage technologies also aim to simulate naturally occurring instances of camouflage present in animals.
3. Jacked in
When the movie Matrix came out in 1999, many of us couldn’t even imagine all of the technologies we can now use to constantly stay connected and “jacked into” the digital world.
Do you also carry around a phone all the time? Can you imagine using your computer without the internet? We aren’t that different from the world of the Matrix, are we?
2. Welcome, Mr. Anderton
In the 2002 neo-noir movie Minority Report, when the main character walks into a department store, his retinas are scanned and he is immediately identified. His general information, preferences, likes and other information were immediately loaded into the mall’s advertising systems. The ads in the mall started showing directly targeted content based on what the system knew about the person.
We are already seeing this with Facebook and Google Ads all over the internet. For example, re-marketing is the concept of using web technologies to remember that you visited a particular eshop and then displaying ads all over the internet to make you return and make a purchase. A similar concept is used by companies, which use loyalty cards to track your spending habits. Based on what they find, they send you coupons and discounts.
1. Food
If you look at the following graph (taken from an article in The Atlantic), this is how spending has changed in the United States over the past century. While food took up a major part of a family’s budget in 1900, it is now a much smaller part (almost 1/4 of 1900 amount) while entertainment expenditures went up 5x.
100 years ago, many people might have only dreamt of the vast access to food currently available in the United States and many other countries around the world. Of course, there are other places around the world, which are still struggling. In fact, there is still about 1/5 of the world’s population, which does not have access to enough drinking water. However, in general we are much better off than a hundred years ago when things like toilets in the same building (or dare I say, apartment) were just fantasies destined for only the richest and most privileged individuals.
Dream big
My biggest motivation behind putting together this list was that I often hear people saying that there is nothing more to invent and that the future is gloomy.
Just open a book, watch a movie or play a game to get inspired!
You will most likely find dozens of ideas by authors, script writers, scene designers and many other creative individuals, who are trying to create fantastical futuristic worlds. They are coming up with new technologies and business ideas, which will help to make your lives more fun and fulfilling than EVER before.
Many of us are lucky to have access to a lot of wonderful things but it was predominantly human creativity and exciting new technologies, which made this possible.
I always think back to this incredible quote by Steve Jobs:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Thinking about futuristic predictions in science fiction as inspiration for your future projects can be very liberating and I encourage you to play around with the idea and create the future, today.
This blog post is derived from a presentation I made at IstroCon scifi and fantasy convention in Slovakia several years ago. Please have a look through the suggested links at the bottom of the post for a LOT more examples. It was updated in January 2017 with minor details and a new title.
