Remember When We were Doomed by the Coming Ice Age?

"Ice Age"
Tales of Future Past

"By dint of laborious calculation it has been shown that the sun's heat is by slow degrees becoming less and less, and that some day, long years hence, the sun will no longer give out the warmth necessary for human existence. Mounting his "time machine," Mr. (H. G.) Wells plunges off into the future...."

After that quote from Pearson's Magazine (1900), The "Ice Age" entry ends with:

"...If you live in most parts of the world, the words 'ice age' are the haunting promise of a planet shrouded in a funeral pall of ice, cities crushed by relentlessly grinding mountains of ice, and all of human achievement smothered under a blanket of never ending snow as the populace stare out in numbed horror from their tiny hovels, like pin-point oases of warmth, at a world in the hand of icy death.

"If you live in the American Midwest, it means it's September."

I live in central Minnesota, a couple hundred miles short of where the upper Midwest ends and Canada begins.

It's not all that bad, really, as long as you don't mind living in a place where water is a mineral for a fair portion of the year. On the up side, the wide selection of invertebrate blood suckers we share the state with are dormant then.

Tales of Future Past is part of a large, complex website, so I prepared this 'bread crumb' trail, to help you find this and related pages: Tales of Future Past > "Dystopias" > "End of the World" > "Ice Age."

Good luck, and don't let the Martians get you.

If you're particularly earnest about the more recent crises du jour, don't worry: the Dystopias section on how the world will end also has pages for "Overpopulation," "Pollution," and "Vogons."

If this isn't relevant enough, come back in about 22 hours: The Lemming has something on Solar energy lined up for tomorrow morning.

And Next Year's Top Ten Technologies Will Be - - -

"The PC Evolved: 10 Big Technologies for the Year Ahead"
GearCrave (January 23, 2009)

"We’re now one month into the new year. When it comes to computing, this year's CES was largely uneventful and uninspiring. We feel that, in spite of its slow start, the coming year can be a big year for the evolution of the personal computer...."

Their predictions for 'the next big thing' are:

• Dual Screens for Laptops
• 3G to 4G
• Designer Netbooks
  
  (from GearCrave, used without permission)
• USB 3.0
• Touch Screens (a special sort)
• Cloud Computing
• 3D Visual Interfaces
• Number Three: Smaller, Slimmer All-in-Ones
• Intel Core i7
• Solid State Drives (in laptops)

I don't know if I'll come back to this post, a year from now, to see how close GearCrave came in this 'top ten' list. It might be fun, though.

That "designer Netbooks" entry isn't so much a new technology, as marketing and fashion: but it made a fun photo.

Tomorrow's Technology: Maybe

"Tech predictions for 2008"

We'll see how many work out. The solid state hard drive is intriguing.

This is the Future - a Century Ago

"What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years"
(There's a facsimile of the John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., article in a link from another URL, a blog post: "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900).")

"Futurists" and their progenitors have been around for a long time. Here's a look at the The Future that we're living in, seen from about a century back.

Some predictions didn't happen.

• No wild animals, except in menageries
• Life expectancy extended to an unlikely 50 years

Others did

• Telephones around the world
• Trains running 150 miles an hour

I don't think the "Ladies Home Journal" author thought the speedy trains would be called shinkansen.

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UPDATE: December 7, 2007. I corrected an error in this post's link: and added another. Sorry about the bungled link.

Futurists Through the Centuries

"Top 30 Technology Predictions that were Wrong:"
Impact Lab (October 28, 2007 )

Some are familiar, like Lord Kelvin's "X-rays will prove to be a hoax."

Others are not so familiar, like Alex Lewyt's "Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years."

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be

"1900 Predictions for the Year 2000" shows state-of-the-art futurology from a little over a century ago.

My guess is that today's futurists will be as accurate, and as flat-out-wrong, about what 2100 will be like.

Still, it's fun to read.

"The Future Isn't What it Used To Be"

Yogi Berra made one of the most profound statements on how well the future was conforming to predictions when he said, "the future isn't what it used to be"

People have been predicting the technological miracles and scientific cure-alls (or kill-alls) for about a hundred years now, at least. A very few were right, most were wrong, and many were funny.

For entertainment, and a reminder to take predictions with at least a pinch of salt, Apathetic Lemming of the North presents:

A website, and a blog

• "Tales of Future Past," "...settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!"
• "Paleo-Future," A look into the future that never was."
  • Now at a new location: Paleo-Future, paleofuture.com

Individual posts

• "Google as predicted in 1964"
  Web Owls
• "Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)"
  Modern Mechanix

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