
The Predictions of Robert A. Heinlein - danso
http://www.challzine.net/30/30predictions.html
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jackgavigan
My favourite Heinlein prediction is the "Shipstone" from _Friday_ \- an energy
storage device that packs _" more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a
smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an
"improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an
H-bomb an "improved firecracker."_

In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised _" that the problem
was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is
everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients
of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in
green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is
free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.

"Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did
not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was
a bucket in which to carry it."_

I really hope this is what Elon Musk is working on next.

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jeroen94704
Categorizing Heinlein and Clarke as "modern" is a bit unfair to the current
crop of SciFi authors, In my view. Authors like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter
and Peter F. Hamilton (all Brits, coincidentally) go way beyond anything
Heinlein and Clarke ever came up with. This is not to belittle the
accomplishments or significance of either of them, of course, but limiting
your scope to those two disregards the tremendous changes in the SciFi field
in the last, say, 25 years or so.

~~~
ianmcgowan
I would add an Aussie to that list - Greg Egan
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan))

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_\(novel\))
\- this book was as mind blowing to me as Anathem, and bears multiple
readings. I've fallen out of scifi in the last few years, and Egan has sucked
me back in.

~~~
jeroen94704
Thanks, I'll give him a try when I have the chance.

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Animats
Heinlein made a chart of the future for his "future history" series, which,
surprisingly, does not appear in the article. Here it is, from 1941:

[http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/fhchart/](http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/fhchart/)

\- "Transatlantic rocket flight early 1960s" \- correct, Gagarin and Shepard's
suborbital flight.

\- "First rocket to moon, 1978" \- too conservative.

\- "False dawn (of space travel), 1960-1970" \- correct.

\- "Antipodes rocket service, 1975" \- the Concorde came close.

\- "Luna City founded, 1985" \- not even close.

\- "Interplanetary exploration and exploitation, 1995" \- yes, but without
people.

\- "Space travel ceased until 2072" \- so far, correct.

\- "Bacteriophage, 2000" \- A bioweapon? Unclear.

\- "The Travel Unit and the Fighting Unit, 2000" \- huh?

\- "Rise of religious fanaticism, 2010" \- he got that right.

\- "Commercial steroptics - 2015" \- 3D TV, Oculus Rift.

Not a bad track record.

~~~
bane
My guess on "Bacteriophage" could be a general anti-biotic.

~~~
gwern
Yes, at the time there was still occasional thought about using bacteriophages
as treatment for all sorts of infections, but interest more or less died out
when antibiotics turned out to be so awesome:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy)

~~~
jacquesm
> interest more or less died out when antibiotics turned out to be so awesome:

With anti-biotics resulting in some serious issues with anti-biotics resistant
strains of bacteria that might see a resurgence one of these days.

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baddox
What I find interesting about science fiction is how difficult it is to
predict technological progress _consistently_ across different types of
technology.

For example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (written in 1966, set in 2075),
space travel and colonization is much more advanced than it is in 2014.
Artificial intelligence is also far superior. But digital electronics and
computer networking are much more primitive. A portable audio recorder has
only an hour or two capacity, and it transmits data by playing the audio sped
up through the telephone. PCs don't appear to exist, and computer monitors and
terminals are rare. There doesn't appear to be cellular phones or an
equivalent. And there's no Internet. An AI system reads books with a scanner
and a robotic page-turner.

~~~
Dove
"There's no internet" is a rather damning accusation that can be made of
practically every sci fi story written up until there was actually internet!
And even then, they generally didn't anticipate just how _much_ it would
change our lives. Stories set hundreds of years in the future contain computer
usage patterns that look primitive within five years of when they're written.
Amazing!

I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet is,
historically speaking.

I think the classic tropes of science fiction are a product of the era in
which they are written:

Starships must have seemed inevitable in a culture that witnessed the
aerospace industry progress from its first powered flight to landing on the
_moon_ in a few decades.

Androids as stock material and fodder for stories about race issues must
surely have come from a culture that didn't see their programming as the hard
or interesting part of the question. Now that we know how hard it is, stories
set decades in the future are a lot more conservative about how relatable the
AIs end up being, what they can do, how human they really are.

The cyberpunk tropes of lone hackers and underground teams outmaneuvering
corporations and governments seem to me like a big reflection of the hobbyist
PC revolution of the 80s and 90s. They seem quaint now, though.

I found Brin's _Existence_ really refreshing on this front -- the predictions
and tropes seem based on looking at technology of today and extrapolating from
that. I really enjoyed it!

~~~
baddox
> I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet
> is, historically speaking.

I think it's also a testament to how history is sometimes dominated by
paradigm shifts rather than gradual change. Sci-fi writers seem reasonably
competent at predicting future technology when that technology changes
gradually.

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incision
While I get that Heinlein may have intended to make genuine predictions...

 _" Heinlein carefully points out that all good science fiction writers tell a
story first and prophesy second, using arguably the greatest of them all, H.G.
Wells, as an example."_

There's something I really dislike about evaluating science fiction as
prediction in general.

A work of fiction can't be right or wrong, just more or less similar. Flying
cars and geopolitics in the year 2000 are no more right or wrong than the
color of imagined character's eyes.

~~~
V-2
H.G. Wells differed from Jules Verne in that he was more inclined to let his
fantasy loose.

The Frenchman actually criticized him for it:

    
    
       We do not proceed in the same manner. 
       It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. 
       No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. 
       I make use of physics. 
       He invents.
    

And yet Wells, bold as he was, was often right (predicting laser, for
example).

~~~
notahacker
The irony is that one of Jules Verne's best known works is a physically-
impossible _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_ , whilst one of Wells' best
known works conceives tactical nuclear weapons, radioactive waste on
battlefields and MUAD before the structure of the atom was properly
understood, and once the neutron was discovered a couple of decades later was
_acknowledged as an influence on Szilard 's thinking when he actually
identified the potential for a functioning atom bomb_...

His utopias are horribly woolly, but for prediction Wells has few equals

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damian2000
In stranger in a strange land he predicted the waterbed, something which
didn't appear until a few years later, in 1968.

> Charles Hall, who brought a waterbed design to the United States Patent
> Office, was refused a patent on the grounds that Heinlein's descriptions in
> Stranger and another novel, Double Star (1956), constituted prior art.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land)

~~~
seanflyon
> predicted the waterbed

I would say "invented" is a better word.

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swamp40
_> > Among other predictions, he stated that war [with the Russians] was
inevitable; suggested we all build bomb shelters; and be prepared to shoot our
grasshopper neighbors who would want in at the last minute._

Glad _that_ prediction didn't happen...

~~~
jacquesm
Yet. History hasn't quite finished just yet.

~~~
x4m
We love our children too.

------
V-2
_In “The Roads Must Roll " Heinlein postulates a set of roofed conveyors,
equipped with variable speed strips, that run long distances across the
country. A person rides the 'roads' by getting on a slow strip at the edge and
transferring (by walking) to strips of increasing speed; the center one rolls
at 100 miles an hour. It’s a bold concept, conceived ten years before the
rapid development of commercial air traffic and the Interstate highway
system._

That's 1959. Herbert George Wells came up with this exact idea a few decades
earlier (in "When the Sleeper Wakes").

~~~
justin66
It made sense in The Caves of Steel, written several years before by Asimov,
at the much smaller scale of an indoor city. On an interstate scale it
honestly seems goofy and inefficient.

~~~
fixedd
More inefficient than using an engine rated at ~ 25% efficiency to propel
thousands of pounds of steel, glass, and plastic to transport a single person?

~~~
dragonwriter
> More inefficient than using an engine rated at ~ 25% efficiency to propel
> thousands of pounds of steel, glass, and plastic to transport a single
> person?

Sure, as you're moving a lot _more_ material per person (and even if the
_engine_ is more efficient, upright humans aren't optimally aerodynamic -- or
even as good of an approximation as typical cards -- so end to end efficiency
is still going to be a problem.)

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pjscott
I'm surprised this doesn't mention _Blowups Happen_ and _Solution
Unsatisfactory_ , involving a nuclear power plant and the development of
nuclear weapons, respectively. They were both published in 1940. Two years
later, the first nuclear reactor was made, and the Manhattan project started.
After three more years, the first atom bomb was detonated at the Trinity site
in New Mexico.

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whitten
Since an AI named Mycroft (after M. Holmes) is an essential part of the story
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned.

Of course, it depended on trinary circuits and Loglan (a logic based
programming language), neither of which exist in the form mentioned.

There are some modern attempts to develop an AI. I would argue that Watson is
not anything close to Mycroft, in purpose, nor in design.

