
Miracles You’ll See in the Next Fifty Years (1950) - prismatic
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/miracles-youll-see-in-the-next-fifty-years/
======
mmaunder
They predicted us traveling by rocket much quicker across the globe. I see
this mentioned now and then with disappointment that the one thing close to a
rocket - the Concorde - was discontinued.

But what happened in the aerospace industry is that we instead focused on fuel
efficiency and lower noise, which lead to the high bypass turbofan engine.

Instead of accelerating a small amount of air to supersonic speeds, which is
both extremely noisy and fuel inefficient, we moved to a system that takes
that small amount of air and uses it to drive a much larger fan which then
takes a large volume of air and accelerates it to subsonic speeds. That's why
'jet engines' of the old days were much thinner and noisier than the really
fat engines we have today.

This led to much cheaper and quieter air travel. This is a huge benefit - just
not quite as spectacularly "space age" as the sci fi authors of the 1950s
envisioned.

~~~
martythemaniak
That might not be too far away - SpaceX does want to use their Starship to fly
point-to-point across the globe. I suspect the noise, will make it infeasible
for all but a few major destinations. They'd likely have to have a sea-based
platform 20-30km away from the city, then use a floating tunnel with
Tesla/BoringCo pods the rest of the way to actually get downtown.

Still, it would be pretty sweet. Go downtown, check in, take a 10 minute pod
ride, get strapped into your seat (there's no washrooms, or moving around),
blast off and 45 minutes later you're on the other side of the world, another
10 minute pod ride away from downtown.

~~~
sneak
> _I suspect the noise, will make it infeasible for all but a few major
> destinations._

I think the issue will be more geopolitical than anything. Few national
defense organizations will trust an ICBM heading toward "just next to (no
seriously, it's fine)" one of their largest population centers, even if it is
from someone they consider friendly.

Not insurmountable, but definitely an uphill battle.

~~~
derekp7
And yet they are perfectly content with thousands of inbound jet planes flying
into all their major cities. Which could just as easily have any payload they
want.

~~~
sneak
I have a feeling that if any of those planes were going Mach 30 they would
feel a little differently about it.

~~~
derefr
Would planes really need to go Mach 30 to devastate a city? 9/11 could have
been about planes with nukes on them.

------
gok
"shop by picture phone" yep

2 hours New York to San Francisco: we had planes for this in the 1970s but it
was killed by regulatory hysteria.

Shaving by chemical: chemical depilatory actually already existed for over a
century by 1950, not sure why they included this

A microwave oven? As the captions says, that was already on its way.

Water soluble plates: how could this possibly be a good idea?

Waterproof furniture: unclear how this actually makes cleaning easier.

Electron microscopes, yep, although again these were really invented in the
1930s.

Replacing steel with aluminum in construction: never really happened although
unclear why this would be a good idea.

The reference to a battery powered automatic insulin dispenser is painful. The
technology to do this is trivial today but it's not really available due to
onerous medical device regulations.

~~~
mmaunder
Wasn't regulatory hysteria. We just chose a more environmentally friendly and
quieter technology to focus our energy. See my other comment about high bypass
turbofan engines in this thread.

~~~
Symbiote
I think gok refers to the American (and others) ban on supersonic flight over
land, which significant restricted the routes Concorde could fly.

~~~
ghaff
Well, yes, but I don't call it regulatory hysteria to ban planes from making
sonic booms over land so that wealthy people can get from one coast to the
other faster.

~~~
gok
If you want to be extremely kind to American regulators, you could argue that
they banned sonic booms out of an overabundance of caution and wanted to see
how bad of a problem it was. But it was clear after years of Concorde flights
over Asia and Europe that it was non-issue. They kept the rules on the books
as a favor to Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas.

~~~
edmundsauto
Admittedly, I don't know much about this. But how was it clear that it was a
non-issue, and not just a different cultural preference?

------
Rerarom
I'd like to read a breakdown on this - what is actually impossible, what is
infeasible but will be in the future, and what is something we don't aim
towards anymore.

~~~
mdorazio
Here are some mentioned things we don't often see:

Sun lamps on 200ft towers - definitely possible with modern lighting options,
but horribly energy wasteful and likely to annoy people more than help them.

Thorium power generators - research is ongoing as you can see from the
articles that often pop up on HN. The main barrier is still materials science.

Atomic "liners" (passenger vessels) - easily possible if not for general
distrust and extreme regulation of nuclear power. For example, there are a
number of nuclear powered ice breakers in service today.

Metal-walled houses - also possible, but so ridiculously expensive no one
actually does it. Worth noting is a lot of commercial construction uses metal
studs today.

Plastic modular houses - also possible (see mobile homes as an example), but
the large majority of people don't want them because of the "cheap" factor.
Also in many places the property costs a lot more than the house itself, so
construction material savings is low priority.

Chemical hair remover for shaving - turns out this is harder than it seems.
Chemicals that can break down hair have a rather annoying tendency to also be
really harsh on skin.

Controlling weather - The amount of energy needed to do this is ridiculous, as
are the environmental impacts of things the article suggests (covering the
ocean in oil and lighting it on fire...)

Supersonic/rocket planes - The tech has been available for many decades, but
the market demanded cheaper tickets rather than faster planes, so development
went in that direction instead.

~~~
contingencies
There are plenty of metal-walled houses mate... down under we call them sheds,
fair dinkum.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=metal+clad+house+australia](https://www.google.com/search?q=metal+clad+house+australia)
(Thermal transfer properties are notably different from traditional building
materials!)

Plastic modular houses ... not quite houses but used structurally where
providing novel utility. For example they fill two-part fused thermoformed
plastic containers with water for crowd control in riots. Recently half of
Hong Kong was filled with these.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=water+filled+barrier](https://www.google.com/search?q=water+filled+barrier)

~~~
Smoosh
And steel framed houses are a thing here too:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=steel+house+frame+australia](https://www.google.com/search?q=steel+house+frame+australia)

------
lsh
"is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe
Dobson’s, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household
appointments, and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"

~~~
ip26
_food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor_

I mean, we just had a year of bountiful seedless grapes, and I'm pretty
thrilled about that.

------
dilippkumar
> One of the more remarkable electronic machines of 2000 is a development of
> one on which hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent in the middle
> years of the 20th century by Dr. Vladimir Zworykin and Dr. John von Neumann.
> The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton is to predict
> the weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination
> of calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of
> separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the
> computer’s instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950,
> meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should
> have been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.

Made me smile.

~~~
dreamcompiler
50-odd variables. Wow.

------
sailfast
"Nobody in the year 2000 would consider building a house to last more than 25
years" seems so odd to my "modern" ears.

Is that because housing at that time was focused on industrialized pre-war /
baby-boom production to meet demand and not on dwelling? Mortgages were still
30 years, right?

So interesting to read these things. A true time capsule.

~~~
ur-whale
If you think about it for a while, it's actually not such a bad idea provided
it could be made environmentally friendly.

~~~
derekp7
The problem is that typically you buy a house attached to a piece of property.
So if the house is 20 years into a 25 year life, you have an issue of trying
to 1) dispose of the house at the 25 year mark, and 2) finding a place to live
for several months while the house is demolished and rebuilt. The only way
this would work is with manufactured homes. Even then, I haven't heard of
anyone having their existing home hauled away while a new one is wheeled in
place the same day (except on the lower end, with park model campers).

------
ozten
You'll eat food from sawdust! - Shitake mushrooms! Mass mushroom consumption
started in the mid 80s has grown steadily.

Not what the 50's author meant, but strangely accurate.

~~~
contingencies
Not only is it better for the environment (less land and energy use, less
greenhouse emissions) but this week in Australia, interestingly as a result of
COVID-19 panic buying, meat (particularly mince; also rice, pasta, cereals,
toilet paper and hand sanitizer) have been sold out in most retailers whereas
mushrooms remain available. Still more evidence of my personal opinion that
mass psychology effects of the current scenario are far more dangerous than
the disease.

------
zaptheimpaler
I wonder how much of the perceived lack of innovation today is because we now
have to divide the same resources among 7.8bn instead of 3bn.

In those days I feel like pop culture thought of innovation as 50% better
everything, but we had to shift to making 50% cheaper, less resource-intensive
everything instead.

examples:

\- making furniture out of sawdust not better wood furniture

\- tiny scooters and fuel-efficient cars not faster cars.

\- plastic not shiny metals/wood for most household items

\- tiny apartment high-rises not better houses

~~~
rexpop
These constraints aren't, I don't think, evidence of an impoverished world,
but of wealth disparity. After all, there are many people who have better
wooden furniture, but market forces squeeze all innovation into cost-cutting
measures.

------
dsfyu404ed
The part they got really right was the progress in material/chemical science
and industrial automation (though we don't use paper media for that).

The bit about electronic communication (video conferencing and online
shopping) seems particularly correct too.

~~~
ghaff
One fairly subtle point the writer gets more or less correct is how people
will travel more but supersonic flight will be mostly for the rich. (Obviously
supersonic commercial flight doesn't exist today but, if it does get
resurrected at some point, that will almost certainly be the case.)

------
fallingfrog
“Discarded paper table “linen” and rayon underwear are bought by chemical
factories to be converted into candy.“

Well we do have edible undies, please don’t give them to your kids as snacks
though..

------
rienbdj
noise pollution does not seem to have occurred to the writer

~~~
ghaff
While true, ubiquitous personal air transportation was pretty much a staple of
a lot of futurism. I suspect that part of it may be that this is from a time
when air travel was nowhere as widespread as it is today--at least normally.
As a result, people were probably not nearly as exposed to issues around noise
from aircraft as they are today.

ADDED: And, yes, an implicit assumption is presumably that these personal
vehicles are quiet but it's unclear what the mechanism for that would be.

~~~
bluGill
A plane ticket today is 5 times less money for the same distance. Note that
doesn't account for the vast amount of inflation between then and now.

~~~
ghaff
Certainly. But that's not personal helicopters or whatever. We ended up
without supersonic flights everywhere (expensive or otherwise) but with pretty
cheap ubiquitous jet travel.

------
lobster45
“It is a crime to burn raw coal and pollute air with smoke and soot. “

Well, 70 years later we are still burning coal!

------
jariel
It's really amazing how certain writers wax on about the future but are unable
to describe the social change which is quite more fundamental.

Many social changes that have happened were basically unthinkable in the
1950's, the words literally did not exist to describe them.

~~~
tzs
I remember reading something by, I think, either Asimov or Heinlein talking
about how many people think that the utility of science fiction (beyond just
transitory entertainment) is to predict what technological changes are coming.

The author disagreed with that, saying that predicting future technological
changes is not really important. What is important is predicting the social
effects of those changes. That's what a good science fiction writer should be
figuring out.

They gave an example that went something like this. Imagine someone writing a
science fiction story in say 1890 (although I suppose it might not have been
called science fiction yet) set 100 years in the future in the United States.

Predicting that people in 1990 would have horseless carriages instead of
horses, and they would be widespread enough for nearly everyone to have one is
interesting, but according to author not really insightful.

The useful and insightful prediction would be for the writer to figure out,
say, what affect that mobility would have on teen dating. In 1890, most of a
teen's social life would involve other teens who lived within easy walking
distance plus maybe some farther away that they met at school and either only
socialize at school or at activities that are close enough to be in reasonably
walking distance for both.

But in the future, when families have more than one horseless carriage and
that teen has easy access to one, their social life can involve anyone in
town, or in neighboring towns.

Also that 1890 teen that has to walk everywhere might have limited opportunity
to get of parental supervision long enough to be alone with their
boy/girlfriend. 1990 teens with their much greater mobility can much more
easily get away from prying parental eyes and get up to things that would be
scandalous in 1890.

~~~
novok
I think that also depends on city design too. A teen living in a dense city in
1920 with a working metro had a lot more options than the teen stuck in 1960s
american suburbia or the 1990s teen living with helicopter parenting.

And in the end, it didn't really matter that much, since most teens only dated
people in the same school, church or other social institutions they attended
anyway.

~~~
jariel
"most teens only dated people in the same school, church or other social
institutions"

'Ethnic group' is the primary criterion. That would correlate race, religion,
language, culture all into one.

