Predicting 2050 - The Power of Fiction

Can we foresee what the world will be like in 2050? I doubt it. No matter how we frame our predictions (there are at least 12 ways to predict the future according to the futurist group Acceleration Watch) we can find ourselves dead wrong—and we won’t be the first. As 2020 approaches, we are still not living on Mars, defying this and other zany projections about our future state detailed in Bob Larkin’s essay on 23 Hilarious Predictions About the Year 2020 That Are Way Off.  

Maybe the problem is taking our reality too seriously. For the fun of it, I turned to fiction to see the predictive “batting average” of a pair of legendary futurists. I read a short story called “In the Year 2889,”  published it in English by the French father-and-son pair Jules Verne and his son Michel in 1889—one thousand years before their title year.  

The “2889” short story turns around a failed prediction—the Vernes are making fun of themselves here. They tell of a man who had requested to have his body preserved so that he could wake up alive in the future. The day has come for him to be resurrected, and a worldwide television link enables all to witness the big day. “The outer world, already notified, was anxiously expectant, for the whole world could be eye-witnesses of the performance, a reporter meanwhile, like the chorus in the ancient drama, explaining it all—viva voce—through the telephone.”

In the end, the man will not wake up. Oops. “Faithburn was dead, quite certainly dead! ‘Here is a method that needs improvement,’ remarked Mr. Smith to Dr. Wilkins, as the scientific committee on hibernation bore the casket out.” So much for that experiment.

Amazingly, however, almost everything this father and son team saw when they looked 200 years ahead has already happened, except for the conveyance of meals by pipes and a bilocatable bathtub (oh well, no prophet is perfect). 

Consider the Vernes’ opening prediction of “modern towns, with populations amounting sometimes to 10,000,000 souls; their streets 300 feet wide, their houses 1000 feet in height; with a temperature the same in all seasons; with their lines of aerial locomotion crossing the sky in every direction!” Today, many major cities exceed the 10 million mark according to the United Nations urban census, and the population of Paris is just about exactly 10 million; the recommended width for an interstate highway is exactly 300 feet according to standards from the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Public Roads; the height of skyscrapers exceeds 1,000 feet (the Chrysler Building of New York made headlines when it exceeded that exact mark nearly a decade ago); and anyone living near an airport can attest to the crisscross of planes. 

The story also describes one Mr. Smith, who “busied himself with examining his accounts—a task of vast magnitude, having to do with transactions which involve a daily expenditure of upward of $800,000.” Today this sum—which works out to $292 million in expenditures per year—seems perfectly normal for a sizeable company. In fact, this is the exact amount of expenditures one major company (MGM Resorts) made in a single quarter a half decade ago years ago (15Q1). 

And the Vernes continue: “Fortunately, indeed, the stupendous progress of mechanic art in modern times makes it comparatively easy. Thanks to the Piano Electro-Reckoner, the most complex calculations can be made in a few seconds.” Take out the word piano and you have today’s algorithmic computer programs. And these are just a few of the Vernes’ predictions that proved true. They even talk about human cloning.

So, if the Vernes could see so well into the future (and at the same time admit the imperfections of futurists), surely we can as well. Maybe the key to prediction lies in art rather than science. It seems that by writing a whimsical short story, the Vernes glimpsed a future that even the scientists of their day could not foresee.