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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in. This is part two of
our Weird Predictions of Yesteryear episode. I'm Ben, and you
know what, I already need to correct myself. No, well,
I don't think all of those predictions were all that weird.
Some of them were pretty accurate. What do you say,
(00:48):
Some of them were pretty accurate, Bend. Some of them
were pretty you know, cogent in terms of like within
the realm of possibility. Um, we kind of reserved some
of the more bizarro ones for this episode. I would
say Episode one was mainly concerned with farming and sustenance
and food trends and and maybe you know again, a
(01:09):
lot of these people that are making these predictions, they're
big brainiact types, and so they like to speak with authority.
There's nothing less attractive than like hedging on a future prediction,
because you have to say it with utter authority, or
else you might as well just not say it at all. Um.
So I would say everything that was in episode one,
even if it hasn't come to pass, like the underwater
(01:32):
helped Fields you know, I could see that a world
where maybe there's something like that are certainly there are
like tanks, you know that, uh, where you grow like
hydroponically and things like that. So there's versions of a
lot of those things. Today we're getting into like weird
wild stuff is Johnny Carson would say, and we're gonna
start in the underwater realm um. And but but mainly
(01:54):
focusing on transportation. We're gonna stick stick with underwater for
a while. Uh. First off, in the twenty one century,
it was predicted by the French artists Jean Marc coute
quote case cote ah Casey on the case French artist,
I would argue surrealist artists. Based on what you're about
(02:17):
to hear, Jean Marc cote H and many of his
contemporaries um in the art world produced over a hundred
of these illustrations of what the year two thousand. In
the year two thousand, apparently we will ride on giant
sea horses. Yeah and uh yeah, I love the idea.
(02:40):
I love arts, I love futurism. Giant sea horses would
have to be genetically created. They don't exist at this time. Uh.
By the way, that's superproducer Casey Pagram, who was our
Casey on the case there. Uh, they didn't stop there.
They had something that might even be a little little
bit a little bit more plausible, which is the idea
(03:02):
of a whale pulling an entire kind of underwater bus
of people through the sea. And whales do exist. Whales
are quite intelligent, so maybe we could convince some whales
to help people. Uh. There there's another shot where there's
like a fish race picture a horse race, but instead
(03:26):
of horses, the jockeys are these scuba divers on these
enormous fish. Uh. There are enormous fish, we just don't
know of any that are super down with being ridden
like race animals. There's also a super weird one. It's
almost like reverse fishing, where there are these like underwater
like helmet frogman type figures, uh, fishing for seagulls. Uh.
(03:49):
They are underwater already and they have like presumably fish
bait or some sort of seagull bait. I guess in
this scenario on strings that they're bobbing up to the
top of the water. Then when the seagulls dive in
to get it, they like jerk the seagulls underwater. What
would you want with a seagull? It's bad luck to
kill a seabird. Everybody knows that, who's seen the lighthouse.
(04:11):
But also they're notoriously gamy and stringy and gross to eat. Yeah,
it's more of like a flex or revenge thing, I think,
because seagulls are some of the most cantankerous of birds
up there with the shoe bill. Uh, they're some of
the only birds I don't particularly care for. Well, you
know my position, But Ben, you are a friend of
of of birds in general, and you're right. I think
(04:32):
I've mentioned that the seagull might actually be the origin
of my fear of birds as a small child. I
believe I was dive bond by them. But then you
get into some more like kind of some of these
I think are like they're really styling. I do want
to point out these all come from Uh what I
was gonna say is these all come from the public
domain review. I think this is an excellent resource. If
(04:52):
you're on Twitter or something like that, follow them. They
have the greatest stories all the time. But now you're
going to describe some of these arcs pieces here absolutely
and you can find this specifically at public domain review
dot org. Slash collections slash all separated by dashes. A
nineteenth century vision of the year two thousand and numbers
(05:13):
separated by dashes. When you start doing show notes for
the show, maybe we can um talk about that new year,
new year, new new way of doing things. But um,
some of these I think are kind of styling where
they're like, I don't know that these artists necessarily believe
that in the future would be riding on giant sea
horses underwater. Um. I think it might have been just
kind of like artistic license for like, oh, what would
(05:35):
be the craziest thing that could happen in the year
two thousands. Some of them are more functional, though. You've
got one where it's like a gentleman running an entire
farm remotely from like what looks sort of like a
railway switching panel or like an old school elevator, where
he's got like a kind of like lever, and then
like a series of buttons on this panel all connected
to these like power line looking things that are connected
(05:58):
to threshers that are are running on these lines that
are using them to like guide their path to like
cut the wheat there are like wheats kind of bales,
or maybe it's honeycomb or something. But the idea is
I think that these lines are remotely running all these threshers,
and that one man can do all this work himself.
Uh and he got then he got ben. I think
(06:18):
something that's the most prevalent here is lots of depictions
of flying machines. Yes, I do want to I do
want to pause though before we go on there. There's
one that really stood out to me. It's a classroom scene.
You can see it here on the side. I know
you can see it in tune Old, where there's someone
who looks like an older schoolmaster who's feeding books into
(06:39):
what looks to be a crank operated shredder, and then
these electric these electric wires lead to these headphones and
spool caps and their students just sitting there with their
hands folded on their desk. That technology, symbolically, I would argue,
is already around in the form of audio books and
dare we say it, podcast So I I feel like
(07:02):
that one's accurate. But through the lens of arts, what
happens to the books though bad? It will do you
lose the books? It looks like the books would be
like shredded into pulp and then converted into some kind
of electronic signal that can then shoot through these wires.
It's a very interesting image with this one poor little
boy cranking the crank while the schoolmaster just shoves the
(07:23):
books into this uh kind of like feeder. He's a
human turnspit dog exactly. So. Yes, so this art is
well worth your time if you're a fan of this
kind of fanciful view of the future stuff. But you're
right now. People are fascinated with air travel at this time.
We have to remember that the first flight of the
(07:45):
Right Brothers took place December seventeenth, nineteen o three. And
during this time and leading up to this, people were
obsessed with the idea that we would one day take
to the air. I think it was nineteen thirteen the
first commercial flight occurs from Florida to Tampa. It carries
(08:10):
one person. It was like the level of uh. It
was the level of flex that you would associate with
billionaires traveling to the outer reaches of gravity just for
like a few seconds nowadays. That's exactly right, Ben, And
the thing that's so remarkable about some of these so
many of these images, all of these in this collection,
is that they just have that kind of Jules Verne,
(08:32):
you know, like like steampunk. I don't know if that's right,
but it's kind of this retro futuristic quality to them,
where there's a lot of like flying suits where there'll
be a man kind of in like a winged suit,
you know, up there soaring right next to the to
the zeppelin or or like you know biplane situation. But
most of them are odd kind of styles on that.
(08:53):
Like there's one that looks sort of like like a
hot air balloon basket that has like a helicopter propeller
on the top and sort of this like arrow looking
ballast thing on either side. Um, then you have people
in wings suits flying up to an eagle's nest, presumably
robbing them of their eggs or poaching them or something
like that. It's a little weird, uh. And then you've
(09:13):
got like ones that we've seen in movies like Sky
Captain in the World of Tomorrow, this like image of
the future with a lot of these machines that logistically
don't really make any sense, Like there's one where the
wings on the flying machine actually flap and and have
and has a tail. I don't think that would work.
I don't think that's the way aerodynamics quite functions. But
so you've got a lot of like dubious science and
(09:36):
a lot of style over function here um, and then
you've got like a blimp situation. We know, the fascination
of about blimps and Zeppelin's you know when it comes
to thinking about the future, and a lot of these
illustrations remind me of well, I think they possibly inspired
one of my favorite books, The Kodaks Sarah Finanius, which
(09:56):
is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world. I think, uh, casey, no,
you guys might have seen it the last time you
were over at my house. Did I ever show you
guys that one? If not, I'll bring it in. It's
it's nuts, just check it out. The reason I mentioned
it is because of the fanciful illustrations. But these illustrations, he's,
(10:19):
oh gosh, I'm gonna do it. These flights of fancy
don't come from yeah, don't come for thin air, because
we know that, like you said, no, there was this
rich cultural soil from which they sprang in the zeitgeist
people were honestly predicting that we would by this time
(10:42):
in human history, that we would all have personal airplanes.
And full disclosure, folks, some people do have personal airplanes. Uh,
your faithful, ridiculous historians here, however, we do not. I
think le Bush may have maybe a small prop plane
somewhere in France. But Casey, that's that's more for uh,
(11:03):
you're off the grid work stuff, right, that's true. I
was just going to jump in to say, I it
took me a second to uh to recall the book.
But the Codex is really really worth investigating. It's a
really really cool book. The illustrations are amazing, and um,
it's just one of those one of the kind bizarre
objects in the world. It's really really cool. It makes
no sense either, you know, it's a it's all. It's
(11:26):
from one. But I think he was inspired by a
lot of the art that we're discussing in the opening
of today's episode. And it's funny, you know. The stuff
about personal airplanes, uh dates back to what No. Nineteen
thirty Frederick Edwin Smith published this book called the World
(11:47):
in twenty thirty a d. And he said, everybody's going
to own a small airplane. It's gonna be perfect for
weekend trips. You know, you can go to Greenland and
ski and then you can come back and yeah, so
I will say this, I mean, you know, I think
the closest thing we have to like personal crafts like
that would be the helicopter, which is obviously you know,
(12:09):
still within only within the realm of like you know,
super super high level wealth. Um. Because we were talking
off air, it would be very difficult to to like
logistically deal with like the traffic of like everyone having
an airplane, and just like air traffic as as difficult
as already is for commercial flights, can you imagine like
(12:31):
having everyone like have an aircraft and then how would
you deal with that? You'd have to communicate with some
sort of air traffic control or like have really really
good radar. I don't know what do you guys think?
What would be What would life be like? I feel
like there would be just crashes, like just wreckage falling
out of the sky left and right on the daily.
This is a longstanding uh. I won't call it an argument,
(12:55):
We'll call it a healthy conversation I had with my
my my old rider Die Scott Benjamin on our show
car stuff. Flying cars are one of those things that
are always eternally just on the horizon. The only way
they could happen safely is if they are autonomous vehicles
controlled by a grid. That's the only way it can happen. Otherwise,
(13:16):
flying cars are still one of those things where it's
a matter of um, how's the best way to say it.
It's amazing if I have a flying car, says one person,
and no one else does. But it's a blood bath
if everybody has a flying car. It just we don't
have the skills as human operators to live in a
world of personal flight machines in a safe way unless
(13:41):
we have a huge jump in technology, or unless they're autonomous.
Im and I say that as someone who does think
the idea is really cool. But even if you gave
everybody on the planet their own personal bicycle, who still
see tons of accidents, we're just not ready for individual
(14:01):
flying cars unless they're robot controlled. That's right. You made
the really good point off air, Ben. We were talking
about autonomous cars and how that's sort of becoming less
of a priority. I think when we say uber is out. Yeah,
and you made the really great point that autonomous vehicles
only works if it's a hundred percent opt in. Like
when you have any level of human error involved in
(14:24):
the equation, it screws up the whole algorithm and makes
the whole thing dangerous. So it's kind of an all
or nothing situation, right, Yeah, that's true. Like, imagine a
line of dominoes or whatever pattern dominoes you want to imagine,
and each of those dominoes is an autonomous vehicle except
for one, and the one domino is uh not controlled
(14:47):
by the falling of the other dominoes. So when it
is supposed to move with the system, it just doesn't.
The system automatically breaks because of that one domino. That's
a very lazy way to put it. But we're working
live here, knowl or work and live. Also unrelated to anything.
Did you see that meme? I didn't realize this, but
the original map max takes place this year. Oh no,
(15:09):
where we're getting there, we're not too too off. Um yeah,
it was really interesting stuff. And um, you know, I
think one thing that we have seen over time, we
know this to be true. We always talk about how
life expectancy back in the you know, olden days of
life on the prairies or you know, in the medieval times,
life expectancy was not good. And that was because you know,
(15:31):
there were plagues and there was really bad ideas when
it came to medicine and treating illnesses and things that
would actually make you get sicker and very uh, you know,
poor conditions when it came to childbirth, thing and your
chances of living through bearing children were super low. Um. So,
as we've seen technology progress and you know, humanity move forward,
(15:53):
people's life expectancies that have seemed to jump. Um. But
one thing that was predicted because of technology and the
very thing in the twenty first century was that we
would live to be old, like really old, like really
really old. People have been thinking about this for centuries.
Benjamin Franklin, the One and Only Benny f had even
(16:16):
written about this as far back as the late seventeen
hundreds and sev who wrote a letter to Reverend John
Lathrop where he said, you know, within a few years,
we're gonna live as long as those people from the
Old Testament from the Book of Genesis. We're gonna be
like Noah will be nine fifty years old. Who is
(16:37):
that super old one Methuselah. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
nine hundred and sixty nine years old. I think Methuselah
made it. And we can go into where that comes from,
maybe on stuff they don't want you to know. Check
out that show. But the weird thing is just like
the pattern we established in part one of our Predictions episode.
The weird thing here is that it's an extreme claim,
(16:59):
an extreme addiction, but it appears to have some degree
of accuracy. People are living longer, people are healthier for
longer in many parts of the world, And if you
look at the science on the horizon, the medical research
on the horizon, then we may be able to extend
(17:21):
people's lives. Currently, we can't extend someone's organic life to
almost a thousand years, but we may be able to
an independs. We're waxing philosophical. We can get to this part,
but we may be able to extend someone's life uh
indefinitely by making a copy of their mind on a
(17:46):
on a digital platform like right, like turning their mind
into code, and then keeping that mind on a hard
drive somewhere or in a cloud. That's that will probably
happen before we can get to years old and still
be hail and hardy. But you know, I've always I've
always been interested in this. This is a question for
you guys. Given the option, would you want to live
(18:10):
for nine hundred plus years? Let's say, let's not make
it a monkey spawl situation. Would you want to live
for nine hundred plus years if you knew you would
be relatively healthy until say, like the last five years.
It's a hard one, man, because you know, you might
say it when you're young with then realize that you
just get bored and you just don't know. Maybe it's
(18:31):
like the mind is a monkey's pat situation, or it's, uh,
you know, a devil's bargain. You think of like the
like interview with the Vampire and all these characters that
kind of live to see all their friends die, and like,
I don't know, maybe if I knew that everyone that
I loved was also going to live that long, then
I'd be cool with it. But I wouldn't want to
like outlive everybody in my life and then be sad
(18:52):
and alone living in some sort of like virtual reality
brain cloud machine. Yeah, what if you could do it physically?
I mean, I'll tell you, I would immediately go to space,
and I would be like, all right, I got nine
hundred and fifty years, but just spend the first two
fifty traveling out somewhere. I'm just gonna turn around and
come back. It sort of makes me think of the
(19:13):
concept behind this really cool Philip K. Dick book called
yubick UK. Maybe it's the idea where people are able
to actually die uh and through this corporation um, their
bodies are kept in cryo state uh and their minds
are like put into this cloud type scenario, so they're
(19:33):
able to kind of like their souls are able to
live on even if their bodies of actually or their
brains have died. I'm not remembering it very precisely, but
it is. Again a lot of these ideas, it makes
sense that they're coming from these science fiction writers or
people like that, because so much of science fiction is
just like thought experiments about like what if, like we
progressed as a society, just this one little thing a
(19:55):
little further than is when they aren't grasp right now,
how would that change our inner actions with each other
and with society in general. And I think that's why
people still love science fiction. To this day. Yeah, yeah,
and also allowing that vein. If you enjoy the Philip K.
Dick story that we'll just recommended, I think you'll also
enjoy Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neil Stevenson, which
(20:18):
has a very similar kind of thing. The only catches
and this isn't a spoiler, but the only catches. The
virtual world in Fall or Dodge in Hell is uh,
for some reason, a medieval fantasy world. So if you
like Neil Stevenson, he's weird. If you like Neil Stevenson,
you haven't read him yet. Check that up. I read
(20:39):
one of his an audiobook form that I can't remember
the name it's about. It was about like a lot
of things. Um. It was about like a a like
gold farming in dungeons and dragons in like, um, what's
that game that online game World of Warcraft where you
can literally like gold, like farm for gold and then
sell it for real money m D. Yeah, it's about
(21:01):
like a like some sort of worm, um what do
you call it, Like an invasive piece of malware? Um,
And like a heist, like an online highest of all this,
like you know, farmed gold and espionage. And he's just
he's really all over the place and really really interesting.
And I believe he wrote snow Crash as well, if
I'm not mistaken. Yeah, he wrote snow Crash. He wrote Anathema,
(21:22):
which is a book I I dearly love. But yes,
Neil Stevenson is another iteration or his work is another
iteration of this larger pattern that you just outlined all
of science fiction through thought experimentation exploring the possibilities of
the future world. And now that we're talking sci fi,
(21:47):
we can go to another very sensitive topic. Uh spoiler alert.
You don't have to be a fan of history to
realize this. People, since people existed, have always has been
talking about the weather. We used to have entire like
religious things built along the passage of the seasons and
the weather, and we still do a degree do. One
(22:09):
of the things that people predicted back in the early
nineteen hundreds is that one day, perhaps in the coming century,
we would be able to control the weather, specifically to
make rain. On January six, Iowa's Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette
(22:30):
came came out with this article that said, yes, we
were one day going to be able to control rain
in the twenty one century. They said we will be
the um masters of moisture. I just made that up.
They would have much better, a much better phrase. But
that turned out to actually be sort of true, which
(22:50):
is amazing. Well, I mean we've talked about this before
and whether we can call it actually whether control or
not is maybe debatable. But the idea of cloud seating,
like you can pump stuff up into clouds using what
is it? Like, Oh, I am so some kind of
like chemical that you can use um and you can
make it rain. But that doesn't mean that you can
(23:12):
make it not rain, you know what I mean, Like,
you can't really control it if you can only work
it one way. But but you also, do you really
see that used during drought? I mean, we still obviously
have terrible droughts. We haven't cracked the code on how
to like not have droughts, so obviously this cloud seeding
thing will only get you so far, right. Yeah, See,
that's the problem. The concept of cloud seeding has been
(23:34):
around for a for a while now. It wasn't around
nineteen ten, but it came It's been around for decades
at this point, as silver iodide particles are injected into clouds. Yeah,
and the problem is it's a drink your milkshake situation
to a degree, because that cloud seeding does not create water.
(23:57):
It gathers water to these clouds, and then that water
becomes rain. So you're taking that water from somewhere. The
government of China just a few weeks ago in December,
they announced that they're going to expand their weather modification
program to get this cover two point one million square miles.
(24:19):
That's more than one and a half times the size
of India. So where's that water coming from. They're they're
using it to combat drought. But but I love your point.
I think you make a fantastic point. We know how
to start the process, but it's it's maybe a little
optimistic to say we know how to control it. Right,
that's right, Ben. Didn't China use cloud seating as like
(24:41):
a kind of special effect during the Olympics to like
do some kind of crazy display during the opening ceremonies. Yeah, yeah,
I think you're correct. I think you're correct. No, Um,
I didn't personally see it, but it's definitely a flex
that is within their uh weather wheelhouse wheelhouse of weather,
oh will House of weather w o W like World
(25:04):
of Warcraft. Wow, indeed. Yeah, the headline from Business Insider
from sixteen is China spent millions on a shady project
to control the weather ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and
and that millions is thirty million dollars and their version
of it involved shooting quote salt and mineral filled bullets
into the sky in order to make it rain, uh,
(25:26):
for the you know, for entertainment purposes. So yeah, we're like, like,
we're sort of there. I don't know that this is
something that like, surely some there's some research going into it,
but it's not something we hear about a lot, and
it certainly doesn't seem to have solved drought or wildfires
or like any of the like things that the weather
does that totally screw us over as human beings. So
(25:47):
I would say this is a no that we have
not figured out how to control the weather wheeled it
to our our own purposes. Yet Yeah, I am unfortunately
tempted to agree, man, because we also see other predictions
about whether that are incredibly optimistic, because the weather has
kind of gone down hill over the past a few centuries.
(26:10):
There are people who predicted that hurricanes would one day
be a thing of the past nine popular mechanics. A
fellow named Waldemore camp Ferret said that hurricanes are going
to be a non issue by the year two thousand
and his he said there would be a non issue,
not because we would prevent them from forming, but because
(26:31):
once we saw one over the ocean, we would start
a large oil fire across the water, drawing air from
the region and and and somehow ending the hurricane. He
also thought we'd be able to divert storms, etcetera. He
was incredibly wrong on multiple accounts, but you know he
(26:53):
was doing his best. I guess. By the way, Tesla
also was incorrect with his uh, his predictions about weather.
I think he said we would end a forestation and
prevent forest fires smoking the bear would be disappointed. Um,
but it still is up to you to prevent forest
fires because we haven't figured it out like as a collective,
(27:14):
so each individual has to do their part. Um. But yeah,
So like another funny weather related one. And this is
sort of like in the the stuff kind of category, right,
like what will what will our stuff be like in
the future. Well, according to Valdemar camp Fare, in the future,
everything in our homes will be waterproof. Another one of
(27:37):
these like underwater dwelling kind of future scenarios. Um. He
believed that everything in the future, including the drapes, uh,
you know, rugs, upholstery on couches, anything, anything you can
put your hands on, would be made of waterproof plastic.
Remember when plastic was like the wave of the future.
(27:58):
You know that this seems to be from that kind
of mentality that everything should be made of plastic. Is
it's the wonder material. If only they knew about nanoplastics
and you know, gives this all cancer um topic for
another day. And that our homes would have like built
in drainage systems, like in the floor so after you know,
(28:20):
we would literally be able to hose down everything in
our house to clean it off, and then the water
would just you know, bloop bloop down the drain and
then they like car wash style, there'd be a blast
of heated air that would try everything off. This is uh,
this one is absurd. I have to say maybe maybe
the most we've got. You know, we have a thing
(28:40):
like this in bathrooms in restrooms in different parts of
the world. Like you'll go to a hotel or a
hostel maybe and you'll see that the the entire restroom
is the shower area. Have you ever seen those? They've
got like the the Fawcett hooks to uley into the
(29:01):
sink and there's a drain just in the middle of
the floor. The commode is still there. It's just when
you want to shower, you just hit a switch on
the sink and then you take the shower head off
the rack. Yeah. Also great, uh for like a murder room,
you know, if you need if you need such, because
then everything just drains down the drain and you can
(29:21):
rinse it all off and you got a fresh start.
But yeah, this is this is true, Bend that we
do have something like this, but they're all kind of
more in the realm of bathrooms. Or possibly you might
have a drain in a garage situation for car wash maybe,
or you know, something like that, like a foot rinsing
station if you live by the beach. Yeah. I like
that you mentioned I like that you mentioned kill rooms.
(29:43):
Though that's gonna sound weird out of context. We're going
somewhere with it because I immediately thought of of the
show Dexter. You remember Dexter, of course, of course, so
Dexter had this this pretty consistent depiction of a kill
room on television. And people will argue all sorts of
(30:05):
things about television and the things depicted upon it, But
there were a lot of predictions about the future of
television in the twenty one century. Imagine so like, according
to some of these futurists, by this point in history,
we should be able to watch a show like Dexter,
or let's take another example, watch a show like Hannibal
(30:27):
and smell uh the food cooking or feel the texture
of of different different things depicted on the show. Nicholas Negroponte,
who was a former director of m I T S
Media Lab, said that we'll have full color, large scale
holographic television with force feedback and old factory output by
(30:50):
the twenty one century, meaning that you could see stuff
on television and you would feel it and you would
smell it. Uh. Here's the thing, man, I don't know
if I want that. Hmm No. And honestly, I think
attempts to do stuff like this it which is still around.
I I think I think three d uh cinema is
(31:12):
a gimmick and it hurts my eyeballs and it makes
me kind of want to Recoil and horror. I don't
really care for it. And I went and saw a
movie with my daughter and her friends. It was an anime.
And there's this like, I don't know, they call it
four D theater at the fancy movie theater pre pre
COVID times, where the seats actually move around. They kind
of jerk you around, and they're a little spritzer's on
(31:34):
the side of the seats that like shoot puffs of
air at you, and there's like air stuff happening, and
even moisture and uh, possibly smells. I don't recall. There
were no smells in this one. But um. Also at
the the Lego Land at one of our malls here,
they have a four D cinema that does involve smells. Um,
(31:54):
and it's just so gimmicky and I just don't see.
It doesn't really integrate into like the experience of it,
Like I get what it is, but it doesn't really
add anything to it other than like, oh, this is cute,
you know what I mean. So I don't know. I
know that there have been some companies doing research into
how to create a smell machine, but I, yeah, I'm
(32:17):
with you, man, I don't I don't know if I
really want to I want to smell what I'm watching,
or if I necessarily want that tactile feedback all the time.
And I agree with you. I think a lot of
us in the audience today can remember how television manufacturers
had this ill fated push to create three D at
(32:38):
home television's and it was a top down push and
a lot of people didn't like it. So it's not
just a question whether the technology exists, it's also a
question of whether there's a demand for it. So let
us know if you're a fan of smell a vision
and why. There's another question here. I think it's it's
(33:03):
one that we'd be remiss if we didn't mention. It's
the world of medicine. We know that predictions of future
miraculous cures are a tail as old as time. Back
in there was a Swiss doctor named Francois Odi who
said that by this time, in this century, by the
(33:25):
twenty one century, all the victories that were the pride
of brilliant surgeons will be forgotten, replaced by the discovery
of quote, a substance which, in the form of a capsule,
will capture the sources of energy that will bring recovery
within hours. So it's just like one miracle pill for everything.
What a world that would be amazing, right if Yeah,
(33:46):
I mean it would be amazing you sure, But is
that not that's like not how medicine works, right, There's
no one pill to cure them all, like Lord of
the Ring style. I mean, there's like nuances and each
individual patient's individual malady. This is very like utopian, future
sci fi type stuff way outside of the realm, just
(34:07):
like a pill that is like your meal of sustenance.
This I don't know that there's any scenario where this
would make any kind of sense unless it was like
may of like nano beings or something that could then
just like zoom around inside your body and find the
particular part that it was ailing you and then fix
you up. Yeah. Yeah. The quest for a panacea is
(34:28):
a long quest, and it's one that hasn't hasn't reached
an endpoint yet. I think you're right, you know, if
there's something that would be analogous to a pill of
this sort, it would have to be some kind of
nanotechnology that would be able to diagnose and immediately treat
(34:49):
your your body and everything that ails it and then
at that point you would just need to take it
as soon as possible, take it before your six so
it could apply preventative treatment. So far has Odie's prediction
has not come to pass, but we still have several
years left in the twenty one century. To say the least.
One of my favorites, this is so weird. One of
(35:12):
my favorite concepts. I had not heard of this before
is the concept of the grouch pill. Yeah. I mean,
let's let's be real. I mean, we'd certainly have something
approaching this, uh in terms of antidepressants, but they wouldn't
have thought of it quite as high mindedly back in
nineteen sixty six. Uh. They were. This was back when
(35:33):
KELP was really big again, the kind of the health
food driven economy um, and they were thinking about how
can we improve relations between married couples when one of
them is in a particularly nasty mood. Um, and the
Rand Corporation, you'll recall, who are the ones that sort
of set forth this whole idea of the underwater fields
(35:54):
of KELP and as far as the eye can see,
tended by frog mem um. They described a world where
you could pop down to the corner drug store, buy
some anti grouch pills and slip them into their coffee.
That's basically, ah, you know, a UM encouraging you to
drug your partner, essentially, But we can leave that aside
(36:16):
for now. But of course this is another kind of
like very simplified version of what antidepressants are. They take,
they work differently on different people, they take quite a
long time to actually kick in. It's not something you
can just dose somebody with and then magically they're happy.
I mean, sure there are drugs like that, but those
(36:36):
are called like hard drugs like heroin or cocaine that
may make you happy instantly, but then long term effects
of those are addiction and extra grouchiness or worse. Yeah. Absolutely,
so again we see there's some real world things that
could be called grouch pills. But the problem is, as
(36:58):
you said, no, uh, I think the problem is in
the specifics of that prediction. I don't think you should
unknowingly drug your partner. Is that is that a hot take?
I hope not. I feel like if you have a
romantic relationship with someone should be founded on trust rather
than surreptitiously drugging them, And in that way, I would
(37:18):
I would deem this a less than optimistic prediction about
the twenty one century. Now, so far, folks, so far,
dear ridiculous historians. We have been pretty uh, pretty honest,
but pretty optimistic as well with our predictions. We've been
talking about people saying nice things. People weren't always saying
(37:39):
nice things. In fact, there were a few less than optimistic,
somewhat strange predictions about the twenty first century. Uh No,
you know, the weirdest one to me is the future
humans one. This is where things get pretty interesting. This
is like sort of in the realm of like body
modification or like, you know what we evolve to be
(38:01):
a certain way. I mean, yeah, there's this idea that
seems really strange in dystopian that in the future humans
will only need one eye. We'll all be cyclops ees.
This was put forth by Dr Thomas Hall Shostad in
article uh called the Face of the Future, and he
(38:23):
says the future I will be in the center of
the face, below a very high forehead where the bridge
of the nose once rested. We won't need in the
where we're going, we won't need noses. That was back
to the future reference. The doctor said that the human
eye originally had evolved to see into the distance. But
(38:44):
we don't need that anymore because we're not like hunters,
you know. We we we get our food served to
us in pill form. All we need to be able
to do is read and write and uh repair watches.
He says, also cut gems. These are all very you know,
modern things. Uh, and look at pictures and so forth. Um.
And he says the cyclopean I would evolve to accommodate
(39:06):
all these close strange tasks and and pastimes. Wow, jeez,
that is that's a lot. That's a lot. That guy's
a doctor, too, has a very low opinion of us.
I don't know how serious that prediction is, but it
seems like he's being he's being sincere, you know. Um.
And then, of course there's a lot of cantankerous stuff
(39:27):
about the way new technologies will affect future humans. One
Time article from ninety one said that people are becoming
less literate due to the rise of television and said
that eventually people in the age of television would not
(39:48):
be able to read. Uh. Specifically, this writer said, by
the twenty first century, our people doubtless will be squint
eyed hunch backed and fond of the dark. But why
am I carrying on like this? Chances are that the
grandchildren of the television age won't know how to read this.
(40:08):
Tut tut, What a weird what a weird diss So
hopefully that's a little bit of satire. We know that
people are encountering literature in different ways, but it's not
like literature no longer exist. I know a lot of
people who read books. I would say, I would say
maybe this writer from the nineteen fifties should consider directing
(40:30):
their fire at the rise of the calculator. How many
people can easily do somethings. When's the last time you
had to do some long division, for instance, without tech assistance?
A million percent? And we've talked about this so often
where it's like do our brains how do they change
based on the information that we no longer need them
(40:50):
for like, uh, you know, remembering phone numbers or whatever,
Like do they fill that space up with other stuff
or do we just kind of lose it? Is like
I use it or lose this situation. I know that
you know, the mind and is very elastic and has
a has a way of adapting to things. Like that.
But it is an interesting thought, especially when you think
about the extreme kind of evolution that he's describing here,
(41:11):
which would presumably take like millions of years right to
evolve into having a single eye. That's that's not the
kind of thing that would happen like in anyone's lifetime. True, true.
And I think the evolution of humanity is now a
conversation with technology. But I don't I don't think television
is going to render people a literate Uh, maybe it
(41:35):
just changes the way we encounter literature. So let's bring
it all the way back around to the very beginning
of part one of our Predictions episode. Nicola Tesla. He
had some really really nice, optimistic predictions to um and
I don't want to say they're wrong, because I also
(41:55):
strive to be optimistic, But I will say we have
what we have, like eighty eighty years to work on
these alright, Well, what what what are some of your favorites? Man? Well,
I don't know. I mean, there's a lot. There's so
much that we've covered, so many weird ones, like pretty
close to accurate ones, ones that were seeing little shades
(42:16):
of in our day to day lives. A couple I
want to end on on Mr Tesla because he did
make a couple of fun ones that actually have come
to pass in very, very real and meaningful ways, one
being the whole notion the concept of a smartphone, or
let's just call it a cell phone. Um. He said
(42:37):
in a nineteen o nine interview with The New York
Times that was published in Popular Mechanics. Quote, h it
will soon be possible, for instance, for a businessman in
New York to dictate instructions and have them appear in type.
In London or elsewhere. He will be able to call
from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber, even
uses the word subscriber in the world. It will only
(42:59):
be necessary to carry an expensive instrument no bigger than
a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere
on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles,
one may listen to or transmit speech or song to
the uttermost parts of the world. Wow. Amazing, Yeah he was.
He was spot on with this one, which gives us
(43:22):
a little hope that maybe he'll be He'll one day
be right with his prediction that news headlines won't focus
on crime and politics in nine and Liberty magazine. He said,
today the most civilized countries of the world spend a
maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education.
The twenty one century will reverse this order. It will
(43:45):
be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die
on the field of battle. How amazing would that be? Nick,
If you're listening, I hope you're right. I guess he's
not familiar with the expression. If it bleeds, it leads.
I still seem to operate rarely under that principle. UM,
So I would say that's a big no, but would
love to see that happen. It's going to require a
(44:06):
whole lot of consensus and a lot of just changing
of attitudes, you know, um, and who knows? I mean,
was a rough year, um moving into one. It's it's
it would be foolish to think that all of a
sudden things are going to change for the better overnight.
But it does feel like the discourses maybe moving towards
something more representing a consensus or a little bit more
(44:29):
do they what is the word? Uh? Lowering the temperature
of of of discourse and of rhetoric and all of that.
So we'll see UM again like you said, Ben, I
too like to be optimistic. Uh. One thing that Tesla
absolutely got right more than a dred years ago. That
isn't a particularly I don't know, it's it's not net unpositive.
They're certainly positive uses for these things. But the idea
(44:51):
of unmanned aerial vehicles are what we love to talk about,
you know, on stuff that I want you to know,
UM drones, idea of drone warfare um and Nicola. Tesla
actually had a pretty optimistic view of what these devices
would accomplish. He uh said, he actually has a patent
(45:12):
for something resembling a drone. Uh. It was it's a
like a sub whatever, like a ship, like a drone ship.
But he believed that radio waves would be able to
use be used as communication technology that would transmit messages
between like a master and and and a host in
this drone UM and be able to use them to
(45:34):
carry out warfare operations. But he referred to them as
drone peacekeeping. Yeah. Yeah, and he was right. He called
it century ago. He predicted the path we would take. Uh.
And as you said, Noel, it is a is a
path fraught with complications. It could be seen as a
(45:57):
net positive. It certainly was seen. Is that positive by Tesla?
But so he was right about cell phones, he was
right about drones. We're hoping he's right about the emphasis
on science over war. And we're also hoping he's right
on one of his most optimistic predictions, the idea that
(46:18):
a Department of hygiene would eliminate pollution and world hunger.
He said, by the year five, there would be enough
wheat and wheat products because remember from our earlier episode,
the guy loved honey milk and wheat, health food nut,
health food nut. He said, there will be enough of
this stuff to feed the entire world, including parts of
the world that have been chronically on the verge of
(46:40):
starvation or experienced food insecurity. And he said, long before
the next century dawns, systematic reforest station and the scientific
management of natural resources will have made an end of
all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. Oh and he
also predicted, uh that we would be done with the
(47:02):
necessity burning fuel and it would be doing such thing
as unsafe drinking water. Tesla, we're trying our best, man,
We're let's just say we're running a little late with
that one. Yeah, we sure are. I want to circle
back to drones just really quickly, because again I sort
of briefly mentioned that he thought of these as a
method of keeping the peace, and the reason is he
(47:23):
felt that his patent for a drone, these unmanned vehicles
would quote this is from a tweet from Matt Schreyer,
um would bring about world peace through mutually assured destruction
in the same way that like the H bomb did.
But unfortunately, there's a really good quote from John Oliver
from last week tonight where he says, uh that drones
(47:46):
didn't have that same effect because so much of what
drones do happen in secret, and you don't have that
same spectacle and that same theater and that same shock
and awe as you do with a singular event like
dropping an H bomb and seeing an associated mushroom cloud
that everyone can like oh and ah over and experience
(48:06):
the fear of God. Right, yeah, right, that's the problem.
Technology always outpaces legislation, and we are now in a
world where, um, it's difficult to make solid predictions about
so much of the future. One thing we can predict, though, hopefully,
is that you have enjoyed this two part episode and
(48:31):
we predict I think we can safely predict that we
are gonna be making more of these episodes in the future,
so long as our super producer, Casey Pegram sticks with us,
as long as we don't get on your nerves too much,
right Casey, I'm here for the long haul, guys. Thanks man,
We appreciate it, and we're here for you for the
(48:52):
long haul and for you ridiculous historians. So and you
could be there for us or for each other, and
in whatever form you see fit, as long as it
involves you know, the Internet. You can find us on Facebook,
on Instagram, on Twitter, where we're Ridiculous History. If you
would like, you can join our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians,
where you can participate in conversations and engage with your
fellow ridiculous historians. And you can also find us as individuals.
(49:16):
You can talk to me directly. I'm on Instagram at
Ben Bullin. You can also find me on Twitter at
Ben Bullin hs W HUE. Thanks to super producer Casey Pegram,
as always Alex Williams, who composed this theme. Christopher hasciotis
here in spirit our wonderful research associate Gabe Lousier. Thanks
to you, Gabe, Thanks also to our own mad Scientists
(49:38):
Jonathan Strickland. Thanks to Eve's Jeff co our pure podcaster,
uh friend of the show. Do check out her fantastic
podcast This Day in History Class. Yes please do. Um.
And you know, I hope your new year is treating
you well. Let us know what the cut off for
calling it a new year is. I would love to know.
Why don't we just call it the new year until
(49:59):
like September? You know what. I'm cool with that. Wait
weigh in though. We'll see you next time Fox. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in. This is part two of
our Weird Predictions of Yesteryear episode. I'm Ben, and you
know what, I already need to correct myself. No, well,
I don't think all of those predictions were all that weird.
Some of them were pretty accurate. What do you say,
(00:48):
Some of them were pretty accurate, Bend. Some of them
were pretty you know, cogent in terms of like within
the realm of possibility. Um, we kind of reserved some
of the more bizarro ones for this episode. I would
say Episode one was mainly concerned with farming and sustenance
and food trends and and maybe you know again, a
(01:09):
lot of these people that are making these predictions, they're
big brainiact types, and so they like to speak with authority.
There's nothing less attractive than like hedging on a future prediction,
because you have to say it with utter authority, or
else you might as well just not say it at all. Um.
So I would say everything that was in episode one,
even if it hasn't come to pass, like the underwater
(01:32):
helped Fields you know, I could see that a world
where maybe there's something like that are certainly there are
like tanks, you know that, uh, where you grow like
hydroponically and things like that. So there's versions of a
lot of those things. Today we're getting into like weird
wild stuff is Johnny Carson would say, and we're gonna
start in the underwater realm um. And but but mainly
(01:54):
focusing on transportation. We're gonna stick stick with underwater for
a while. Uh. First off, in the twenty one century,
it was predicted by the French artists Jean Marc coute
quote case cote ah Casey on the case French artist,
I would argue surrealist artists. Based on what you're about
(02:17):
to hear, Jean Marc cote H and many of his
contemporaries um in the art world produced over a hundred
of these illustrations of what the year two thousand. In
the year two thousand, apparently we will ride on giant
sea horses. Yeah and uh yeah, I love the idea.
(02:40):
I love arts, I love futurism. Giant sea horses would
have to be genetically created. They don't exist at this time. Uh.
By the way, that's superproducer Casey Pagram, who was our
Casey on the case there. Uh, they didn't stop there.
They had something that might even be a little little
bit a little bit more plausible, which is the idea
(03:02):
of a whale pulling an entire kind of underwater bus
of people through the sea. And whales do exist. Whales
are quite intelligent, so maybe we could convince some whales
to help people. Uh. There there's another shot where there's
like a fish race picture a horse race, but instead
(03:26):
of horses, the jockeys are these scuba divers on these
enormous fish. Uh. There are enormous fish, we just don't
know of any that are super down with being ridden
like race animals. There's also a super weird one. It's
almost like reverse fishing, where there are these like underwater
like helmet frogman type figures, uh, fishing for seagulls. Uh.
(03:49):
They are underwater already and they have like presumably fish
bait or some sort of seagull bait. I guess in
this scenario on strings that they're bobbing up to the
top of the water. Then when the seagulls dive in
to get it, they like jerk the seagulls underwater. What
would you want with a seagull? It's bad luck to
kill a seabird. Everybody knows that, who's seen the lighthouse.
(04:11):
But also they're notoriously gamy and stringy and gross to eat. Yeah,
it's more of like a flex or revenge thing, I think,
because seagulls are some of the most cantankerous of birds
up there with the shoe bill. Uh, they're some of
the only birds I don't particularly care for. Well, you
know my position, But Ben, you are a friend of
of of birds in general, and you're right. I think
(04:32):
I've mentioned that the seagull might actually be the origin
of my fear of birds as a small child. I
believe I was dive bond by them. But then you
get into some more like kind of some of these
I think are like they're really styling. I do want
to point out these all come from Uh what I
was gonna say is these all come from the public
domain review. I think this is an excellent resource. If
(04:52):
you're on Twitter or something like that, follow them. They
have the greatest stories all the time. But now you're
going to describe some of these arcs pieces here absolutely
and you can find this specifically at public domain review
dot org. Slash collections slash all separated by dashes. A
nineteenth century vision of the year two thousand and numbers
(05:13):
separated by dashes. When you start doing show notes for
the show, maybe we can um talk about that new year,
new year, new new way of doing things. But um,
some of these I think are kind of styling where
they're like, I don't know that these artists necessarily believe
that in the future would be riding on giant sea
horses underwater. Um. I think it might have been just
kind of like artistic license for like, oh, what would
(05:35):
be the craziest thing that could happen in the year
two thousands. Some of them are more functional, though. You've
got one where it's like a gentleman running an entire
farm remotely from like what looks sort of like a
railway switching panel or like an old school elevator, where
he's got like a kind of like lever, and then
like a series of buttons on this panel all connected
to these like power line looking things that are connected
(05:58):
to threshers that are are running on these lines that
are using them to like guide their path to like
cut the wheat there are like wheats kind of bales,
or maybe it's honeycomb or something. But the idea is
I think that these lines are remotely running all these threshers,
and that one man can do all this work himself.
Uh and he got then he got ben. I think
(06:18):
something that's the most prevalent here is lots of depictions
of flying machines. Yes, I do want to I do
want to pause though before we go on there. There's
one that really stood out to me. It's a classroom scene.
You can see it here on the side. I know
you can see it in tune Old, where there's someone
who looks like an older schoolmaster who's feeding books into
(06:39):
what looks to be a crank operated shredder, and then
these electric these electric wires lead to these headphones and
spool caps and their students just sitting there with their
hands folded on their desk. That technology, symbolically, I would argue,
is already around in the form of audio books and
dare we say it, podcast So I I feel like
(07:02):
that one's accurate. But through the lens of arts, what
happens to the books though bad? It will do you
lose the books? It looks like the books would be
like shredded into pulp and then converted into some kind
of electronic signal that can then shoot through these wires.
It's a very interesting image with this one poor little
boy cranking the crank while the schoolmaster just shoves the
(07:23):
books into this uh kind of like feeder. He's a
human turnspit dog exactly. So. Yes, so this art is
well worth your time if you're a fan of this
kind of fanciful view of the future stuff. But you're
right now. People are fascinated with air travel at this time.
We have to remember that the first flight of the
(07:45):
Right Brothers took place December seventeenth, nineteen o three. And
during this time and leading up to this, people were
obsessed with the idea that we would one day take
to the air. I think it was nineteen thirteen the
first commercial flight occurs from Florida to Tampa. It carries
(08:10):
one person. It was like the level of uh. It
was the level of flex that you would associate with
billionaires traveling to the outer reaches of gravity just for
like a few seconds nowadays. That's exactly right, Ben, And
the thing that's so remarkable about some of these so
many of these images, all of these in this collection,
is that they just have that kind of Jules Verne,
(08:32):
you know, like like steampunk. I don't know if that's right,
but it's kind of this retro futuristic quality to them,
where there's a lot of like flying suits where there'll
be a man kind of in like a winged suit,
you know, up there soaring right next to the to
the zeppelin or or like you know biplane situation. But
most of them are odd kind of styles on that.
(08:53):
Like there's one that looks sort of like like a
hot air balloon basket that has like a helicopter propeller
on the top and sort of this like arrow looking
ballast thing on either side. Um, then you have people
in wings suits flying up to an eagle's nest, presumably
robbing them of their eggs or poaching them or something
like that. It's a little weird, uh. And then you've
(09:13):
got like ones that we've seen in movies like Sky
Captain in the World of Tomorrow, this like image of
the future with a lot of these machines that logistically
don't really make any sense, Like there's one where the
wings on the flying machine actually flap and and have
and has a tail. I don't think that would work.
I don't think that's the way aerodynamics quite functions. But
so you've got a lot of like dubious science and
(09:36):
a lot of style over function here um, and then
you've got like a blimp situation. We know, the fascination
of about blimps and Zeppelin's you know when it comes
to thinking about the future, and a lot of these
illustrations remind me of well, I think they possibly inspired
one of my favorite books, The Kodaks Sarah Finanius, which
(09:56):
is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world. I think, uh, casey, no,
you guys might have seen it the last time you
were over at my house. Did I ever show you
guys that one? If not, I'll bring it in. It's
it's nuts, just check it out. The reason I mentioned
it is because of the fanciful illustrations. But these illustrations, he's,
(10:19):
oh gosh, I'm gonna do it. These flights of fancy
don't come from yeah, don't come for thin air, because
we know that, like you said, no, there was this
rich cultural soil from which they sprang in the zeitgeist
people were honestly predicting that we would by this time
(10:42):
in human history, that we would all have personal airplanes.
And full disclosure, folks, some people do have personal airplanes. Uh,
your faithful, ridiculous historians here, however, we do not. I
think le Bush may have maybe a small prop plane
somewhere in France. But Casey, that's that's more for uh,
(11:03):
you're off the grid work stuff, right, that's true. I
was just going to jump in to say, I it
took me a second to uh to recall the book.
But the Codex is really really worth investigating. It's a
really really cool book. The illustrations are amazing, and um,
it's just one of those one of the kind bizarre
objects in the world. It's really really cool. It makes
no sense either, you know, it's a it's all. It's
(11:26):
from one. But I think he was inspired by a
lot of the art that we're discussing in the opening
of today's episode. And it's funny, you know. The stuff
about personal airplanes, uh dates back to what No. Nineteen
thirty Frederick Edwin Smith published this book called the World
(11:47):
in twenty thirty a d. And he said, everybody's going
to own a small airplane. It's gonna be perfect for
weekend trips. You know, you can go to Greenland and
ski and then you can come back and yeah, so
I will say this, I mean, you know, I think
the closest thing we have to like personal crafts like
that would be the helicopter, which is obviously you know,
(12:09):
still within only within the realm of like you know,
super super high level wealth. Um. Because we were talking
off air, it would be very difficult to to like
logistically deal with like the traffic of like everyone having
an airplane, and just like air traffic as as difficult
as already is for commercial flights, can you imagine like
(12:31):
having everyone like have an aircraft and then how would
you deal with that? You'd have to communicate with some
sort of air traffic control or like have really really
good radar. I don't know what do you guys think?
What would be What would life be like? I feel
like there would be just crashes, like just wreckage falling
out of the sky left and right on the daily.
This is a longstanding uh. I won't call it an argument,
(12:55):
We'll call it a healthy conversation I had with my
my my old rider Die Scott Benjamin on our show
car stuff. Flying cars are one of those things that
are always eternally just on the horizon. The only way
they could happen safely is if they are autonomous vehicles
controlled by a grid. That's the only way it can happen. Otherwise,
(13:16):
flying cars are still one of those things where it's
a matter of um, how's the best way to say it.
It's amazing if I have a flying car, says one person,
and no one else does. But it's a blood bath
if everybody has a flying car. It just we don't
have the skills as human operators to live in a
world of personal flight machines in a safe way unless
(13:41):
we have a huge jump in technology, or unless they're autonomous.
Im and I say that as someone who does think
the idea is really cool. But even if you gave
everybody on the planet their own personal bicycle, who still
see tons of accidents, we're just not ready for individual
(14:01):
flying cars unless they're robot controlled. That's right. You made
the really good point off air, Ben. We were talking
about autonomous cars and how that's sort of becoming less
of a priority. I think when we say uber is out. Yeah,
and you made the really great point that autonomous vehicles
only works if it's a hundred percent opt in. Like
when you have any level of human error involved in
(14:24):
the equation, it screws up the whole algorithm and makes
the whole thing dangerous. So it's kind of an all
or nothing situation, right, Yeah, that's true. Like, imagine a
line of dominoes or whatever pattern dominoes you want to imagine,
and each of those dominoes is an autonomous vehicle except
for one, and the one domino is uh not controlled
(14:47):
by the falling of the other dominoes. So when it
is supposed to move with the system, it just doesn't.
The system automatically breaks because of that one domino. That's
a very lazy way to put it. But we're working
live here, knowl or work and live. Also unrelated to anything.
Did you see that meme? I didn't realize this, but
the original map max takes place this year. Oh no,
(15:09):
where we're getting there, we're not too too off. Um yeah,
it was really interesting stuff. And um, you know, I
think one thing that we have seen over time, we
know this to be true. We always talk about how
life expectancy back in the you know, olden days of
life on the prairies or you know, in the medieval times,
life expectancy was not good. And that was because you know,
(15:31):
there were plagues and there was really bad ideas when
it came to medicine and treating illnesses and things that
would actually make you get sicker and very uh, you know,
poor conditions when it came to childbirth, thing and your
chances of living through bearing children were super low. Um. So,
as we've seen technology progress and you know, humanity move forward,
(15:53):
people's life expectancies that have seemed to jump. Um. But
one thing that was predicted because of technology and the
very thing in the twenty first century was that we
would live to be old, like really old, like really
really old. People have been thinking about this for centuries.
Benjamin Franklin, the One and Only Benny f had even
(16:16):
written about this as far back as the late seventeen
hundreds and sev who wrote a letter to Reverend John
Lathrop where he said, you know, within a few years,
we're gonna live as long as those people from the
Old Testament from the Book of Genesis. We're gonna be
like Noah will be nine fifty years old. Who is
(16:37):
that super old one Methuselah. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
nine hundred and sixty nine years old. I think Methuselah
made it. And we can go into where that comes from,
maybe on stuff they don't want you to know. Check
out that show. But the weird thing is just like
the pattern we established in part one of our Predictions episode.
The weird thing here is that it's an extreme claim,
(16:59):
an extreme addiction, but it appears to have some degree
of accuracy. People are living longer, people are healthier for
longer in many parts of the world, And if you
look at the science on the horizon, the medical research
on the horizon, then we may be able to extend
(17:21):
people's lives. Currently, we can't extend someone's organic life to
almost a thousand years, but we may be able to
an independs. We're waxing philosophical. We can get to this part,
but we may be able to extend someone's life uh
indefinitely by making a copy of their mind on a
(17:46):
on a digital platform like right, like turning their mind
into code, and then keeping that mind on a hard
drive somewhere or in a cloud. That's that will probably
happen before we can get to years old and still
be hail and hardy. But you know, I've always I've
always been interested in this. This is a question for
you guys. Given the option, would you want to live
(18:10):
for nine hundred plus years? Let's say, let's not make
it a monkey spawl situation. Would you want to live
for nine hundred plus years if you knew you would
be relatively healthy until say, like the last five years.
It's a hard one, man, because you know, you might
say it when you're young with then realize that you
just get bored and you just don't know. Maybe it's
(18:31):
like the mind is a monkey's pat situation, or it's, uh,
you know, a devil's bargain. You think of like the
like interview with the Vampire and all these characters that
kind of live to see all their friends die, and like,
I don't know, maybe if I knew that everyone that
I loved was also going to live that long, then
I'd be cool with it. But I wouldn't want to
like outlive everybody in my life and then be sad
(18:52):
and alone living in some sort of like virtual reality
brain cloud machine. Yeah, what if you could do it physically?
I mean, I'll tell you, I would immediately go to space,
and I would be like, all right, I got nine
hundred and fifty years, but just spend the first two
fifty traveling out somewhere. I'm just gonna turn around and
come back. It sort of makes me think of the
(19:13):
concept behind this really cool Philip K. Dick book called
yubick UK. Maybe it's the idea where people are able
to actually die uh and through this corporation um, their
bodies are kept in cryo state uh and their minds
are like put into this cloud type scenario, so they're
(19:33):
able to kind of like their souls are able to
live on even if their bodies of actually or their
brains have died. I'm not remembering it very precisely, but
it is. Again a lot of these ideas, it makes
sense that they're coming from these science fiction writers or
people like that, because so much of science fiction is
just like thought experiments about like what if, like we
progressed as a society, just this one little thing a
(19:55):
little further than is when they aren't grasp right now,
how would that change our inner actions with each other
and with society in general. And I think that's why
people still love science fiction. To this day. Yeah, yeah,
and also allowing that vein. If you enjoy the Philip K.
Dick story that we'll just recommended, I think you'll also
enjoy Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neil Stevenson, which
(20:18):
has a very similar kind of thing. The only catches
and this isn't a spoiler, but the only catches. The
virtual world in Fall or Dodge in Hell is uh,
for some reason, a medieval fantasy world. So if you
like Neil Stevenson, he's weird. If you like Neil Stevenson,
you haven't read him yet. Check that up. I read
(20:39):
one of his an audiobook form that I can't remember
the name it's about. It was about like a lot
of things. Um. It was about like a a like
gold farming in dungeons and dragons in like, um, what's
that game that online game World of Warcraft where you
can literally like gold, like farm for gold and then
sell it for real money m D. Yeah, it's about
(21:01):
like a like some sort of worm, um what do
you call it, Like an invasive piece of malware? Um,
And like a heist, like an online highest of all this,
like you know, farmed gold and espionage. And he's just
he's really all over the place and really really interesting.
And I believe he wrote snow Crash as well, if
I'm not mistaken. Yeah, he wrote snow Crash. He wrote Anathema,
(21:22):
which is a book I I dearly love. But yes,
Neil Stevenson is another iteration or his work is another
iteration of this larger pattern that you just outlined all
of science fiction through thought experimentation exploring the possibilities of
the future world. And now that we're talking sci fi,
(21:47):
we can go to another very sensitive topic. Uh spoiler alert.
You don't have to be a fan of history to
realize this. People, since people existed, have always has been
talking about the weather. We used to have entire like
religious things built along the passage of the seasons and
the weather, and we still do a degree do. One
(22:09):
of the things that people predicted back in the early
nineteen hundreds is that one day, perhaps in the coming century,
we would be able to control the weather, specifically to
make rain. On January six, Iowa's Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette
(22:30):
came came out with this article that said, yes, we
were one day going to be able to control rain
in the twenty one century. They said we will be
the um masters of moisture. I just made that up.
They would have much better, a much better phrase. But
that turned out to actually be sort of true, which
(22:50):
is amazing. Well, I mean we've talked about this before
and whether we can call it actually whether control or
not is maybe debatable. But the idea of cloud seating,
like you can pump stuff up into clouds using what
is it? Like, Oh, I am so some kind of
like chemical that you can use um and you can
make it rain. But that doesn't mean that you can
(23:12):
make it not rain, you know what I mean, Like,
you can't really control it if you can only work
it one way. But but you also, do you really
see that used during drought? I mean, we still obviously
have terrible droughts. We haven't cracked the code on how
to like not have droughts, so obviously this cloud seeding
thing will only get you so far, right. Yeah, See,
that's the problem. The concept of cloud seeding has been
(23:34):
around for a for a while now. It wasn't around
nineteen ten, but it came It's been around for decades
at this point, as silver iodide particles are injected into clouds. Yeah,
and the problem is it's a drink your milkshake situation
to a degree, because that cloud seeding does not create water.
(23:57):
It gathers water to these clouds, and then that water
becomes rain. So you're taking that water from somewhere. The
government of China just a few weeks ago in December,
they announced that they're going to expand their weather modification
program to get this cover two point one million square miles.
(24:19):
That's more than one and a half times the size
of India. So where's that water coming from. They're they're
using it to combat drought. But but I love your point.
I think you make a fantastic point. We know how
to start the process, but it's it's maybe a little
optimistic to say we know how to control it. Right,
that's right, Ben. Didn't China use cloud seating as like
(24:41):
a kind of special effect during the Olympics to like
do some kind of crazy display during the opening ceremonies. Yeah, yeah,
I think you're correct. I think you're correct. No, Um,
I didn't personally see it, but it's definitely a flex
that is within their uh weather wheelhouse wheelhouse of weather,
oh will House of weather w o W like World
(25:04):
of Warcraft. Wow, indeed. Yeah, the headline from Business Insider
from sixteen is China spent millions on a shady project
to control the weather ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and
and that millions is thirty million dollars and their version
of it involved shooting quote salt and mineral filled bullets
into the sky in order to make it rain, uh,
(25:26):
for the you know, for entertainment purposes. So yeah, we're like, like,
we're sort of there. I don't know that this is
something that like, surely some there's some research going into it,
but it's not something we hear about a lot, and
it certainly doesn't seem to have solved drought or wildfires
or like any of the like things that the weather
does that totally screw us over as human beings. So
(25:47):
I would say this is a no that we have
not figured out how to control the weather wheeled it
to our our own purposes. Yet Yeah, I am unfortunately
tempted to agree, man, because we also see other predictions
about whether that are incredibly optimistic, because the weather has
kind of gone down hill over the past a few centuries.
(26:10):
There are people who predicted that hurricanes would one day
be a thing of the past nine popular mechanics. A
fellow named Waldemore camp Ferret said that hurricanes are going
to be a non issue by the year two thousand
and his he said there would be a non issue,
not because we would prevent them from forming, but because
(26:31):
once we saw one over the ocean, we would start
a large oil fire across the water, drawing air from
the region and and and somehow ending the hurricane. He
also thought we'd be able to divert storms, etcetera. He
was incredibly wrong on multiple accounts, but you know he
(26:53):
was doing his best. I guess. By the way, Tesla
also was incorrect with his uh, his predictions about weather.
I think he said we would end a forestation and
prevent forest fires smoking the bear would be disappointed. Um,
but it still is up to you to prevent forest
fires because we haven't figured it out like as a collective,
(27:14):
so each individual has to do their part. Um. But yeah,
So like another funny weather related one. And this is
sort of like in the the stuff kind of category, right,
like what will what will our stuff be like in
the future. Well, according to Valdemar camp Fare, in the future,
everything in our homes will be waterproof. Another one of
(27:37):
these like underwater dwelling kind of future scenarios. Um. He
believed that everything in the future, including the drapes, uh,
you know, rugs, upholstery on couches, anything, anything you can
put your hands on, would be made of waterproof plastic.
Remember when plastic was like the wave of the future.
(27:58):
You know that this seems to be from that kind
of mentality that everything should be made of plastic. Is
it's the wonder material. If only they knew about nanoplastics
and you know, gives this all cancer um topic for
another day. And that our homes would have like built
in drainage systems, like in the floor so after you know,
(28:20):
we would literally be able to hose down everything in
our house to clean it off, and then the water
would just you know, bloop bloop down the drain and
then they like car wash style, there'd be a blast
of heated air that would try everything off. This is uh,
this one is absurd. I have to say maybe maybe
the most we've got. You know, we have a thing
(28:40):
like this in bathrooms in restrooms in different parts of
the world. Like you'll go to a hotel or a
hostel maybe and you'll see that the the entire restroom
is the shower area. Have you ever seen those? They've
got like the the Fawcett hooks to uley into the
(29:01):
sink and there's a drain just in the middle of
the floor. The commode is still there. It's just when
you want to shower, you just hit a switch on
the sink and then you take the shower head off
the rack. Yeah. Also great, uh for like a murder room,
you know, if you need if you need such, because
then everything just drains down the drain and you can
(29:21):
rinse it all off and you got a fresh start.
But yeah, this is this is true, Bend that we
do have something like this, but they're all kind of
more in the realm of bathrooms. Or possibly you might
have a drain in a garage situation for car wash maybe,
or you know, something like that, like a foot rinsing
station if you live by the beach. Yeah. I like
that you mentioned I like that you mentioned kill rooms.
(29:43):
Though that's gonna sound weird out of context. We're going
somewhere with it because I immediately thought of of the
show Dexter. You remember Dexter, of course, of course, so
Dexter had this this pretty consistent depiction of a kill
room on television. And people will argue all sorts of
(30:05):
things about television and the things depicted upon it, But
there were a lot of predictions about the future of
television in the twenty one century. Imagine so like, according
to some of these futurists, by this point in history,
we should be able to watch a show like Dexter,
or let's take another example, watch a show like Hannibal
(30:27):
and smell uh the food cooking or feel the texture
of of different different things depicted on the show. Nicholas Negroponte,
who was a former director of m I T S
Media Lab, said that we'll have full color, large scale
holographic television with force feedback and old factory output by
(30:50):
the twenty one century, meaning that you could see stuff
on television and you would feel it and you would
smell it. Uh. Here's the thing, man, I don't know
if I want that. Hmm No. And honestly, I think
attempts to do stuff like this it which is still around.
I I think I think three d uh cinema is
(31:12):
a gimmick and it hurts my eyeballs and it makes
me kind of want to Recoil and horror. I don't
really care for it. And I went and saw a
movie with my daughter and her friends. It was an anime.
And there's this like, I don't know, they call it
four D theater at the fancy movie theater pre pre
COVID times, where the seats actually move around. They kind
of jerk you around, and they're a little spritzer's on
(31:34):
the side of the seats that like shoot puffs of
air at you, and there's like air stuff happening, and
even moisture and uh, possibly smells. I don't recall. There
were no smells in this one. But um. Also at
the the Lego Land at one of our malls here,
they have a four D cinema that does involve smells. Um,
(31:54):
and it's just so gimmicky and I just don't see.
It doesn't really integrate into like the experience of it,
Like I get what it is, but it doesn't really
add anything to it other than like, oh, this is cute,
you know what I mean. So I don't know. I
know that there have been some companies doing research into
how to create a smell machine, but I, yeah, I'm
(32:17):
with you, man, I don't I don't know if I
really want to I want to smell what I'm watching,
or if I necessarily want that tactile feedback all the time.
And I agree with you. I think a lot of
us in the audience today can remember how television manufacturers
had this ill fated push to create three D at
(32:38):
home television's and it was a top down push and
a lot of people didn't like it. So it's not
just a question whether the technology exists, it's also a
question of whether there's a demand for it. So let
us know if you're a fan of smell a vision
and why. There's another question here. I think it's it's
(33:03):
one that we'd be remiss if we didn't mention. It's
the world of medicine. We know that predictions of future
miraculous cures are a tail as old as time. Back
in there was a Swiss doctor named Francois Odi who
said that by this time, in this century, by the
(33:25):
twenty one century, all the victories that were the pride
of brilliant surgeons will be forgotten, replaced by the discovery
of quote, a substance which, in the form of a capsule,
will capture the sources of energy that will bring recovery
within hours. So it's just like one miracle pill for everything.
What a world that would be amazing, right if Yeah,
(33:46):
I mean it would be amazing you sure, But is
that not that's like not how medicine works, right, There's
no one pill to cure them all, like Lord of
the Ring style. I mean, there's like nuances and each
individual patient's individual malady. This is very like utopian, future
sci fi type stuff way outside of the realm, just
(34:07):
like a pill that is like your meal of sustenance.
This I don't know that there's any scenario where this
would make any kind of sense unless it was like
may of like nano beings or something that could then
just like zoom around inside your body and find the
particular part that it was ailing you and then fix
you up. Yeah. Yeah. The quest for a panacea is
(34:28):
a long quest, and it's one that hasn't hasn't reached
an endpoint yet. I think you're right, you know, if
there's something that would be analogous to a pill of
this sort, it would have to be some kind of
nanotechnology that would be able to diagnose and immediately treat
(34:49):
your your body and everything that ails it and then
at that point you would just need to take it
as soon as possible, take it before your six so
it could apply preventative treatment. So far has Odie's prediction
has not come to pass, but we still have several
years left in the twenty one century. To say the least.
One of my favorites, this is so weird. One of
(35:12):
my favorite concepts. I had not heard of this before
is the concept of the grouch pill. Yeah. I mean,
let's let's be real. I mean, we'd certainly have something
approaching this, uh in terms of antidepressants, but they wouldn't
have thought of it quite as high mindedly back in
nineteen sixty six. Uh. They were. This was back when
(35:33):
KELP was really big again, the kind of the health
food driven economy um, and they were thinking about how
can we improve relations between married couples when one of
them is in a particularly nasty mood. Um, and the
Rand Corporation, you'll recall, who are the ones that sort
of set forth this whole idea of the underwater fields
(35:54):
of KELP and as far as the eye can see,
tended by frog mem um. They described a world where
you could pop down to the corner drug store, buy
some anti grouch pills and slip them into their coffee.
That's basically, ah, you know, a UM encouraging you to
drug your partner, essentially, But we can leave that aside
(36:16):
for now. But of course this is another kind of
like very simplified version of what antidepressants are. They take,
they work differently on different people, they take quite a
long time to actually kick in. It's not something you
can just dose somebody with and then magically they're happy.
I mean, sure there are drugs like that, but those
(36:36):
are called like hard drugs like heroin or cocaine that
may make you happy instantly, but then long term effects
of those are addiction and extra grouchiness or worse. Yeah. Absolutely,
so again we see there's some real world things that
could be called grouch pills. But the problem is, as
(36:58):
you said, no, uh, I think the problem is in
the specifics of that prediction. I don't think you should
unknowingly drug your partner. Is that is that a hot take?
I hope not. I feel like if you have a
romantic relationship with someone should be founded on trust rather
than surreptitiously drugging them, And in that way, I would
(37:18):
I would deem this a less than optimistic prediction about
the twenty one century. Now, so far, folks, so far,
dear ridiculous historians. We have been pretty uh, pretty honest,
but pretty optimistic as well with our predictions. We've been
talking about people saying nice things. People weren't always saying
(37:39):
nice things. In fact, there were a few less than optimistic,
somewhat strange predictions about the twenty first century. Uh No,
you know, the weirdest one to me is the future
humans one. This is where things get pretty interesting. This
is like sort of in the realm of like body
modification or like, you know what we evolve to be
(38:01):
a certain way. I mean, yeah, there's this idea that
seems really strange in dystopian that in the future humans
will only need one eye. We'll all be cyclops ees.
This was put forth by Dr Thomas Hall Shostad in
article uh called the Face of the Future, and he
(38:23):
says the future I will be in the center of
the face, below a very high forehead where the bridge
of the nose once rested. We won't need in the
where we're going, we won't need noses. That was back
to the future reference. The doctor said that the human
eye originally had evolved to see into the distance. But
(38:44):
we don't need that anymore because we're not like hunters,
you know. We we we get our food served to
us in pill form. All we need to be able
to do is read and write and uh repair watches.
He says, also cut gems. These are all very you know,
modern things. Uh, and look at pictures and so forth. Um.
And he says the cyclopean I would evolve to accommodate
(39:06):
all these close strange tasks and and pastimes. Wow, jeez,
that is that's a lot. That's a lot. That guy's
a doctor, too, has a very low opinion of us.
I don't know how serious that prediction is, but it
seems like he's being he's being sincere, you know. Um.
And then, of course there's a lot of cantankerous stuff
(39:27):
about the way new technologies will affect future humans. One
Time article from ninety one said that people are becoming
less literate due to the rise of television and said
that eventually people in the age of television would not
(39:48):
be able to read. Uh. Specifically, this writer said, by
the twenty first century, our people doubtless will be squint
eyed hunch backed and fond of the dark. But why
am I carrying on like this? Chances are that the
grandchildren of the television age won't know how to read this.
(40:08):
Tut tut, What a weird what a weird diss So
hopefully that's a little bit of satire. We know that
people are encountering literature in different ways, but it's not
like literature no longer exist. I know a lot of
people who read books. I would say, I would say
maybe this writer from the nineteen fifties should consider directing
(40:30):
their fire at the rise of the calculator. How many
people can easily do somethings. When's the last time you
had to do some long division, for instance, without tech assistance?
A million percent? And we've talked about this so often
where it's like do our brains how do they change
based on the information that we no longer need them
(40:50):
for like, uh, you know, remembering phone numbers or whatever,
Like do they fill that space up with other stuff
or do we just kind of lose it? Is like
I use it or lose this situation. I know that
you know, the mind and is very elastic and has
a has a way of adapting to things. Like that.
But it is an interesting thought, especially when you think
about the extreme kind of evolution that he's describing here,
(41:11):
which would presumably take like millions of years right to
evolve into having a single eye. That's that's not the
kind of thing that would happen like in anyone's lifetime. True, true.
And I think the evolution of humanity is now a
conversation with technology. But I don't I don't think television
is going to render people a literate Uh, maybe it
(41:35):
just changes the way we encounter literature. So let's bring
it all the way back around to the very beginning
of part one of our Predictions episode. Nicola Tesla. He
had some really really nice, optimistic predictions to um and
I don't want to say they're wrong, because I also
(41:55):
strive to be optimistic, But I will say we have
what we have, like eighty eighty years to work on
these alright, Well, what what what are some of your favorites? Man? Well,
I don't know. I mean, there's a lot. There's so
much that we've covered, so many weird ones, like pretty
close to accurate ones, ones that were seeing little shades
(42:16):
of in our day to day lives. A couple I
want to end on on Mr Tesla because he did
make a couple of fun ones that actually have come
to pass in very, very real and meaningful ways, one
being the whole notion the concept of a smartphone, or
let's just call it a cell phone. Um. He said
(42:37):
in a nineteen o nine interview with The New York
Times that was published in Popular Mechanics. Quote, h it
will soon be possible, for instance, for a businessman in
New York to dictate instructions and have them appear in type.
In London or elsewhere. He will be able to call
from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber, even
uses the word subscriber in the world. It will only
(42:59):
be necessary to carry an expensive instrument no bigger than
a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere
on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles,
one may listen to or transmit speech or song to
the uttermost parts of the world. Wow. Amazing, Yeah he was.
He was spot on with this one, which gives us
(43:22):
a little hope that maybe he'll be He'll one day
be right with his prediction that news headlines won't focus
on crime and politics in nine and Liberty magazine. He said,
today the most civilized countries of the world spend a
maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education.
The twenty one century will reverse this order. It will
(43:45):
be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die
on the field of battle. How amazing would that be? Nick,
If you're listening, I hope you're right. I guess he's
not familiar with the expression. If it bleeds, it leads.
I still seem to operate rarely under that principle. UM,
So I would say that's a big no, but would
love to see that happen. It's going to require a
(44:06):
whole lot of consensus and a lot of just changing
of attitudes, you know, um, and who knows? I mean,
was a rough year, um moving into one. It's it's
it would be foolish to think that all of a
sudden things are going to change for the better overnight.
But it does feel like the discourses maybe moving towards
something more representing a consensus or a little bit more
(44:29):
do they what is the word? Uh? Lowering the temperature
of of of discourse and of rhetoric and all of that.
So we'll see UM again like you said, Ben, I
too like to be optimistic. Uh. One thing that Tesla
absolutely got right more than a dred years ago. That
isn't a particularly I don't know, it's it's not net unpositive.
They're certainly positive uses for these things. But the idea
(44:51):
of unmanned aerial vehicles are what we love to talk about,
you know, on stuff that I want you to know,
UM drones, idea of drone warfare um and Nicola. Tesla
actually had a pretty optimistic view of what these devices
would accomplish. He uh said, he actually has a patent
(45:12):
for something resembling a drone. Uh. It was it's a
like a sub whatever, like a ship, like a drone ship.
But he believed that radio waves would be able to
use be used as communication technology that would transmit messages
between like a master and and and a host in
this drone UM and be able to use them to
(45:34):
carry out warfare operations. But he referred to them as
drone peacekeeping. Yeah. Yeah, and he was right. He called
it century ago. He predicted the path we would take. Uh.
And as you said, Noel, it is a is a
path fraught with complications. It could be seen as a
(45:57):
net positive. It certainly was seen. Is that positive by Tesla?
But so he was right about cell phones, he was
right about drones. We're hoping he's right about the emphasis
on science over war. And we're also hoping he's right
on one of his most optimistic predictions, the idea that
(46:18):
a Department of hygiene would eliminate pollution and world hunger.
He said, by the year five, there would be enough
wheat and wheat products because remember from our earlier episode,
the guy loved honey milk and wheat, health food nut,
health food nut. He said, there will be enough of
this stuff to feed the entire world, including parts of
the world that have been chronically on the verge of
(46:40):
starvation or experienced food insecurity. And he said, long before
the next century dawns, systematic reforest station and the scientific
management of natural resources will have made an end of
all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. Oh and he
also predicted, uh that we would be done with the
(47:02):
necessity burning fuel and it would be doing such thing
as unsafe drinking water. Tesla, we're trying our best, man,
We're let's just say we're running a little late with
that one. Yeah, we sure are. I want to circle
back to drones just really quickly, because again I sort
of briefly mentioned that he thought of these as a
method of keeping the peace, and the reason is he
(47:23):
felt that his patent for a drone, these unmanned vehicles
would quote this is from a tweet from Matt Schreyer,
um would bring about world peace through mutually assured destruction
in the same way that like the H bomb did.
But unfortunately, there's a really good quote from John Oliver
from last week tonight where he says, uh that drones
(47:46):
didn't have that same effect because so much of what
drones do happen in secret, and you don't have that
same spectacle and that same theater and that same shock
and awe as you do with a singular event like
dropping an H bomb and seeing an associated mushroom cloud
that everyone can like oh and ah over and experience
(48:06):
the fear of God. Right, yeah, right, that's the problem.
Technology always outpaces legislation, and we are now in a
world where, um, it's difficult to make solid predictions about
so much of the future. One thing we can predict, though, hopefully,
is that you have enjoyed this two part episode and
(48:31):
we predict I think we can safely predict that we
are gonna be making more of these episodes in the future,
so long as our super producer, Casey Pegram sticks with us,
as long as we don't get on your nerves too much,
right Casey, I'm here for the long haul, guys. Thanks man,
We appreciate it, and we're here for you for the
(48:52):
long haul and for you ridiculous historians. So and you
could be there for us or for each other, and
in whatever form you see fit, as long as it
involves you know, the Internet. You can find us on Facebook,
on Instagram, on Twitter, where we're Ridiculous History. If you
would like, you can join our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians,
where you can participate in conversations and engage with your
fellow ridiculous historians. And you can also find us as individuals.
(49:16):
You can talk to me directly. I'm on Instagram at
Ben Bullin. You can also find me on Twitter at
Ben Bullin hs W HUE. Thanks to super producer Casey Pegram,
as always Alex Williams, who composed this theme. Christopher hasciotis
here in spirit our wonderful research associate Gabe Lousier. Thanks
to you, Gabe, Thanks also to our own mad Scientists
(49:38):
Jonathan Strickland. Thanks to Eve's Jeff co our pure podcaster,
uh friend of the show. Do check out her fantastic
podcast This Day in History Class. Yes please do. Um.
And you know, I hope your new year is treating
you well. Let us know what the cut off for
calling it a new year is. I would love to know.
Why don't we just call it the new year until
(49:59):
like September? You know what. I'm cool with that. Wait
weigh in though. We'll see you next time Fox. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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