September 7, 2024 • 39 mins
Science fiction writers have made some amazingly accurate predictions over the years, but in 1945 the pace of technological change created a field that spun off of sci-fi forecasting, futurology. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, it's me Joshuam. For this week's select I've
chosen our January twenty sixteen episode on futurology. It's one
of those topics that has a name that makes it
sound way cooler and far out than it actually is.
But happily we found that when you dig into it,
even the blandest parts of futurology are super interesting. Still,
(00:21):
I hope you like this one.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Guys, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here, and it's
stuff you should know from the future, but not really.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
How you doing, I'm fine, Well, good, that's good. I
enjoyed this topic. I thought it was kind of neat. Yeah,
it was. It was funny.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
When you're reading about futurology and futurelogists aka futurists, you
tend to want to make it like more than it
actually is, and when you look into the topic it
keeps having to be beaten down just because of the
name alone.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, you sound like a little bit like a wackad
do A whack could do, say you're a futurist, a seer.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, and you know, sometimes they're thinking about they're using
these these really neat techniques to predict the future. They're
talking about some really mundane stuff, Yeah, boring stuff, economic forecasts,
things like that, how much oil will be left in
thirty years, that kind of thing. But then on the
other hand, if you're a futurerologist, you may also be
(01:44):
tasked with figuring out what technology we're going to be
using in thirty years, or you know, what color the
shiny jumpsuits we're all going to wear will be.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
That kind of stuff. Yeah. I think one of my
favorite things is to look at past future predictions. Yeah,
it's fun. Yeah, there's nothing that'll make someone look less
knowledgeable than going back to what they thought the future
would look like in the year two thousand, right, like
back in the nineteen thirties or forties or sometimes some
(02:15):
of those things happen. Yeah, and then it's amazing. Yeah,
that's like wow, you know, because something to this.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
These guys are like really really dead on. And I
was reading an article I think it was in Harvard
Business Review, and it was a post by Paul Sappho,
who runs a venture capital firm I believe called discern. Yeah,
and Paul Sefa was saying like he was trying to
(02:41):
get across that sci fi authors and future ologists their
paths overlap quite a bit, but really there's pretty big distinctions.
And even in this article they got lumped in together. Yeah,
because sci fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But
(03:04):
Paul Cefo was saying like, yeah, but a real futureologist
you have to use logic.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
If you're a sci fi.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Writer, you can just use your imagination, you don't have
to back it up with anything. Yes, you're a creature ologist.
You have to use logic that makes sense to whoever's
hearing your prediction.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, And I think that's one reason why some sci
fi writers have been right on the nose with some
future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic and they
can just free form, you know. Yeah, but then it's
just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I
think they're still applying a lot of the same rules
(03:41):
of future ology. Yeah, but they're just not bound by
you know, the laws of well not the laws, but
you know, the laws of logic. Yeah, exactly. I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
But that's the best science fiction though, I think, is
something that logically makes sense. Yeah, because then it's just fantasy. Yeah,
that's true.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So futurology is recognizing and assessing potential future events. I
could have sworn Jonathan Strickland wrote this, by the way,
it ready, but it was not. No, it's very Strickland esk.
Nicholas Gerbis. Yeah, that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if
it is. I've never met this, Nicholas Gerbis. But the
(04:26):
point Gerbus makes, which I think is good as it's
a product of our times in many cases, like depending
on where we are as a society, and like he
makes a great point. During the Civil War there probably
weren't a lot of like rosy predictions for the future
American Civil War, sure, but in the Gilded Age people
a lot more optimistic, optimistic, so they may have you know,
(04:48):
it's a whole different deal like during the Cold War,
for instance, right, a lot of paranoia, a lot of cynicism.
Probably not going to be a rosy outlook for the future, right,
like during the Gilded Age when it was rosier. Yeah,
way more optimistic than the Cold.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
War, which is kind of ironic because the Gilded Age
didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were just pretending,
hence the name. Yeah, the thing is what you've just said, though,
is is kind of an argument against futurology because one
of the big critiques of it is that a futureologist,
they're not doing anything. Even if you're commenting on the
(05:25):
past or the future, you're still really commenting about your present,
your contemporary time, because that's what you.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Or recent past.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Sure, yeah, that's what you what you've lived through and experienced.
That's all you can really reflect on. And futurology seeks
to go beyond that.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Well, yeah, that makes sense. So if you like, look
at this thing that is happening now or just happened,
then what is going to be happening in that thing
in ten years? And it's a lot of times based
on how the direction it's currently going. Yes, okay, so.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Gerbis makes a pretty good It gives you a good
example that the cell phone grew out of the telegraph,
which ultimately is related further.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Back to the smoke signal.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Sure, right, yeah, but if you were a future all
just hanging out around somebody who was sending smoke signals.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Would you be able to predict the cell phone? Probably
not or not? Could you predict the impact of the
automobile or the highway system? Right? Maybe? But would you
predict that people would have sex in the back seat
of a car because it provides a little well, I
don't think they did. Or urban sprawl? Yeah? Could you
(06:41):
predict exurbs and edge cities just because the highways got built?
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah, and not a lot of people did, even though
a lot of people said there's going to be horseless
carriages one day, and it's going they're going to change
things big time. People are going to be able to
move around a lot more. Yeah, But that doesn't mean
that everybody saw every result of the automobile. It was
a game changer, yeah, is what you could agreed. So
(07:10):
what we're saying here, And if it sounds a little
weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing futurology, that's
basically the fun thing to do when you talk about
futurology is to criticize it and be awed by it
because a lot of times they really are super right.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
That's right. Futurology has been around for a long time.
I mean, since people were writing fiction, there were people
predicting the future, right, but as far as things didn't
really get going as far as being meaningful until after
World War Two, when the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically,
(07:52):
like it was really important to try and see where
things were going militarily, right, because it was super expensive
to develop new technologies. It could take a long time.
So they started thinking, hey, we need to get some
people on board that can kind of hopefully predict where
we're headed here so we can make the right decisions.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, because if it takes a really long time, like
you said, to develop a weapon, by the time you
have that weapon in deployed in the field, you're going
to need to know it's not already obsolete. The only
way to do that is to predict what kind of
warfare you're going to be engaged in. Because this is
a time like at the end of World War two,
so many inventions came out of World War one and
(08:31):
two war machine inventions that things were changing so quickly
that there was actually you can kind of put modern
futureology into the lap of one guy, an Air Force
general named hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing
so fast that his Air Force needed to basically predict
the future and see what direction it needed to go.
(08:53):
So he looked around and he started tapping people to
do that. One of the first people he tapped is
a scientist anautical engineer named Theodore von Carmon.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yes, he was a super smart dude, and he led
a team that did predict a lot of stuff like
drones and as far as you know, the military using drones,
not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood, just
a film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone, target
seeking missiles, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
All of this was in one report. Yeah, to hap
Arnold like, this is like and this guy knocked it
out of the park. But he and his group were
very much limited to small academic and military circles. Like
the general public wasn't aware that this was going on,
but his group. Von Carmon's group so accurately foresaw the
(09:49):
direction that modern warfare was going that you can also
very easily make the case that no, he basically created
a roadmap to the future that the Air Force follows.
So is his prophecies were self fulfilling? Yeah, because he
said go this way, and the Air Force went that way, yeah,
and created all this stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Yeah, and then the military and well, the Brand Corporation specifically,
it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglas Aircraft.
In the mid forties. They said, well, having one person
to say these things is great, but what we need
is a team and a consensus among this team. So
they kind of, well, not kind of. They very much
(10:31):
patented a technique they called the Delphi technique d E.
L Phi, and that is basically a technique where they're
trying to get agreed on consensus from a number of people.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So there's this very famous story about how the Navy,
I think lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the
Russians had lost a submarine something like that. There was
a loss sub that they wanted to find and they
had no idea where it was. So the Navy polled
all these different different experts and all these different fields
(11:06):
that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, whether aeronautics,
people from Noah, all these people right, and ask them
where do you think the sub is? And no one
hit it on the nose. But why when they basically
used statistical distribution of these various opinions guesses of professionals.
(11:31):
It led them right to that sub And that's what
the Delphi technique does too. It takes opinions of experts
in various fields and says, what do you think of this?
And everybody sends in a questionnaire and anonymously, and there's
no group meeting, so the group doesn't bow to pressure,
no leaders emerge. They're giving their unvarnished opinion. And then
(11:52):
after those opinions come in, they take that information and
send it out again. So it goes in rounds and
rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group
consensus that in the future, we're all going to be
wearing metallic blue jumpsuits.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. And what they're doing is generating what's known as
a scenario. And a guy named Herman Khan Kahn worked
with Rand in the nineteen fifties and he's the one
that kind of coined the term scenario as it applies
to futurology. A pretty good definition I found was a
scenario is a detailed portrait of a plausible future world,
(12:30):
one sufficiently vivid that a planner can clearly see and
comprehend the problems, challenges, and opportunities that such an environment
would present. So it's you know, it's saying, in the future,
we're going to have a scenario where there are going
to be robots in every house hold. Yeah. And one
of the biggest ways that they work on scenarios is
(12:52):
with something called back casting, which is starting at the end,
which is you got a robot in every house, and
then go backwards to how you got there? Yeah, how
you got there? Really? Yeah makes sense?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, and a scenario that's a pretty cool scenario. They
can also be as mundane as running a fire drill
where you're envisioning the fire broke out in the high
school gym, right, and so everybody needs to get out.
That's a that's a scenario. It's as simple as that. Yeah. There.
The weather forecasts are economic forecasts that are run through
(13:24):
computer algorithms. The computer algorithms, the model, the process that
it's going through is the scenario, and it spits out
a possible prediction.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's almost like an effect then, cause right, yeah, you know, yeah,
excellently put thank you. So Herman Kahn worked with rand
and and he did you look him up at all? Oh?
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, he's one of the inspirations for Doctor Strangelove. Yeah,
he was described as a super genius.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, he was super smart, and he he kind of
was a bit of a celebrity at the time. He
wrote a book in nineteen sixty one called on Thermonuclear
War and then went on to forum left ran to
from the Hudson Institute, where he basically was like, we're
a group that is going to forecast the future. So
(14:08):
he became it was like super popular book. Yeah, and
he spawned a lot of other books, similar books.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
We need to take a break, but we're getting We'll
get right back to this in a second. So, Chuck,
(14:34):
you were just talking about Herman Kahn being the super
genius who is something of a celebrity. I read that
Timothy Leary animated that he had taken acid with him.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I believe it.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
He was a part of the inspiration for Doctor Strange Love.
And this book that he wrote called the Year two
thousand a Framework for Speculation on the next thirty three years.
It basically established this outlook that America and capitalism could
do anything thanks to basically technological inventiveness.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, here's a let's hear some of these There was
a list in that book, one hundred technical innovations very
likely in the last third of the twentieth century, one
hundred some of the first ten multiple applications of lasers, boom,
high strength structural materials nailed it, wouldn't you think, Hellois
(15:36):
new or improved materials for equipment and appliances. That's easy. Yeah,
anyone can.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Say that, sure should be better material and predict that
now for twenty fifty.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Longer range, longer range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting.
I don't know about that one. I think that was
a miss. How about this here here are a few
of the other ones. New techniques for cheap and reliable
birth control for sure. Yeah, the pill. I don't know
if the pill is around, we should do A whole
(16:10):
thing may have been the same year because it came
out in sixty seven, was it.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, well, this book came out in sixty seven, right, right?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
A widespread use of nuclear reactors for power duh. Improved
capability to change sex of a children or adult gender reassignment,
Pervasive business use of computers. Yeah, they're all over. Personal pagers. Yeah,
they came and went, and then one of the other
ones was home computers to run households and communicate with
the outside world. Yeah, the Internet of Things. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
They also predicted the rise of the credit economy. Oh
really Yeah, that we currently are in interesting yeah. So,
and that was just like a list, like a sidebar basically, yeah,
in the book, in this book, but the whole idea
that America and capitalism in the West could invent its
way out of any problem. Will we possibly ran across
(17:00):
in the future was the premise or the position of
this book, and it caused an enormous furor in academic circles,
and not just academic circles, because this book was one
of the first to introduce to the public that there
were such things as think tanks like Randy and that
Club of Rome. Yeah, and that these people were sitting
(17:22):
there thinking about the future and we're writing books about it,
and it kind of became a hip thing. But the
Club of Rome was basically diametrically opposed to the outlook
that Herman Kahn had. And the Club of Rome was
a business consortium that conspiracy theorists say is basically the seat.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Of the new world order.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
They're still around, they are, And the Club of Rome
basically said No, we are establishing the gloom and doom
camp that there's such thing as resource depletion overpopulation and
we are basically doomed.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yeah. I mean we've covered this a lot on the show.
Different people that have made wild predictions about we're going
to run out of this by this year. Thomas Malthus, Yeah,
very Malthusian. One of the books that came out of
the Club of Rome in nineteen seventy two was called
Limits to Growth by Danella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jurgen Randers,
and William Barn's at MIT and they had a very
(18:18):
dire apocalyptic outlook of the future, as did a lot
of other people at the time, and a lot of
these were way off base. A lot of these dire predictions, right,
you know, which happened over and over again. Yeah, and so.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
On the Club of Rome's website they defend the Limits
to Growth. No, not the Limits to Growth, the yeah,
the Limits to Growth book, basically saying that it's often
miscited as predicting the collapse of civilization due to renewable
resource over use, right, and it doesn't do that. But
(18:54):
they did use these same kind of techniques that Herman
Kahn and some of his other colleagues. We're coming up
with by by taking population information, food production data, industrial production, pollution,
and non renewable resource consumption and then running scenarios through
this model that they built using computers and coming up
(19:17):
with the scenarios they came up with were kind of grim.
The thing is is, even though they missed the mark,
they still helped establish a very young idea that you
can't just throw your McDonald's styrofoam on the ground, You
can't drive a car that gets two miles per gallon, like,
(19:38):
we can't live like everything is just forever abundant, that
there's no such thing as scarcity.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, it's a double edged sword though, Like I totally agree.
But then it also when you're wrong about these things,
it gives Cynex something to point to to say, well, see,
we didn't run out of oil in the early nineteen
eighties like you said we would, and we don't do
anything about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
I mean, man, that is a great point. It's a
very great point. But at the same time, what you're
seeing here between the limits to growth and the year
two thousand, we still see this today with climate change.
You know, it's like, let's do something about climate change.
The other people say, no, we can invent our way
(20:19):
out of it. And besides, if we do something about
climate change, it's going to mess with the economy. And
these people are saying, forget about the economy. We are
all going to.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Die, yeah, or not necessarily forget about the economy. But
maybe you can do both, right, you know, yeah, you know.
My whole deal with that has always been just like
why take that risk?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Well, who we humans aren't very good at like preparing
for future risk, which is I think one of the
reasons why future ologists are so revered and odd but
also mocked and scorned, because they're doing something that's almost
almost flies in the face of human nature.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, you're really putting yourself out there when you predict
some of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
One other episode that that just reminded me of the
ten thousand year clock.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, that was a great one. Yeah. So
the military, the United States military obviously has used it
for years. Then beginning when was this in the sixties
or seventies, that business got into it.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
So in nineteen seventy two, I think Royal Dutch Shell
heard somebody at the top heard that there wasn't going
to be any oil in by nineteen eighty five, and
they went w Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Businesses basically said, wait a minute, there are people that
can actually use models to determine what the future might
look like, right, how can we use that to make money? Well,
let's throw money at them and find out exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
A couple of other places too that were nascent think
tanks like RAND was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group
in the California Institute of Technology early like kind of
think tank breeding grounds of smart people walking around thinking
about the future.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
But that wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You can't just say this is what I think it's
going to be like, you have to back it up
and we'll talk about how they back it up right
after this.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
How do they back it up?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Well, they use different techniques. If you're a futurist or
a future ologist, you're going to be using techniques that
are pretty recognizable. But the way you put them together
and the things you sort out is what's going to
make you successful or not successful. Right, So you like
brainstorm ideas.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, that's probably where you start. Yeah, it's just like
blue Sky Territory as.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
They say, yeah, you imagine things using scenarios or games,
apparently game theory.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But we got to do that at some point.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, I've been avoiding it cano so like we's a
mind bender. We could mess it up really bad, Yeah,
but we'll do it. That changed the futurism feel tremendously
when they came up with game theory, because it's a
pretty good way of predicting how people will work. And
that's one of the big confounding factors is you can
(23:21):
predict something, follow every single one of these steps that
we're talking about right now, and then people will just
cut to the left all of a sudden, and your
prediction just fell to the wayside because humanity went this
way real quick.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah. Or somebody invented a game changer, a game changing
product or innovation, Yeah, that nobody saw coming. Yeah. What's
that called disruptive technology? Is it? Yeah? That's a good
I like that, not a bad band name. Oh, I
wonder if it's out there.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
If so, it's made of like Silicon Valley rich guys.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Yeah, this is like my sideband. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Do you want to gather professional opinions using say the
Delphi technique? Yeah, you want to do historical analysis current
trends are very huge and can help you as well.
And then like you were saying, I think you call
it back masking.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
No, that's turn me on dead man right from the bets.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, that's what they do. They listen to the beatles
backwards where what it was it. It's not back masking,
I know, but where they where you envision the future
and then you work your way backward from it. When
you do this, you do all this stuff together and
again back casting, backcasting, and when you're when you're using
(24:41):
this along with computer algorithms that can model like the
economy or the weather, oil consumption or something like that,
you can come up with something that you could rightly
say is a prediction or a forecast for the future
where we're going to be. That's right again, though, just
things happen, Like for example, Herman Kahn did not predict
(25:03):
the oil crisis that came the year after he wrote
another famous book. Yeah, in nineteen seventy two, he wrote
a response, I think to limits the growth and just
totally missed the oil crisis.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Man. But how could he predict that? Because the oil crisis.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Came out of the OPEC oil embargo that was punishment
for the US's being involved in the Yam Kipper War.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
So you couldn't see that coming. No, and that's the
big problem with futurology. Yes, exactly, our own US government
has been wrong. The US Department of Interior announced twice
in nineteen thirty nine and then in nineteen fifty one
that we only had thirteen years of oil left. Yeah,
so weird that both times it was thirteen years.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
They don't like to bother people, so they wait until
there's thirteen years left, and they sound it's.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Just such a specific number.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
It.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
What else, Well, we've talked about Moore's law before. That
has aged a little better than some other futurology predictions
because it has been revised over the years, which is
sort of a cheat a little bit. But still, what
I really meant was this right.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I think he went from eighteen months to two years
or something like that. But what's funny is Gerbis stakes
his position in this article. He's saying, like the limits
to Growth and the other Club of Rome stuff, they
missed the mark because they predicted catastrophe, and Moore's law
predicts technological innovation, so it's successful. So yeah, clearly Gerbis
(26:35):
agrees with the Herman Khan group rather than the Club
of Rome group.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I don't think it's subtle.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I think you can't just say, like the Gloom and
Doom camp has just been completely eradicated or proven wrong.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Agreed, you know, yeah, Moore's law. I don't eve think
we said specifically. It predicts the number of transistors on
integrated circuits and computers doubles every two years, right, And
like we said, it's been updated and it's been pretty consistent.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And so with Herman Khan's popularity, and then the big
high profile book publishing argument that he got in with
the Club of Rome that led to like a spade
of other futureology books that I.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Remember it being a big deal when I was a kid.
I remember a lot of people talking about the near
and far future.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
The one that I ran across in this article that
I had heard of, but I didn't know anything about Alvin.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Toffler's Future Shock. I remember that.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I think, did you read it? N The cover I
guarantee would just give you a nostalgia. I'm really but
it came out in nineteen seventy and it predicts a
future where too much rapid change technological change and advancement.
It happens too quickly, and people get all sorts of
stressed and just worn out and basically have all manner
(27:52):
of terrible reactions to it. And I'm like, oh, well,
I predicted twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
So like a person's emotions couldn't handle.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, we're just overwhelmed, okay, through too much rapid technological
innovation happens too quick.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Do you think we're overwhelmed?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Like I get stressed out by like say social media
or something like that.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah. I wonder if it's like people of a certain
age maybe Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
I would guess if you're born into it, you're used
to it, So it would probably more likely apply to
a transition population, like.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Right, a transitional generation? Is that what we are? Don't
you get stressed by social media? Don't you get like
just tense and uh yeah, I mean I kind of
just hate.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
It or having like having information, all this information and
all of it's just so thin ye, content wise or
value wise, but there's tons of it. Yeah, and it's
always coming at you.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Ye. Always wears me out. It wears me out. I
got the future, shock, chuck, you got the Jimmy legs yeah, no,
I totally agree. I'm like that. I just want to
shut it all down, just sh everybody. Not podcasts though, right, yes,
that should live on. So we talked about science fiction
(29:11):
writers and how they are easily off the hook because
they're just writers, right, They're not supposed to predict the future,
but they have been. You can't dismiss it because they've
been on the money or close to it a lot
over the years. Yeah, because, like we said, they're not
hampered by the rational laws of today. They can just
say whatever they want and if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,
(29:33):
I'm just writing stuff. Yes, this is fiction, right, But
a few of the highlights. Jules Verne mid nineteenth century
predicted going to the Moon in a spacecraft.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Not only that, so he predicted it would be shot
out of a cannon basically yeah, but done. But the
thing that he really got though, was that he placed
the moon shot in Florida. Yeah, like one hundred and
thirty seven miles from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch
rockets to the Moon. Not bad now, and for the
(30:06):
same reason too, Like that was it's close to the equator.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Oh is that why? That's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Plus Cape Canaveral is largely protected by the Gulf Stream
from hurricanes. Like as a hurricane comes ashore right before
it starts to get to Canaveral, it goes.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Out again right and then hits North Carolina. Interesting that
that'd be an interesting conversation to have been in on
Like oh, when they were picking play, like where should
we launch this? I mean, where should we put all
of our money in? Right? HG. Wells He predicted tanks. Yeah,
he was here three.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Supposedly he was the first guy to really think of
himself as a futurist.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
He predicted the Adam bomb in nineteen oh eight, aerial
bombing in nineteen oh eight. What The name robot was
actually coined by a science fiction writer, a check writer
named Carl Kopek. In nineteen twenty one, he named robots.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I think the all time winner, though, is Hugo Gernsbach.
And Hugo Gernsbach. If you're into science fiction, you recognize
his first name because he's who the Hugo Award is
named after. You may also recognize his last name too,
if you're a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in I
think the nineteen tens.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, he was rinning.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph one two four
C forty one plus. He predicted everything in this.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah you know what that means. It's actually a play
on words one two It means one two for C
for one another. You get it. Wow. Yeah, that's great.
One two four C for one and then another is
the plus sign. Yeah. Yeah that alone, I was sold. Yeah,
it's like, I love this guy.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
It's just like that Van Halen album. OHU eight one
two exactly.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
So what is he predicted? He predict did solar power,
like the realistic use of solar power? Uh huh. He
predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders, jukeboxes, loud.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Speakers, tinfoil, rust, poof steel, synthetic fabrics, all in one book.
And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named after him
because he wanted to make science fiction more science based.
Yeah you know, I'm using that same logic. So he
would have been a very like almost a father of
(32:31):
future ology.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Oh yeah, for sure. You know, here's a few other
things from that book. This one, to me, I'm surprised
no one's done this yet. The appetizer, which is at
a restaurant in an advanced scientifically advanced restaurant will be
a room that you wait in before you get your
table that's flooded with gases that make you hungry. Oh yeah,
not bad. Yeah, just have a seat in the appetizer room, right,
(32:55):
we'll be ready shortly.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Just like bloody fingernails, a scratch send in the walls
as people are trying to get to the other room
where the food is.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
The telautograph, which is basically a fax machine, the telefat
which was a picturephone, had a universal translator where they
translate any language right there in your hand. Yeah, not bad.
And then this one I love. The Vacation City was
(33:24):
a suspended city and a domed suspended city twenty thousand
feet in the air that used a device that nullified gravity.
And in vacation City, no mechanical devices are permitted because
it was supposed to be a true escape. That's awesome
from the mechanized world. Waiting for that one. And this
was in nineteen eleven. Yeah, he predicted just that there
(33:45):
would be a need for that.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
That's like that town in West Virginia, Green something, West
Virginia where the people who have electromagnetic sensitivity. Go because
you're not allowed to have any electromagnetic stuff. Oh really,
because there's like a radio telescope whe there's something there
could be interfered with.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah, and you could be amish. Can you just be amish? No,
like I want to be amish. If you're Harrison Ford,
you could be yeah, or Woody Harrelson. Yeah, right, you
got anything else? How about these predictions for the future.
There's a couple in here there kind of funny. Ten
predictions that missed the mark, and these are real predictions.
(34:24):
In nineteen sixty seven, US News and World Report said
that by the end of the century, we will launch
our freight across the continent with missiles. Like you order
something from Amazon in New York instead of having a
fulfillment center nearby, Right, they just put it in a
missile and shoot it to you. Yeah, didn't happen. No,
(34:44):
but drones are coming? Are they really? Are they still
on that? Probably? Okay.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
In nineteen fifty five, a guy named Alex Lewett predicted
nuclear power vacuum cleaners.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
This one I think would be pretty great, dissolving dishes. Yeah,
and asked what it would be like in the year
two thousand, a science writer named Valdemire. Come, there's a
lot of man one, two, three, four five. He's a
fabulous science writer with the funny name Consonants in a row.
He said, you would basically, uh, put your plate in
(35:21):
two hundred and fifty degree water at the end and
it will just dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Uh.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Bucky Fuller predicted that Canada would be a subtropical climate
because we build a dome over it.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
That didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
No, it didn't, which is strange because Bucky Fuller was
pretty sharp.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Dude. Here's another one. Was he really? Yeah? Buckminster Fuller?
Oh I didn't pick up on that.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
He's who bucky balls are named after. Really, why I don't.
He may have invented him. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
What's the bucky ball.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
It's the those little balls that are magnetic spheres that
like you, Oh, they'll shape in bucket balls.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Here's one. A Scottish geneticist that said in
the nineteen twenties that in the future, one third of
the babies would not be born. Oh, only one third
would be born as a result of pregnancy and the
other babies would be born in a lab.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Would they be grown basically exogenesis? Yeah, here's the last one.
Check you ready. Nineteen seventy five, the Research Institute of America,
which sounds pretty smart, said that by nineteen seventy five,
I'm sorry, this is several years before that, we would
all be driving personal helicopters.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Did not pan out, Probably never will. I don't know
if i'd want a personal helicopter.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
You know. I was for Emily's birthday. I rented a
cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. Did you take a
personal helicopter there? No? But I was sitting on the
deck we all were, and way across the valley on
the side of a mountain was this huge, huge house.
And I heard a sound of a helicopter. I was like,
and I saw a blinking light. I got out the
(37:08):
binoculars and this dude had a helicopter. Wow. And he
took it and he flew it down about two miles
to the lake at the bottom of the valley. And
I guess he has a lake house and a mountain house,
and the easiest way to get there is to make
the four minute helicopter flight. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow, it
was pretty amazing. Wow, I want to know who that
(37:30):
guy is? Nut guy could be a lady. Yeah, it
could be what am I saying? It could be Carly Fiorina. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Is that she's the woman who's running for GOP president candidate?
Oh right, Fiurina, that's right, gotcha?
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Go ahead? Oh oh sorry, let's see.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Well, if you want to know more about futurology, you
can type that word into the search bar at house
to work dot com. And since Chuck had an anecdote
about helicopters, it's time for listeners.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
It sort of looked like one of those Magnum p
I ones too.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Well, if I did have a personal helicopter, it would
look an awful lot like that.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
I'm sure what Hey, guys, my name is Shelby. I'm
honored for you to be reading this. My husband and
I love your show, and you've solved our dilemma as
to what to listen to in our car together. I
want to let you know you did a great job
on the HIV AIDS podcast. However, I think you missed
telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis. Just
before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating heemophilia,
called a clotting factor concentrate was developed. I finally let
(38:32):
those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and completely
change the landscape of the disorder. By the time HIV
was discovered to be a blood born virus, many of
those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to mention
that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies did
not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of their
knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong public
(38:54):
outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story is
not told often enough. In the injustice that these individuals
suffered at the hands of big Pharma is undoubtedly one
of the greatest our country has seen. Man. There's an
extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called Bad
Blood Colon A cautionary tale. Anyway, that's about it, And
I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out. That is from Shelby.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Shelby thank you for not only that illuminating email, yeah,
but also the documentary recommendation.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We're always looking for those absolutely.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can send us an email to Stuff podcast at houstuffworks
dot com and has always tuned us at our home
on the web. Stuff Youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everyone, it's me Joshuam. For this week's select I've
chosen our January twenty sixteen episode on futurology. It's one
of those topics that has a name that makes it
sound way cooler and far out than it actually is.
But happily we found that when you dig into it,
even the blandest parts of futurology are super interesting. Still,
(00:21):
I hope you like this one.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Guys, welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here, and it's
stuff you should know from the future, but not really.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
How you doing, I'm fine, Well, good, that's good. I
enjoyed this topic. I thought it was kind of neat. Yeah,
it was. It was funny.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
When you're reading about futurology and futurelogists aka futurists, you
tend to want to make it like more than it
actually is, and when you look into the topic it
keeps having to be beaten down just because of the
name alone.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, you sound like a little bit like a wackad
do A whack could do, say you're a futurist, a seer.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah, and you know, sometimes they're thinking about they're using
these these really neat techniques to predict the future. They're
talking about some really mundane stuff, Yeah, boring stuff, economic forecasts,
things like that, how much oil will be left in
thirty years, that kind of thing. But then on the
other hand, if you're a futurerologist, you may also be
(01:44):
tasked with figuring out what technology we're going to be
using in thirty years, or you know, what color the
shiny jumpsuits we're all going to wear will be.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
That kind of stuff. Yeah. I think one of my
favorite things is to look at past future predictions. Yeah,
it's fun. Yeah, there's nothing that'll make someone look less
knowledgeable than going back to what they thought the future
would look like in the year two thousand, right, like
back in the nineteen thirties or forties or sometimes some
(02:15):
of those things happen. Yeah, and then it's amazing. Yeah,
that's like wow, you know, because something to this.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
These guys are like really really dead on. And I
was reading an article I think it was in Harvard
Business Review, and it was a post by Paul Sappho,
who runs a venture capital firm I believe called discern. Yeah,
and Paul Sefa was saying like he was trying to
(02:41):
get across that sci fi authors and future ologists their
paths overlap quite a bit, but really there's pretty big distinctions.
And even in this article they got lumped in together. Yeah,
because sci fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But
(03:04):
Paul Cefo was saying like, yeah, but a real futureologist
you have to use logic.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
If you're a sci fi.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Writer, you can just use your imagination, you don't have
to back it up with anything. Yes, you're a creature ologist.
You have to use logic that makes sense to whoever's
hearing your prediction.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, And I think that's one reason why some sci
fi writers have been right on the nose with some
future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic and they
can just free form, you know. Yeah, but then it's
just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I
think they're still applying a lot of the same rules
(03:41):
of future ology. Yeah, but they're just not bound by
you know, the laws of well not the laws, but
you know, the laws of logic. Yeah, exactly. I'm with you.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
But that's the best science fiction though, I think, is
something that logically makes sense. Yeah, because then it's just fantasy. Yeah,
that's true.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So futurology is recognizing and assessing potential future events. I
could have sworn Jonathan Strickland wrote this, by the way,
it ready, but it was not. No, it's very Strickland esk.
Nicholas Gerbis. Yeah, that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if
it is. I've never met this, Nicholas Gerbis. But the
(04:26):
point Gerbus makes, which I think is good as it's
a product of our times in many cases, like depending
on where we are as a society, and like he
makes a great point. During the Civil War there probably
weren't a lot of like rosy predictions for the future
American Civil War, sure, but in the Gilded Age people
a lot more optimistic, optimistic, so they may have you know,
(04:48):
it's a whole different deal like during the Cold War,
for instance, right, a lot of paranoia, a lot of cynicism.
Probably not going to be a rosy outlook for the future, right,
like during the Gilded Age when it was rosier. Yeah,
way more optimistic than the Cold.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
War, which is kind of ironic because the Gilded Age
didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were just pretending,
hence the name. Yeah, the thing is what you've just said, though,
is is kind of an argument against futurology because one
of the big critiques of it is that a futureologist,
they're not doing anything. Even if you're commenting on the
(05:25):
past or the future, you're still really commenting about your present,
your contemporary time, because that's what you.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Or recent past.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Sure, yeah, that's what you what you've lived through and experienced.
That's all you can really reflect on. And futurology seeks
to go beyond that.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Well, yeah, that makes sense. So if you like, look
at this thing that is happening now or just happened,
then what is going to be happening in that thing
in ten years? And it's a lot of times based
on how the direction it's currently going. Yes, okay, so.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Gerbis makes a pretty good It gives you a good
example that the cell phone grew out of the telegraph,
which ultimately is related further.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Back to the smoke signal.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Sure, right, yeah, but if you were a future all
just hanging out around somebody who was sending smoke signals.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Would you be able to predict the cell phone? Probably
not or not? Could you predict the impact of the
automobile or the highway system? Right? Maybe? But would you
predict that people would have sex in the back seat
of a car because it provides a little well, I
don't think they did. Or urban sprawl? Yeah? Could you
(06:41):
predict exurbs and edge cities just because the highways got built?
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah, and not a lot of people did, even though
a lot of people said there's going to be horseless
carriages one day, and it's going they're going to change
things big time. People are going to be able to
move around a lot more. Yeah, But that doesn't mean
that everybody saw every result of the automobile. It was
a game changer, yeah, is what you could agreed. So
(07:10):
what we're saying here, And if it sounds a little
weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing futurology, that's
basically the fun thing to do when you talk about
futurology is to criticize it and be awed by it
because a lot of times they really are super right.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
That's right. Futurology has been around for a long time.
I mean, since people were writing fiction, there were people
predicting the future, right, but as far as things didn't
really get going as far as being meaningful until after
World War Two, when the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically,
(07:52):
like it was really important to try and see where
things were going militarily, right, because it was super expensive
to develop new technologies. It could take a long time.
So they started thinking, hey, we need to get some
people on board that can kind of hopefully predict where
we're headed here so we can make the right decisions.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, because if it takes a really long time, like
you said, to develop a weapon, by the time you
have that weapon in deployed in the field, you're going
to need to know it's not already obsolete. The only
way to do that is to predict what kind of
warfare you're going to be engaged in. Because this is
a time like at the end of World War two,
so many inventions came out of World War one and
(08:31):
two war machine inventions that things were changing so quickly
that there was actually you can kind of put modern
futureology into the lap of one guy, an Air Force
general named hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing
so fast that his Air Force needed to basically predict
the future and see what direction it needed to go.
(08:53):
So he looked around and he started tapping people to
do that. One of the first people he tapped is
a scientist anautical engineer named Theodore von Carmon.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yes, he was a super smart dude, and he led
a team that did predict a lot of stuff like
drones and as far as you know, the military using drones,
not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood, just
a film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone, target
seeking missiles, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
All of this was in one report. Yeah, to hap
Arnold like, this is like and this guy knocked it
out of the park. But he and his group were
very much limited to small academic and military circles. Like
the general public wasn't aware that this was going on,
but his group. Von Carmon's group so accurately foresaw the
(09:49):
direction that modern warfare was going that you can also
very easily make the case that no, he basically created
a roadmap to the future that the Air Force follows.
So is his prophecies were self fulfilling? Yeah, because he
said go this way, and the Air Force went that way, yeah,
and created all this stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Yeah, and then the military and well, the Brand Corporation specifically,
it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglas Aircraft.
In the mid forties. They said, well, having one person
to say these things is great, but what we need
is a team and a consensus among this team. So
they kind of, well, not kind of. They very much
(10:31):
patented a technique they called the Delphi technique d E.
L Phi, and that is basically a technique where they're
trying to get agreed on consensus from a number of people.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So there's this very famous story about how the Navy,
I think lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the
Russians had lost a submarine something like that. There was
a loss sub that they wanted to find and they
had no idea where it was. So the Navy polled
all these different different experts and all these different fields
(11:06):
that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, whether aeronautics,
people from Noah, all these people right, and ask them
where do you think the sub is? And no one
hit it on the nose. But why when they basically
used statistical distribution of these various opinions guesses of professionals.
(11:31):
It led them right to that sub And that's what
the Delphi technique does too. It takes opinions of experts
in various fields and says, what do you think of this?
And everybody sends in a questionnaire and anonymously, and there's
no group meeting, so the group doesn't bow to pressure,
no leaders emerge. They're giving their unvarnished opinion. And then
(11:52):
after those opinions come in, they take that information and
send it out again. So it goes in rounds and
rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group
consensus that in the future, we're all going to be
wearing metallic blue jumpsuits.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. And what they're doing is generating what's known as
a scenario. And a guy named Herman Khan Kahn worked
with Rand in the nineteen fifties and he's the one
that kind of coined the term scenario as it applies
to futurology. A pretty good definition I found was a
scenario is a detailed portrait of a plausible future world,
(12:30):
one sufficiently vivid that a planner can clearly see and
comprehend the problems, challenges, and opportunities that such an environment
would present. So it's you know, it's saying, in the future,
we're going to have a scenario where there are going
to be robots in every house hold. Yeah. And one
of the biggest ways that they work on scenarios is
(12:52):
with something called back casting, which is starting at the end,
which is you got a robot in every house, and
then go backwards to how you got there? Yeah, how
you got there? Really? Yeah makes sense?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, and a scenario that's a pretty cool scenario. They
can also be as mundane as running a fire drill
where you're envisioning the fire broke out in the high
school gym, right, and so everybody needs to get out.
That's a that's a scenario. It's as simple as that. Yeah. There.
The weather forecasts are economic forecasts that are run through
(13:24):
computer algorithms. The computer algorithms, the model, the process that
it's going through is the scenario, and it spits out
a possible prediction.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's almost like an effect then, cause right, yeah, you know, yeah,
excellently put thank you. So Herman Kahn worked with rand
and and he did you look him up at all? Oh?
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah, he's one of the inspirations for Doctor Strangelove. Yeah,
he was described as a super genius.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, he was super smart, and he he kind of
was a bit of a celebrity at the time. He
wrote a book in nineteen sixty one called on Thermonuclear
War and then went on to forum left ran to
from the Hudson Institute, where he basically was like, we're
a group that is going to forecast the future. So
(14:08):
he became it was like super popular book. Yeah, and
he spawned a lot of other books, similar books.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
We need to take a break, but we're getting We'll
get right back to this in a second. So, Chuck,
(14:34):
you were just talking about Herman Kahn being the super
genius who is something of a celebrity. I read that
Timothy Leary animated that he had taken acid with him.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
I believe it.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
He was a part of the inspiration for Doctor Strange Love.
And this book that he wrote called the Year two
thousand a Framework for Speculation on the next thirty three years.
It basically established this outlook that America and capitalism could
do anything thanks to basically technological inventiveness.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, here's a let's hear some of these There was
a list in that book, one hundred technical innovations very
likely in the last third of the twentieth century, one
hundred some of the first ten multiple applications of lasers, boom,
high strength structural materials nailed it, wouldn't you think, Hellois
(15:36):
new or improved materials for equipment and appliances. That's easy. Yeah,
anyone can.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Say that, sure should be better material and predict that
now for twenty fifty.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Longer range, longer range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting.
I don't know about that one. I think that was
a miss. How about this here here are a few
of the other ones. New techniques for cheap and reliable
birth control for sure. Yeah, the pill. I don't know
if the pill is around, we should do A whole
(16:10):
thing may have been the same year because it came
out in sixty seven, was it.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, well, this book came out in sixty seven, right, right?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
A widespread use of nuclear reactors for power duh. Improved
capability to change sex of a children or adult gender reassignment,
Pervasive business use of computers. Yeah, they're all over. Personal pagers. Yeah,
they came and went, and then one of the other
ones was home computers to run households and communicate with
the outside world. Yeah, the Internet of Things. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
They also predicted the rise of the credit economy. Oh
really Yeah, that we currently are in interesting yeah. So,
and that was just like a list, like a sidebar basically, yeah,
in the book, in this book, but the whole idea
that America and capitalism in the West could invent its
way out of any problem. Will we possibly ran across
(17:00):
in the future was the premise or the position of
this book, and it caused an enormous furor in academic circles,
and not just academic circles, because this book was one
of the first to introduce to the public that there
were such things as think tanks like Randy and that
Club of Rome. Yeah, and that these people were sitting
(17:22):
there thinking about the future and we're writing books about it,
and it kind of became a hip thing. But the
Club of Rome was basically diametrically opposed to the outlook
that Herman Kahn had. And the Club of Rome was
a business consortium that conspiracy theorists say is basically the seat.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Of the new world order.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
They're still around, they are, And the Club of Rome
basically said No, we are establishing the gloom and doom
camp that there's such thing as resource depletion overpopulation and
we are basically doomed.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yeah. I mean we've covered this a lot on the show.
Different people that have made wild predictions about we're going
to run out of this by this year. Thomas Malthus, Yeah,
very Malthusian. One of the books that came out of
the Club of Rome in nineteen seventy two was called
Limits to Growth by Danella H. Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jurgen Randers,
and William Barn's at MIT and they had a very
(18:18):
dire apocalyptic outlook of the future, as did a lot
of other people at the time, and a lot of
these were way off base. A lot of these dire predictions, right,
you know, which happened over and over again. Yeah, and so.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
On the Club of Rome's website they defend the Limits
to Growth. No, not the Limits to Growth, the yeah,
the Limits to Growth book, basically saying that it's often
miscited as predicting the collapse of civilization due to renewable
resource over use, right, and it doesn't do that. But
(18:54):
they did use these same kind of techniques that Herman
Kahn and some of his other colleagues. We're coming up
with by by taking population information, food production data, industrial production, pollution,
and non renewable resource consumption and then running scenarios through
this model that they built using computers and coming up
(19:17):
with the scenarios they came up with were kind of grim.
The thing is is, even though they missed the mark,
they still helped establish a very young idea that you
can't just throw your McDonald's styrofoam on the ground, You
can't drive a car that gets two miles per gallon, like,
(19:38):
we can't live like everything is just forever abundant, that
there's no such thing as scarcity.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, it's a double edged sword though, Like I totally agree.
But then it also when you're wrong about these things,
it gives Cynex something to point to to say, well, see,
we didn't run out of oil in the early nineteen
eighties like you said we would, and we don't do
anything about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
I mean, man, that is a great point. It's a
very great point. But at the same time, what you're
seeing here between the limits to growth and the year
two thousand, we still see this today with climate change.
You know, it's like, let's do something about climate change.
The other people say, no, we can invent our way
(20:19):
out of it. And besides, if we do something about
climate change, it's going to mess with the economy. And
these people are saying, forget about the economy. We are
all going to.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Die, yeah, or not necessarily forget about the economy. But
maybe you can do both, right, you know, yeah, you know.
My whole deal with that has always been just like
why take that risk?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Well, who we humans aren't very good at like preparing
for future risk, which is I think one of the
reasons why future ologists are so revered and odd but
also mocked and scorned, because they're doing something that's almost
almost flies in the face of human nature.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, you're really putting yourself out there when you predict
some of this stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
One other episode that that just reminded me of the
ten thousand year clock.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, that was a great one. Yeah. So
the military, the United States military obviously has used it
for years. Then beginning when was this in the sixties
or seventies, that business got into it.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
So in nineteen seventy two, I think Royal Dutch Shell
heard somebody at the top heard that there wasn't going
to be any oil in by nineteen eighty five, and
they went w Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Businesses basically said, wait a minute, there are people that
can actually use models to determine what the future might
look like, right, how can we use that to make money? Well,
let's throw money at them and find out exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
A couple of other places too that were nascent think
tanks like RAND was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group
in the California Institute of Technology early like kind of
think tank breeding grounds of smart people walking around thinking
about the future.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
But that wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
You can't just say this is what I think it's
going to be like, you have to back it up
and we'll talk about how they back it up right
after this.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
How do they back it up?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Well, they use different techniques. If you're a futurist or
a future ologist, you're going to be using techniques that
are pretty recognizable. But the way you put them together
and the things you sort out is what's going to
make you successful or not successful. Right, So you like
brainstorm ideas.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, that's probably where you start. Yeah, it's just like
blue Sky Territory as.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
They say, yeah, you imagine things using scenarios or games,
apparently game theory.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But we got to do that at some point.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, I've been avoiding it cano so like we's a
mind bender. We could mess it up really bad, Yeah,
but we'll do it. That changed the futurism feel tremendously
when they came up with game theory, because it's a
pretty good way of predicting how people will work. And
that's one of the big confounding factors is you can
(23:21):
predict something, follow every single one of these steps that
we're talking about right now, and then people will just
cut to the left all of a sudden, and your
prediction just fell to the wayside because humanity went this
way real quick.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yeah. Or somebody invented a game changer, a game changing
product or innovation, Yeah, that nobody saw coming. Yeah. What's
that called disruptive technology? Is it? Yeah? That's a good
I like that, not a bad band name. Oh, I
wonder if it's out there.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
If so, it's made of like Silicon Valley rich guys.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Yeah, this is like my sideband. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Do you want to gather professional opinions using say the
Delphi technique? Yeah, you want to do historical analysis current
trends are very huge and can help you as well.
And then like you were saying, I think you call
it back masking.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
No, that's turn me on dead man right from the bets.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, that's what they do. They listen to the beatles
backwards where what it was it. It's not back masking,
I know, but where they where you envision the future
and then you work your way backward from it. When
you do this, you do all this stuff together and
again back casting, backcasting, and when you're when you're using
(24:41):
this along with computer algorithms that can model like the
economy or the weather, oil consumption or something like that,
you can come up with something that you could rightly
say is a prediction or a forecast for the future
where we're going to be. That's right again, though, just
things happen, Like for example, Herman Kahn did not predict
(25:03):
the oil crisis that came the year after he wrote
another famous book. Yeah, in nineteen seventy two, he wrote
a response, I think to limits the growth and just
totally missed the oil crisis.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Man. But how could he predict that? Because the oil crisis.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Came out of the OPEC oil embargo that was punishment
for the US's being involved in the Yam Kipper War.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
So you couldn't see that coming. No, and that's the
big problem with futurology. Yes, exactly, our own US government
has been wrong. The US Department of Interior announced twice
in nineteen thirty nine and then in nineteen fifty one
that we only had thirteen years of oil left. Yeah,
so weird that both times it was thirteen years.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
They don't like to bother people, so they wait until
there's thirteen years left, and they sound it's.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Just such a specific number.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
It.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
What else, Well, we've talked about Moore's law before. That
has aged a little better than some other futurology predictions
because it has been revised over the years, which is
sort of a cheat a little bit. But still, what
I really meant was this right.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I think he went from eighteen months to two years
or something like that. But what's funny is Gerbis stakes
his position in this article. He's saying, like the limits
to Growth and the other Club of Rome stuff, they
missed the mark because they predicted catastrophe, and Moore's law
predicts technological innovation, so it's successful. So yeah, clearly Gerbis
(26:35):
agrees with the Herman Khan group rather than the Club
of Rome group.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I don't think it's subtle.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I think you can't just say, like the Gloom and
Doom camp has just been completely eradicated or proven wrong.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Agreed, you know, yeah, Moore's law. I don't eve think
we said specifically. It predicts the number of transistors on
integrated circuits and computers doubles every two years, right, And
like we said, it's been updated and it's been pretty consistent.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And so with Herman Khan's popularity, and then the big
high profile book publishing argument that he got in with
the Club of Rome that led to like a spade
of other futureology books that I.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Remember it being a big deal when I was a kid.
I remember a lot of people talking about the near
and far future.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
The one that I ran across in this article that
I had heard of, but I didn't know anything about Alvin.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Toffler's Future Shock. I remember that.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
I think, did you read it? N The cover I
guarantee would just give you a nostalgia. I'm really but
it came out in nineteen seventy and it predicts a
future where too much rapid change technological change and advancement.
It happens too quickly, and people get all sorts of
stressed and just worn out and basically have all manner
(27:52):
of terrible reactions to it. And I'm like, oh, well,
I predicted twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
So like a person's emotions couldn't handle.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, we're just overwhelmed, okay, through too much rapid technological
innovation happens too quick.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Do you think we're overwhelmed?
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Like I get stressed out by like say social media
or something like that.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Yeah. I wonder if it's like people of a certain
age maybe Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
I would guess if you're born into it, you're used
to it, So it would probably more likely apply to
a transition population, like.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Right, a transitional generation? Is that what we are? Don't
you get stressed by social media? Don't you get like
just tense and uh yeah, I mean I kind of
just hate.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
It or having like having information, all this information and
all of it's just so thin ye, content wise or
value wise, but there's tons of it. Yeah, and it's
always coming at you.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Ye. Always wears me out. It wears me out. I
got the future, shock, chuck, you got the Jimmy legs yeah, no,
I totally agree. I'm like that. I just want to
shut it all down, just sh everybody. Not podcasts though, right, yes,
that should live on. So we talked about science fiction
(29:11):
writers and how they are easily off the hook because
they're just writers, right, They're not supposed to predict the future,
but they have been. You can't dismiss it because they've
been on the money or close to it a lot
over the years. Yeah, because, like we said, they're not
hampered by the rational laws of today. They can just
say whatever they want and if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,
(29:33):
I'm just writing stuff. Yes, this is fiction, right, But
a few of the highlights. Jules Verne mid nineteenth century
predicted going to the Moon in a spacecraft.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Not only that, so he predicted it would be shot
out of a cannon basically yeah, but done. But the
thing that he really got though, was that he placed
the moon shot in Florida. Yeah, like one hundred and
thirty seven miles from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch
rockets to the Moon. Not bad now, and for the
(30:06):
same reason too, Like that was it's close to the equator.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Oh is that why? That's one of the reasons why.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Plus Cape Canaveral is largely protected by the Gulf Stream
from hurricanes. Like as a hurricane comes ashore right before
it starts to get to Canaveral, it goes.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Out again right and then hits North Carolina. Interesting that
that'd be an interesting conversation to have been in on
Like oh, when they were picking play, like where should
we launch this? I mean, where should we put all
of our money in? Right? HG. Wells He predicted tanks. Yeah,
he was here three.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Supposedly he was the first guy to really think of
himself as a futurist.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
He predicted the Adam bomb in nineteen oh eight, aerial
bombing in nineteen oh eight. What The name robot was
actually coined by a science fiction writer, a check writer
named Carl Kopek. In nineteen twenty one, he named robots.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I think the all time winner, though, is Hugo Gernsbach.
And Hugo Gernsbach. If you're into science fiction, you recognize
his first name because he's who the Hugo Award is
named after. You may also recognize his last name too,
if you're a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in I
think the nineteen tens.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, he was rinning.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph one two four
C forty one plus. He predicted everything in this.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah you know what that means. It's actually a play
on words one two It means one two for C
for one another. You get it. Wow. Yeah, that's great.
One two four C for one and then another is
the plus sign. Yeah. Yeah that alone, I was sold. Yeah,
it's like, I love this guy.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
It's just like that Van Halen album. OHU eight one
two exactly.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
So what is he predicted? He predict did solar power,
like the realistic use of solar power? Uh huh. He
predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders, jukeboxes, loud.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Speakers, tinfoil, rust, poof steel, synthetic fabrics, all in one book.
And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named after him
because he wanted to make science fiction more science based.
Yeah you know, I'm using that same logic. So he
would have been a very like almost a father of
(32:31):
future ology.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Oh yeah, for sure. You know, here's a few other
things from that book. This one, to me, I'm surprised
no one's done this yet. The appetizer, which is at
a restaurant in an advanced scientifically advanced restaurant will be
a room that you wait in before you get your
table that's flooded with gases that make you hungry. Oh yeah,
not bad. Yeah, just have a seat in the appetizer room, right,
(32:55):
we'll be ready shortly.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Just like bloody fingernails, a scratch send in the walls
as people are trying to get to the other room
where the food is.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
The telautograph, which is basically a fax machine, the telefat
which was a picturephone, had a universal translator where they
translate any language right there in your hand. Yeah, not bad.
And then this one I love. The Vacation City was
(33:24):
a suspended city and a domed suspended city twenty thousand
feet in the air that used a device that nullified gravity.
And in vacation City, no mechanical devices are permitted because
it was supposed to be a true escape. That's awesome
from the mechanized world. Waiting for that one. And this
was in nineteen eleven. Yeah, he predicted just that there
(33:45):
would be a need for that.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
That's like that town in West Virginia, Green something, West
Virginia where the people who have electromagnetic sensitivity. Go because
you're not allowed to have any electromagnetic stuff. Oh really,
because there's like a radio telescope whe there's something there
could be interfered with.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah, and you could be amish. Can you just be amish? No,
like I want to be amish. If you're Harrison Ford,
you could be yeah, or Woody Harrelson. Yeah, right, you
got anything else? How about these predictions for the future.
There's a couple in here there kind of funny. Ten
predictions that missed the mark, and these are real predictions.
(34:24):
In nineteen sixty seven, US News and World Report said
that by the end of the century, we will launch
our freight across the continent with missiles. Like you order
something from Amazon in New York instead of having a
fulfillment center nearby, Right, they just put it in a
missile and shoot it to you. Yeah, didn't happen. No,
(34:44):
but drones are coming? Are they really? Are they still
on that? Probably? Okay.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
In nineteen fifty five, a guy named Alex Lewett predicted
nuclear power vacuum cleaners.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
This one I think would be pretty great, dissolving dishes. Yeah,
and asked what it would be like in the year
two thousand, a science writer named Valdemire. Come, there's a
lot of man one, two, three, four five. He's a
fabulous science writer with the funny name Consonants in a row.
He said, you would basically, uh, put your plate in
(35:21):
two hundred and fifty degree water at the end and
it will just dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Uh.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Bucky Fuller predicted that Canada would be a subtropical climate
because we build a dome over it.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
That didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
No, it didn't, which is strange because Bucky Fuller was
pretty sharp.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Dude. Here's another one. Was he really? Yeah? Buckminster Fuller?
Oh I didn't pick up on that.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
He's who bucky balls are named after. Really, why I don't.
He may have invented him. I'm not sure.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
What's the bucky ball.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
It's the those little balls that are magnetic spheres that
like you, Oh, they'll shape in bucket balls.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Here's one. A Scottish geneticist that said in
the nineteen twenties that in the future, one third of
the babies would not be born. Oh, only one third
would be born as a result of pregnancy and the
other babies would be born in a lab.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Would they be grown basically exogenesis? Yeah, here's the last one.
Check you ready. Nineteen seventy five, the Research Institute of America,
which sounds pretty smart, said that by nineteen seventy five,
I'm sorry, this is several years before that, we would
all be driving personal helicopters.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Did not pan out, Probably never will. I don't know
if i'd want a personal helicopter.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
You know. I was for Emily's birthday. I rented a
cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. Did you take a
personal helicopter there? No? But I was sitting on the
deck we all were, and way across the valley on
the side of a mountain was this huge, huge house.
And I heard a sound of a helicopter. I was like,
and I saw a blinking light. I got out the
(37:08):
binoculars and this dude had a helicopter. Wow. And he
took it and he flew it down about two miles
to the lake at the bottom of the valley. And
I guess he has a lake house and a mountain house,
and the easiest way to get there is to make
the four minute helicopter flight. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow, it
was pretty amazing. Wow, I want to know who that
(37:30):
guy is? Nut guy could be a lady. Yeah, it
could be what am I saying? It could be Carly Fiorina. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Is that she's the woman who's running for GOP president candidate?
Oh right, Fiurina, that's right, gotcha?
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Go ahead? Oh oh sorry, let's see.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Well, if you want to know more about futurology, you
can type that word into the search bar at house
to work dot com. And since Chuck had an anecdote
about helicopters, it's time for listeners.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
It sort of looked like one of those Magnum p
I ones too.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Well, if I did have a personal helicopter, it would
look an awful lot like that.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
I'm sure what Hey, guys, my name is Shelby. I'm
honored for you to be reading this. My husband and
I love your show, and you've solved our dilemma as
to what to listen to in our car together. I
want to let you know you did a great job
on the HIV AIDS podcast. However, I think you missed
telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis. Just
before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating heemophilia,
called a clotting factor concentrate was developed. I finally let
(38:32):
those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and completely
change the landscape of the disorder. By the time HIV
was discovered to be a blood born virus, many of
those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to mention
that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies did
not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of their
knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong public
(38:54):
outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story is
not told often enough. In the injustice that these individuals
suffered at the hands of big Pharma is undoubtedly one
of the greatest our country has seen. Man. There's an
extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called Bad
Blood Colon A cautionary tale. Anyway, that's about it, And
I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out. That is from Shelby.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Shelby thank you for not only that illuminating email, yeah,
but also the documentary recommendation.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
We're always looking for those absolutely.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can send us an email to Stuff podcast at houstuffworks
dot com and has always tuned us at our home
on the web. Stuff Youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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