25 years ago, a group of writers and scientists offered their visions of today’s world. What did they get right? And what did they miss? […]
The full collection of letters Hubbard got for his time capsule is here. A lot of the greats offered their thoughts. There’s Fredrick Pohl, the genre’s legendary editor (who’s still at it, after 70 years in the business); Jerry Pournelle, writer of political and military SF, who also did some speechwriting for President Reagan; Roger Zelazny, who mined the world’s great mythologies for his stories; Gregory Benford, astrophysicist-turned-Hugo winner; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow; and Isaac Asimov, arguably the greatest of them all.
Sara Robinson from Alternet has summarised and categorised some of the predictions. Topics covered include: population, technology, health, energy, the environment, education, culture, nuclear war, global politics and economics. There’s also a lighthearted, catch-all category “hopes, fears and foolishness”.
As expected, the predictions range from those that are way off the mark (e.g. most said we would have space colonies on the Moon and Mars), to some that are eerily accurate. This is how Sheldon Glashow imagined the economic situation: “Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown … Most automobiles and heavy machinery will be manufactured in Japanese owned planets located in America.”