Unexpectedly correct SF predictions

[Ilya]

There is an endless list of all the things in SF literature which seemed quite reasonable when written – maybe a decade or two away, - yet turned out completely off. Flying cars, Moon colonies by 1980, food pills, human-like robots, gigantic centralized computers controlling everything, Heinlein’s rolling roads (well, maybe these looked farfetched even then), guilt-free sex, etc. However, I have a more interesting, IMO, question:

Which SF predictions, whether scientific or cultural, looked completely absurd, impossible, when first dreamed up, yet actually came to be? Or something like them came to be – it would be too much to expect a precise match?

Off the bat, I can think of two. One is cloning mammals. Up until 1997 it was very much in the realm of science fiction – "not happening any time soon," possibly ever. Then all of a sudden it is here.

The other is TV shows where people compete for money in degrading semi-gladiatorial contests. Common in 1970's SF, and totally farfetched then. Of course, reality (pun intended) turned out a lot less lethal than portrayed back then, but still no one in his right (or even wrong) mind would have imagined 30 years ago the otherwise very peaceful and safety-minded society revel in people humiliating themselves.

Anythng else come to mind?

[Lonewulf]

I give this thread 1 out of 5 for indirectly mentioning fear factor and reality TV. I also now officially hate Ilya.

As for predictions that came true... well... there is the flying car. Or rather, there is a car in existance that can be converted to an aeroplane. :)

[AGN Fuel]

(Scanning the Jules Verne in the bookcase)

What to pick, what to pick..... :think:

[Swift]

Fahrenheit 451 had interact TV that is certainly not far removed from reality TV or Sim-type computer games.

IIRC, Mote in God's Eye had computers that were more like our personal computers, rather than giant centralized ones more common in SF.

I recall (without remembering particular examples) SF with common, cosmetic surgery, including replacing body parts with artifical components (there was one story with a girl with metallic eyelids). Again, not very far from some of our cosmetic surgery or body piercing.

I think a lot of biomedical SF will become close to true in the next 25 years or so, including genetic engineering and designer drugs (both good and bad).

The computer disks in Star Trek are a lot like 3-1/2 inch disks. Some of their medical scanning stuff is getting close to MRI and similar technologies. And communicators are sure a lot like cell phones.

[Argos]

The Internet looks like the Universal AC from Asimov´s "The Last Question" ("Everything I know I learned through Googling...:) ).

[GDwarf]

Well, there's always A. C. Clarke and communications satellites.

[Doodler]

Sometimes I think science fiction is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Star Trek's tech "predictions" are less a sign of Nostradomism from Roddenberry, than a clear sign of the series' cultural impact.

[Frog march]

didn't nostodamus predict spam?

[Doodler]

didn't nostodamus predict spam?

After writing three books of pointless entries, I think he invented the thing...

[Argos]

Doodler, I was about to say the same. :)

[Ilya]

I recall (without remembering particular examples) SF with common, cosmetic surgery, including replacing body parts with artifical components (there was one story with a girl with metallic eyelids). Again, not very far from some of our cosmetic surgery or body piercing.
But did that seem all that far-fetched when the books were written? I was asking specifically about examples which, when read upon first publication, evoked "Neat idea, but maybe in a thousand years, if ever" reaction.

[tdvance]

I just read Wells' "War of the Worlds"---there was this heat ray that used a parabolic mirror to focus invisible light into a parallel beam to set fires, melt things, etc. An infrared laser could substitute for this easily.

Also, the main character wondered if the Martian fighting machines were Martian-controlled or if they had an automatic mechanism for controlling them. If only Wells had gone with the latter instead of the former, it would be a foretelling of automated control systems and artificial intelligence, not to mention robots.

Todd

[Krel]

Murray Leinster's 1946 story, "A Logic Named Joe" came amazingly close to modern home computers and the internet. This page gives examples of what was in the story and how close it came to predicting modern computers: http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Leinster/Logic-Named-Joe.html

David.

[PhantomWolf]

Well Cybernetics (http://www.ric.org/bionic/) are starting to become real, give them another 10 years....

Many Sci-Fi stories pre-1969 had voyages to the moon.

[Ronald Brak]

Well there was one science fiction book I read in which the hero played what would today be a computer game where a space ship flew around the solar system, except in this story the image on his screen was made by a model spacecraft with a camera in the nose moving around a model solar system. It seems like the author lacked imagination in not predicting that computers would be used, but back in the sixties or whenever it was written not many people ever considered the possibility.

[Ilya]

Murray Leinster's 1946 story, "A Logic Named Joe" came amazingly close to modern home computers and the internet.
"Amazingly close" does not even begin to describe it. "Supernaturally prescient" is how I would phrase it. And AFAIK, that story never got much attention before personal computers actually made an appearance -- probably because what it described was such an "obvious" fantasy.

That story is probably the single best example of what I asked for in OP.

[mike alexander]

In "The Roads Must Roll", Robert Heinlein envisioned a gyroscopically stabilized personal vehicle that is almost spot on for the Segway device. But that's minor. The major prediction in the story was that a terrorist type, using careful and patient planning, could potentially wreck a significant portion of a tightly interconnected technological civilization with a few pounds of explosives.

In "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Heinlein noted the opportunities for manipulating the vote in an election that uses computers to collect the data, since it is assumed that the data are 'correct'.

[Frog march]

didn't they have large flatscreen tvs in people's appartments in 1984?

[clop]

Not quite SF, but still rather ahead of her time.

Mother Shipton (http://www.crystalinks.com/mother_shipton.html)

Mother Shipton was born Ursula Sontheil in 1488 in a cave beside the river Nidd in North Yorkshire, England. (I used to live less than 2 miles from that very cave!)

Mother Shipton exhibited prophetic and psychic abilities from an early age. She wrote her prophecies about events to come in the form of poems.

For example:

A carriage without horse will go
Disaster fill the world with woe.

Around the world men's thoughts will fly
Quick as the twinkling of an eye.

Beneath the water, men shall walk
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall even talk.

In water, iron, then shall float
As easy as a wooden boat.


I'm sure it seemed like science fiction back in the 1400's.

clop

[eburacum45]

By the early eighteenth century the Voyage to Laputa by Swift included the prediction of the discovery of the moons of Mars, a spooky coincidence if ever there was one.

[Ilya]

didn't they have large flatscreen tvs in people's appartments in 1984?
No, TV's in people's appartments were quite small; only those in public places were large. And I do not recall them described anywhere as "flat".

[ToSeek]

didn't they have large flatscreen tvs in people's appartments in 1984?

I think that was Fahrenheit 451 - something by Bradbury, anyway.

[Gillianren]

I don't know if they were described as flat (I'd have to go reread it), but yeah, the walls of the living room were covered in TV.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Not quite SF, but still rather ahead of her time.

Mother Shipton (http://www.crystalinks.com/mother_shipton.html)

Mother Shipton was born Ursula Sontheil in 1488 in a cave beside the river Nidd in North Yorkshire, England. (I used to live less than 2 miles from that very cave!)

Mother Shipton exhibited prophetic and psychic abilities from an early age. She wrote her prophecies about events to come in the form of poems.

For example:

A carriage without horse will go
Disaster fill the world with woe.

Around the world men's thoughts will fly
Quick as the twinkling of an eye.

Beneath the water, men shall walk
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall even talk.

In water, iron, then shall float
As easy as a wooden boat.


I'm sure it seemed like science fiction back in the 1400's.

clop
It Seems Hindsiight, Truely is 20/20 ...

That Poem is a Well Known Forgery (http://www.sacred-texts.com/pro/msi/index.htm), Dating from 1862 ...

Also, Additions were Made to it In The Mid-20th Century, By Which Tiime Such Thiings were So Common as to Be Downriight Routine!

:wall:

[clop]

It Seems Hindsiight, Truely is 20/20 ...

That Poem is a Well Known Forgery (http://www.sacred-texts.com/pro/msi/index.htm), Dating from 1862 ...

Also, Additions were Made to it In The Mid-20th Century, By Which Tiime Such Thiings were So Common as to Be Downriight Routine!

:wall:

Stop it you git. How dare you sully the name of Mother Shipton.

clop :)

[greenfeather]

I don't know if they were described as flat (I'd have to go reread it), but yeah, the walls of the living room were covered in TV.

Fahrenheit 451 the movie had the TV interacting with the viewer, the personalities on the TV asked her to vote on some totally trivial question.

Kind of like interactive webcams.

Then along came the husband Montag and flamed the poor wife along with the TV.

[Grand_Lunar]

The ocean of Europa was described in the book 2010 way before the Galileo probe confirmed it.

The communicators on the original Star Trek series are similar in concept to cell phones. Does that count?

[Krel]

The communicators on the original Star Trek series are similar in concept to cell phones. Does that count?

I take it, you are not familiar with a 60 plus years old electronic device now commonly known as a Walkie-Talkie? :lol:

David.

[Ilya]

The ocean of Europa was described in the book 2010 way before the Galileo probe confirmed it.

Doesn't count. It was hypothesized shortly after Voyager photos.

The communicators on the original Star Trek series are similar in concept to cell phones. Does that count?
No. The concept was hardly mind-boggling in 1966.

[Ilya]

(Scanning the Jules Verne in the bookcase)

What to pick, what to pick.....

Except for cannon to the Moon stories, everything Jules Verne wrote looked fairly plausible at his time. Now, atomic bombs in H.G. Wells' "World Set Free" definitely count as "unexpectedly correct prediction". Close enough, anyway.

[Gillianren]

Fahrenheit 451 the movie had the TV interacting with the viewer, the personalities on the TV asked her to vote on some totally trivial question.

Kind of like interactive webcams.

Then along came the husband Montag and flamed the poor wife along with the TV.

I wouldn't know; I haven't seen the movie. But I'm pretty sure that was in the book, too. Definitely the first part, anyway--it was her "family."

[HenrikOlsen]

From what I vaguely remember, the tv episodes where made with pauses where the viewer was expected to make the obvious response, I can't remember that it was implied that it actually mattered what the response was, it would just continue, so it was interactive the same way language tapes are.

For predictions, have a look at Karel Chapek's Krakakit from 1924.

[mike alexander]

Now that I think about it, the idea of the Ginnangu Gap in James Blish's "The Triumph of Time" sounds very much like some colliding-branes theories of the universe.

[eburacum45]

Oh yes; how could I forget? One concept from a Science Fiction story has come true unexpectedly (I didn't expect it, anyway).

Flash Crowds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd).
Niven supposed that, if cheap teleportation were available, crowds of people would suddenly appear at the scene of any short-lived media event.

What has happened, of course, is that the Internet is full of short-lived media events , and Flash Mobs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob) appear without the benefit of teleportation at various places. One appeared at Liverpool Street Station yesterday, a so-called 'mobile clubbing' (http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,,1921425,00.html) event.



All dancing to different music on their i-Pods, eh?
That reminds me of something too;
The Different Drummers from Halo Jones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_Jones#Synopsis) -but perhaps that is stretching the idea a bit far.

[AstroSmurf]

The tiny datacrystals in Babylon 5 always seemed hopelessly useless to me. Who'd want something so small that you're bound to lose track of it to keep vital data on?

And here we are, with Flash memory sticks being sold everywhere...

[stutefish]

William Gibson predicted robot police helicopters in Virtual Light, and a newer, smaller Hummer in Pattern Recognition, for starters.

His books are actually packed with reliable near-future predictions. I'm convinced that even the most extreme ideas from his earlier work will one day be realities.

[tdvance]

Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor"--SPOILER--











an angry, defeated (in the just-finished war between US and Japan) Japanese airline pilot got final revenge by flying the fully-fueled airliner into the Capitol building, killing the President and half of congress. A few years later, watching the news showing a tape of the World Trade Center being hit by the plane, I recalled the book and the striking similarity.

Todd

[Gillianren]

There's a similar sequence at the end of the book of The Running Man, by Richard Bachman. (Okay, Stephen King. But if you're not going to respect the psuedonym, you have to file The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn under Clemens.) Which is why I pretty much just rolled my eyes when people referred to it as "unthinkable"; several people had thought of it, clearly!

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor"--SPOILER--











an angry, defeated (in the just-finished war between US and Japan) Japanese airline pilot got final revenge by flying the fully-fueled airliner into the Capitol building, killing the President and half of congress. A few years later, watching the news showing a tape of the World Trade Center being hit by the plane, I recalled the book and the striking similarity.

Todd
Especially Since, By What Phantom Wolf has Quoted Previously ...

The Airliner that Hit The Pentagon, Was ORIGINALLY Intended to Strike The US Capitol ...

If he Hadn't Over-Shot and The Scaffolding on The Army Section Hadn't Caught his Eye, Our Legislative Branch Could've Been Beheaded!

:eek:

[PhantomWolf]

The Airliner that Hit The Pentagon, Was ORIGINALLY Intended to Strike The US Capitol ...

Flight 77 was believed to be targeted to the White House, but hit the Pentagon after turning to sharply and losing too much height to be able to get back on target.

Flight 93 was the one belived to be targeting the Capitol.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

The Airliner that Hit The Pentagon, Was ORIGINALLY Intended to Strike The US Capitol ...

Flight 77 was believed to be targeted to the White House, but hit the Pentagon after turning to sharply and losing too much height to be able to get back on target.

Flight 93 was the one belived to be targeting the Capitol.
You're Riight ...

I ALWAYS Get those Two Confused ...

Still though, If Not for The Passengers and Crew of Flight 93, Tom Clancy's Horrible Vision May have Been Realized After All!

:think:

[Doodler]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15329396/

Holy Romulan Empire, Batman!

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15329396/

Holy Romulan Empire, Batman!
WHOA ...

That's Even Better Than a Stealth Bomber ...

I Wonder What Siize an Object Wiill Have to Be For it to Work, The Mind Siimply Boggles at The Possibilities!