What futurists thought 2012 would be like

[TC200six]

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technolog...-would-be-like

It's funny what humans think will happen in the future and predict what would be invented by a certain year. Some of the predictions made about 2012 were just ridiculous, especially the one suggesting that internal combustion engines would be extinct by now. Others were just a little too optimistic about the year.

Paraplegics walk again, among other medical breakthroughs

An article published in the Sun-Herald in May 1993 quoted American pathologist Dr Jeffrey Fisher, who examined medical research in more than 60 fields for his predictions.

Among them:

In 2005, Alzheimer’s disease is cured with new growth factors and drugs.
In 2007, drug addiction would be conquered with designer drugs which correct abnormal genes and eliminate desire.
Humans now live an average of 120 years.
A new vaccine has cured 80 percent of colds.
First successful cloning of a human being. The purpose is for a repository of organs for transplant.
In 2010, paraplegics and quadriplegics walk again. Artificial nerves bypass spinal cord breaks.
New drugs used for Alzheimer's now used on teenagers and adults to create supernormal memories.

The last petrol station in Brisbane closes

A lighthearted Courier Mail article from 2003 titled “The future timeline map of possibilities” provided some exciting predictions for the future.

It said that in 2012 Brisbane would shut down its last petrol station, with drivers having fully migrated to renewable energy.

Perhaps more interestingly, the article also predicted Osama Bin Laden would be assassinated in 2006 and 40 percent of Brisbane would be damaged by a storm in 2008.

Considering Osama was assassinated in 2011 and Brisbane was devastated by floods the same year, those predictions weren’t too far off.

Don’t like your genes? Just change them

An article published in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1989 said that replacing defective genes with healthy substitutes would be a common medical practice by the year 2000.

Another article, published in The Futurist magazine the same month, said that by 2010 the practice would be so widespread that "every family will probably have a member who has undergone such treatment".

Almost ten years later, in 1998, the Sunday Herald Sun quoted Francis Collins, the scientist who was in charge of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) near Washington.

He expected that by 2005 his team would have deciphered the secrets held within our genes and for the first time, scientists would be able to view the complete genetic code of humanity.

"It is reasonably likely that by the year 2010, when you reach your 18th birthday, you will be able to have your own report card printed out listing the risks that you run of contracting a disease in the future, based on the genes you have inherited," he said.

It turns out that Dr Collins was right — his team created a working draft of the human genome in 2000 and a complete one in 2003. Today it is very possible for scientists to analyse your genes and see which diseases you are predisposed to.

Robots go to school

In 2002, the Herald Sun ran a story exploring how quickly artificial intelligence (AI) would progress.

Researcher Ian Neild from UK firm BTexact Technologies predicted that the first artificial mind would pass Year 11 in 2010, Year 12 in 2011, gain a degree in 2013, a master's degree in 2014, a PhD in 2016, and win a Nobel Prize in 2018.

While AI has come a long way in the last decade, the artificial mind is not yet close to human intelligence in most areas.

In June this year, a robot called Eugene developed by a Russian team came within a hair’s breadth of passing the Turing Test — an exercise in which an unseen robot communicates with a group of humans via text, and they have to decide whether or not it is a person.

Eugene was emulating a 13-year-old boy at the event in Buckinghamshire, England, and it fooled the judges 29.2 per cent of the time, nearly reaching the 30 percent pass mark set when the test was first devised by mathematician Alan Turing more than 60 years ago.

Cancer is cured

An article published in June 1989 in the Sun-Herald, cautiously titled “An Optimistic Look at Life Beyond the 1990s”, ran a list of predictions from the Japanese Government's Science and Technology Agency.

The agency compiled a forecast covering the years between 1994 and 2015 after surveying 2,000 optimistic professionals and specialists.

Among the predictions — in 2005 there would emerge a method of restoring cancerous cells to normal conditions.

The same year was expected to see the development of technology for commercially disposing of radioactive waste in outer space.

In 2010 the world's motorists would be driving hydrogen-fuelled cars and doctors would be inserting artificial nerves in their patients.

And in 2012 there would be permanent space stations circling the Earth (good call) — with a manned spaceship landing on Mars the year after (not so good).

Soviets land on Mars

In July 1988 the Soviet Union announced to much fanfare that they planned to land humans on Mars by the year 2010.

Leonid Gorshkov of the Soviet space agency Glavkosmos was quoted in the Los Angeles Times announcing the plan, which he called "a logical expansion of human development".

To be fair, he also added: "but sometimes we think we are a bit optimistic".

Little did he know he was also being optimistic about the longevity of his entire nation. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

[HULK EF]

pretty outlandish stuff!

[MWTB]

I'd like to see some Back to the Future 2 style cooking where you bang a dehydrated pizza in a microwave contraption and 5 seconds later you have a fresh feast. Saves cooking and washing up!

[Resurrection]

Things often don't move that quickly.

[2011G6E]

I do often wonder how fast medical treatments would have advanced if every new idea didn't have to go before a committee of non-doctors...

Look at stem cell treatments...it doesn't go before a review committee of scientists and doctors...it has to be "approved" by a government review made up of politicians, fricking church representatives for some damn reason, and "moral ethicists"...

[hulkfocus]

wow they had some big plans! what happened lol probally politics

[Powdered Toast Man]

We probably could just about clone a human now. Its the law that prevents it.

[Dusty1]

I remember watching Tonight Live and Dave Graney was on. He is always a flash dresser. He said he modeled all his clothing on magazines from the 60s that showed clothes that people would be wearing in the 'future' (2000s I think).

Anyway he quipped, who would have predicted that we'd live our lives in tracksuit pants.

Comfy though.

[2011G6E]

You see, the problem is this: when you go back to the eighties and early nineties when we were really looking forward to "the future" beyond the 21st century, we had literally no idea that there would be no such thing as "unbounded development", and "unrestricted progress".

Try and build a garden shed now and you have to get all sorts of approvals. It;s been said before that if someone suggested nation-building projects like the Snowey Mountain Scheme today, it would be tied in in so much red tape with green protests, environmental approvals, land rights inquiries, and so on that it wouldn't happen.

We imagined a future where atomic energy would be pursued naturally as a part of progress, as we all knew that Australia has some of the worlds biggest uranium deposits, but then people got scared because of Chernobyl without realising that it was fifty year old badly maintained technology run by drunks with no maintainance (and only around 60 people actually died because of it, not the "hundreds of thousands" that green groups tried to tell us). Three Mile Island in the USA was also a wake up call...but simply for better safety standards and maintainance...again, no one died from that accident, but the green groups got plenty of air time stirring up the fear.

We thought that progress was good, that big projects being built and planned and approved quickly were great for the future. We thought that medical and scientific breakthroughs would allow us all to enjoy a better and longer lifespan. And they do...but imagine what they could have been if there were no restrictions of the study that doctors and medical scientists were allowed to do...not having to run off to an ethics committee and undergo a long drawn-out process before killing a few rats in the name of science testing new drugs and techniques, for example.
We did look forward to the inevitable outcome of cloning...that being the ability to clone body parts or a complete "spare" body that could be kept on ice, as it were, in case you needed some spares. Run that idea by some wibbly wobbly hand-wringing ethics committee today and watch their heads explode...

If you want an example of over-the-top unlimited research and what comes from it (but which of course should never be repeated), look no further than Nazi Germany...doctors there were able to do things that no doctor has ever, and will never be allowed again of course, to do...as many "test subjects" as they liked, to do with however they liked.
Many people are uncomfortable with the fact that virtually everything we know about how the human body reacts to decompression, high altitude, extreme cold, and many other things, all stems from Nazi research on live (but not live for long) human subjects. Even the effects of blood transfusions and insulin were vastly advanced after the war from what Germans and Japanese scientists did to real live people.
The Allies snapped up the research after the war, and ever since there has been a moral dilemma in using the results of this research, as helpful as it is, as horrifying as the source of the facts and figures. It's a fascinating subject and one worth looking up.

Of course there has to be a middle ground...naturally doctors and medical research scientists can't just try out things on living people (well...they can to a certain limit with consent in trials), but they also shouldn't be restricted from trying out things that means a few animals might die in the process, when the potential outcomes are things such as predicted in the above articles.

[goose1000]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

We imagined a future where atomic energy would be pursued naturally as a part of progress, as we all knew that Australia has some of the worlds biggest uranium deposits, but then people got scared because of Chernobyl without realising that it was fifty year old badly maintained technology run by drunks with no maintainance (and only around 60 people actually died because of it, not the "hundreds of thousands" that green groups tried to tell us). Three Mile Island in the USA was also a wake up call...but simply for better safety standards and maintainance...again, no one died from that accident, but the green groups got plenty of air time stirring up the fear.

I think a lot of the problem today is that science has also been devalued. So many arguments are now won or lost on political grounds or popular opinion. Climate change debate is the obvious example, scientists say its happening and all these politicians come out and deny it cause they know dealing with it will be deeply unpopular (and for all those that are now going to smash me over the carbon tax, no I don't believe that the carbon tax is an effective way of dealing with it either). Anyway the point is we don't listen to people who know stuff anymore, we listen to people that tell us what we want to hear.

[GT0132]

When you consider that the Boeing 747 was the aircraft of choice to fly from Australia to England in 1974 and still is nearly 40 years later as well as the fact that supersonic air travel has actually been erradicated with the decommisioning of the Concorde, its fair to say that aviation technology has actually gone back or remained stagnant at best....Yes , we have more fuel efficient, quieter planes now but the industry has't gone forward in leaps and bounds like others have in the past 40 years.

Apart from the changes in livery/logo of the various airlines and the fact that many have gone by the wayside (Pan AM, CPA Air, UTA, Olympic, TAA and Ansett) and new ones have started (Virgin, Jetstar, Etihad and Emirates) the look and feel of commercial air travel has not changed hardly at all in 30-40 years

[chamb0]

Originally Posted by MWTB

I'd like to see some Back to the Future 2 style cooking where you bang a dehydrated pizza in a microwave contraption and 5 seconds later you have a fresh feast. Saves cooking and washing up!

"thanks mum, you sure can hydrate a pizza!"

[mik]

the interview with the guy that built the skycar(Moller)? comes to mind, from memory the bloke was saying by the year 2000 they would be starting to become popular , but it seems people of this generation are more concerned whether their phone and car has all the wizz bang gadget stuff in it.

[BigBlue]

Oddly though none of the "experts" mentioned the internet or mobile phones having the impact (or even existing at all) they actually have today.

Anyone brave enough to have a guess at how we will be living fifty years from now?

Peter.

[SIMBAD]

Originally Posted by BigBlue

Oddly though none of the "experts" mentioned the internet or mobile phones having the impact (or even existing at all) they actually have today.

Anyone brave enough to have a guess at how we will be living fifty years from now?

Peter.

Like the jetsons....

[mik]

Originally Posted by SIMBAD

Like the jetsons....

or we might be back to horse and cart .

[bazza91]

Originally Posted by mik

or we might be back to horse and cart .

My money is on a horse and cart.

Undoubtedly we will have very little freedom of choice.

We will eventually find someway of outsmarting ourselves or we will have another major war, which will be worse this time around due to nuclear weapons,
and we will have to start from square one again.

but you just never know!

[Mr Hardware]

Nothing changes anywhere near as fast as people think

the FG Falcon really isn't that different to the XW/XY falcon of over 40 years ago - still consuming roughly the same amount of dino juice while rolling on rubber tyres.

Remember it's been 43 years since the moon landing but it was only 66 years from the wright brother's first flight to the moon landing.

Not as much will change in the 21st century compared to the 20th. It will just become nicer and safer.