Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I've been busy with other work and haven't had much time to work on Steampunk Star Wars or other personal work. But there's new stuff coming, I swear. Here, I'll prove it with a teaser!
So, what else has been going on? My car got broken into yesterday. They left a nice dent in my door and stole 20 or 30 CDs from my glove box. Nothing irreplacable, but it's still a hell of a bummer. Ah well, at least they didn't break a window or steal the car.
I have a new favourite blog! Paleo-future, which looks at the predictions about the future from the past. This is getting linked to all over. It's great seeing how people of the past thought we would be living today. Even predictions from ten years ago tend to be quite inaccurate. Looking through all the different predictions from different time periods, you can see a lot of common mistakes they tend to share. Even when they correctly predict the direction of technology, they almost always completely fail to predict the cultural and social changes that go along with them. People seem to assume their grandchildren will be exactly like them, just with new toys.
Some of my favourite posts:
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900
Suprisingly accurate in some respects, very naive in others. I like the way they casually predict the extinction of all wildlife, and their seeming obsession with pneumatic tubes. Not only that, but they predict automobiles with one or maybe even two horsepower!
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (1993)
The future, as AT&T would like it. My favourite is part 3, where the kid plays a terribly designed virtual reality game with his friends.
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)
GIANT ROBOTS! YEAH!
Makes you wonder what assumptions we have about the future following generations are going to laugh at. Are hydrogen fuel cells the new pneumatic tubes? And what technologies and cultural developments are we severely underestimating?
1 comment:
R2!
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