Heinlein's Predictions

[stevenehrbar]

Back in 1950, Robert A. Heinlein made a number of predictions about the future, the end date for most being the year 2000.  He updated them with commentary in 1965 and 1980, and they were published in his book Expanded Universe.  I just re-read them last night, and decided to scorecard 'em:

• Interplanetary travel at your front door, COD.  It's yours when you pay for it.
  

Nope.  Oh, we could have had it; we got to the Moon in RAH's lifetime.  But no human being has been more than 200 miles from Earth in mine.  His 1980 follow-up that some other country would do it was wrong, too; the closest anybody got to a Mars mission was President Bush (41) proposing one.

• Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

Clearly right.

• The most important military fact of this century is there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.

Right.  I do wonder what would have happened if the ABM treaty had never been signed, and we'd actually tried to develop a defense.  RAH in his 1965 and 1980 comments defended this in light of anti-missile technology by saying that rocks from the Moon wouldn't be blocked by them; since nobody's been to the Moon since the last Apollo mission, the defense doesn't convince.  But it doesn't need to since we didn't even try to build one.

• It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventative war".  We will fight when attacked, or in territory we have guaranteed to defend.

Well, he was still right in 1980, but he was wrong since.  Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1990, Iraq in 1991, Iraq in 1998, Kosovo in 1999; none involved attacks on the U.S. or on territory we'd guaranteed to defend.  (Iraq 2003, too, of course but his predictions were only through 2000.)

(Next prediction was a 15-year one that RAH admitted he got wrong, and which hasn't come true since.  Now on to the next . . .)

• We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.

Nope.  He missed the Green Revolution.  Outside of a handful of basket case countries, food is plentiful.  Heck, even India is a grain exporter.  Biggest problem in America is obesity, even among the poor.  This is a case where RAH's timidity -- the assumption that there wouldn't be a radical breakthrough -- got him, instead of over-optimism like with the space program.

• The cult of the phony wil disappear.  So-called "modern art" will only be discussed by psychiatrists.

And we'll all be starving on the surface of the Moon.  Sorry,  here RAH's hopes blinded him to the institutional shift.  Academic art, which had standards, was destroyed by its overreaction to Impressionism, and standardless art is immunized from the pressure of becoming relevant to the public by bureaucrat-controlled government funding.

• Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will br replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction.

Basically right.  We now have a medicalized psychiatry that shows FDA-measurable results.  Psychology isn't as rigorous, but it's doing much better now.

• Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered.

No, not even close.

• By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a building.

Well, we've done eight of nine planets by robot probe, none but the Moon by humans, and we're not even considering using anything more than telescopes on other stars.  Failed prediction.

• Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag.  Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

Yes, yes, could if you went to the bother of setting up the computer equipment or a voicemail system but you probably didn't, and could if you went to the bother of setting up the computer equipment but you probably didn't.

• Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

Nope.

• A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at high speed.

No, again.  The subways aren't around, and the planes don't go a thousand miles per hour.  However, you can fly 800 miles non-stop, Houton to El Paso, for $66 in current money; CPI adjusted, that's under a 1950s cent a mile.

• A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity

No, a major objective of theoretical physics is still to explain gravity.  Nobody's really trying to control it yet.

• We will not achieve a "World State" in the predicatable future.  Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from the planet.

RAH backed off in his 1980 comments, but I'm inclined to give credit for this one.  The Soviet Bloc collapsed, China kept the name but converted in practice to fascism, and most of the rest of the Third World Marxisms did so too.

• Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population.  About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.

RAH admitted in 1980 he was wrong.

• All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis with a multiple electronic "brain".

No, we never did do such an upgrade.

• Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins.  Beef will become a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.

He missed the Green Revolution and overestimated population growth.  Even his "worldwide" hedge in 1965 doesn't save this; the only places where meat is rare today are places it was rare in 1950, and not all of them at that.

• Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed.

Does this really count?  I mean, for any of his other predictions to be true this one had to come true, too.  But I'm here typing on a computer, so it is true.

• Here are things we won't get soon, if ever:
• Travel through time
• Travel faster than the speed of light
• "Radio" transmission of matter
• Manlike robots with manlike reactions
• Laboratory creation of life
• Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter
• Scientific proof of personal survival after death
• Nor a permanent end to war

Yep.  Only thing we're even remotely close to is life; there's a project to create an ultrasimple microbe with artificial chromosomes, which I'd count, and I expet to see succeed by 2050.

Seven for twenty, then, including the wrong-and-admitted wrong one I didn't include.

Tomorrow, I'll post my predictions . . .

Comments

[brianh]

Actually, I recall from biology back when getting my Bachelor's that we have synthesized early earth conditions in the labratory leading to biogenesis from abiotic material. As I recall, it looked like a bubble of brown goo, but...

Re:

[stevenehrbar.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's true, but it only got as far as creating amino acids; RAH clarifies in his 1965 comments that he did not mean merely them. We haven't ever created a biological self-replicator artificially.