35 years ago, Isaac Asimov was asked by the Star to predict the world of 2019. Here is what he wrote
Like the headline says, famed science fiction author Asimov was asked at the end of 1983 to predict waht 2019 wouldbe like. He touched on three main topics:
1: Nuclear war.
2: Computers
3: Space
As to #1, he didn;t have much to say other than, effectively, if it happens, we;ll be toast and all predictions go out the window.
As to #2, he correctly – and for 1983, unsurprisingly – predicted that computers would be very important, and that computerization would have led to substantial changes in the workforce. He also said this, which would by modern standards get him labeled a Nazi:
Those who can he retrained and re-educated will have been: those who can’t be will have been put to work at something useful, or where ruling groups are less wise, will have been supported by some sort of grudging welfare arrangement.
Claiming that nanny states are less wise?? OUTRAGE!!!
But where he sadly failed utterly was in predicting the future of spaceflight.
By 2019, we will be back on the moon in force. There will be on it not Americans only, but an international force of some size; and not to collect moon rocks only, but to establish a mining station that will process moon soil and take it to places in space where it can be smelted into metals, ceramics. glass and concrete — construction materials for the large structures that will be put in orbit about the Earth.
Yeah… no. This is of course what *should* have happened, but clearly it did not. He also suggested that solar power satellites would be under construction, manufacturing industries would be setting up in orbit and that there would be important space-based observatories. Of these, only the latter came close to truth, with the Hubble fundamentally expanding humanities view of the universe. But in 1983 the Hubble was well underway and was well know, so that was no great prognostication. Additionally, the Hubble is old and creaky, close to death, with no replacement due until the Webb telescope is launched… whenever the hell it gets launched.
By 2019, the first space settlement should be on the drawing boards; and may perhaps be under actual construction.
Sigh.
Predicting the future, even relatively short-term futures, is damned difficult to do even for the best science fiction authors (and even harder for people who don’t understand science, technology and history). I can remember 1983, and can assure you confidently that virtually *nobody* would have expected that well under a decade later the Soviet union would not only have disappeared, but done so *peacefully.* Surely nobody in 1983 would have been able to predict that credit card companies would be on the leading edge of shutting down the whole concept of free expression; that astrology and related bunk would be in ascendance; that after the triumph of the freemarket over communism,hat communism would be popular enough that advocates of it would achieve high office in the US; that we’d all carry semi-intelligent supercomputers in our pockets that allow worldwide low cost video telephony and provide instant access to the sum of human knowledge, and would somehow still lead humanity to a doom of dumbth.
