Predictions About The Future From Shows And Movies

If you are like me you might get a kick out of looking at sci-fi movies where the story is supposedly taking place in the future. I saw one the other day where it was supposed to be 200 years from 1990 and data was being stored on what looked exactly like a SD card. In case you don’t know what an SD card is, it is the memory card in our digital devices such as our cameras and tablets. When the movie was being shown, scientists were just about to work on the SD format, but I doubt the writers of the movie knew about this. It is always interesting to see what writers of sci-fi movies or even documentaries think the future will look like. Some of the movies are so wrong in their future predictions we have to laugh, but I guess we really can’t blame some of them for the mistakes they made.

If we look at the original “Lost In Space” television show which aired from 1965 to 1968, we look into the future to 1997. The problem is the show had us traveling to a planet in Alpha Centauri. It was well known at the time we would soon be on the moon so I have to think the writers felt that in another thirty years after that we would probably be traveling to the stars. Little did they know at the time, after we reached the moon and went there a few times we were not going back. Then there is the technology. According to widely held belief we are not capable of traveling to another solar system, because we don’t have the speed, so this can’t happen. I say widely held belief, because there are those who do believe we can do it and the technology exists in black projects, these are the projects the government doesn’t have to account for.

One of the first serious science fiction movies was “Things To Come.” It was made in 1936. It predicted a very long world war which lasted for decades then showed the world being rebuilt and advancing. The story was written by H.G. Wells. The time period shown was supposed to span 1940 to 2036. The war continues so long, most people forget why they are fighting. In 1970 a futuristic plane is seen landing. It is still propeller powered, but everyone else still had bi-planes. It isn’t long until great strides are made in technology. A flight to the moon takes place but not with rockets, it uses a capsule shot out of a giant cannon. Could this have been a prediction of a railgun? It shows people of the future trying to stop the advance of technology, because they think it is all happening too fast. The movie was right about one thing, technology is advancing very fast. It doesn’t predict much however if we think about the gadgets we are surrounded with today.
One movie which had it wrong in a lot of ways could still turn out to eventually be right in its predictions and that is “The Terminator.” It predicted a not too distant future full of intelligent machines which have turned on the human race. Obviously this has not happened yet, but there are a lot of people including scientists who believe this is a very strong possibility. The movie was made in 1984 which is over 30 years ago, but since then we have made incredible strides in artificial intelligence. The movie also predicted time travel. This seems to be way off base, but hey as they say, you never know.

I guess if we are talking about missing the mark, “Space 1999”, a television show which first aired in 1975 couldn’t have been more wrong. Again it didn’t seem so farfetched in 1975, after all we had already been to the moon and everyone believed we would have a base there soon. I know when people were polled it was almost 100% yes when they were asked the question of whether we would have a moon base. When the Apollo Program was stopped it was a surprise to all of us and when the government blamed us for stopping it saying we no longer had an interest in the space program, it hurt even more.

2001: A Space Odyssey had Pan American Airlines flying people to our space station in 2001. Unfortunately for the movie Pan American was out of business for over ten years by that time and we weren’t launching rockets to the moon from any space station. The movie did get the idea of a space station in 2001 correct since the International Space Station got its first human occupants on 2 November 2000. We did not find any alien artifacts indicating alien life, or at least we were not told about them. There were other space stations in orbit previously, but they were specific to the Soviet Union and the United States. There is a scene where a computer is being used to talk to someone who is also using a computer. Skype was first released in 2003, pretty close to 2001 wasn’t it?

I think if we had to pick a science fiction series or movie which got the most things correct about the future it had to be Star Trek. All we have to do is look at our cell phones. Some movies weren’t meant to be serious like Airplane II but it showed naked body scanners at security posts and Back To The Future II showed a wearable computer. In 1990 Total Recall predicted self-driving cabs known as Johnny Cabs. We all know it will only be a matter of time before self-driving cars are here, since they are being worked on so furiously and some are even being tested on our roads already. It could be we will have them far ahead of 2084 when they were being used in the movie. We see a strange military robot in the movie Short Circuit from 1986. All one has to do is look at all the military robots we now have in the world to know this has come true. In the movie Sleeper made in 1973 we see robot assisted surgery, which is common place today. In1982 Blade Runner showed digital billboards. We already have them and their use is increasing.

It just goes to show the predictions of the future in shows and movies are not always wrong. It is amazing to me how many of these writers have gotten things right.