ToDo: compare to age of SuccessfulScienceFictionProphecies - mostly 15yo, right?
Inspired by FailedScienceFictionProphecies.
These may not be exactly as envisioned by their original authors, but reasonable facsimiles are acceptable. Extra points if you can cite the author and title. I've seeded the list with a number of things in modern use. Not all of them may have been predicted in ScienceFiction. My Sci-Fi reading is years behind, so the list will clearly be incomplete. Please embrace and extend.
Moon Landing Well, unless you support the "Moon Landing Hoax" theory.
Crazy AI Killing People It happens more than you'd think, but in mundane situations like a jet autopilot with a bad neural net and poor safeties around it. Not an AI that argues you to death, but that's coming!
Supersonic Flight Another hoax. ;-)
Laser Guns (in fact, laser beams at all)
- Not predicted, and not invented, either; lasers as guns turn out not to be practical, in any case lasers are merely extremely bright light sources that happen to be highly monochromatic, highly collimated, usually high degree of temporal and spatial phase coherence, and are created due to Bose-Einstein statistics. Not a single one of those characteristics were predicted by SF stories with Buck Rogers blasters. Typically they were atomic disintegrators, in fact.
Oh, they were predicted...
Wow. I've never seen an artist draw a beam that's so obviously monochromatic. I mean, if any image has ever made it clear that something is a laser and not just a beam of light, it's this (and yes, I'm ignoring the point, since it isn't relevant). Has anyone pointed out how War of the Worlds correctly predicted the existence of squid, yet?
Jet To Space
Jet to sub-orbital tested on live TV; the USA has naturally had a "secret" Jet-to-Space project since the 50s...
Submarines
Submarines that can reach the deepest deeps
- [There still aren't any manned subs that can reach "the deepest deeps"] 20000 Leagues under the Sea?. That's horizontal. The Nautilus couldn't go below 50 fathoms.
Nuclear power, and nuclear powered things
- E.E. "Doc" Smith postulated atomic power from nuclear disintegration of copper. Oh well, close enough.
Nuclear bombs
- (not just "powered by the atom", but specific story from 1942 that had many details correct and freaked out the U.S. intelligence service)
- Isaac Asimov, if memory serves, wrote a story about a fission bomb that got him a visit from the men in black suits
Stun Guns
- Once touted as an alternative to a gun, police now use them as an alternative to a verbal reprimand.
Personal Computers
- Was this predicted?? I don't think so. Asimov's early Foundation books are filled with spaceship pilots sweating out hyperspace calculations manually. I think MooresLaw had such a rapid effect on computer size that even fiction couldn't anticipate it. but there were other early asimov stories with handheld and personal computing devices see pocket calculators below.
- The generic prediction on this one, from golden age of pulps, is moderns would have "viewer plates" that showed them various camera views, and folks would exchange text and audio with them. That part is now hand held (due to the cadre of minions around SteveJobs - and all their competition).
Global Positioning System (GPS)
- Was this predicted?? Hell, I don't know. Anyone?
Personal mobile phones slash video-phones
- Well, there's the communicators in StarTrek; however, I suspect there's a far earlier source for these in print. Heinlein has more than one character using a small, portable, wireless telephone in stories written well before Trek.
- RobertHeinlein predicted "independent-unit radiotelephones" using "ultra micro-wave techniques" in Waldo in 1950.
- personal mobile video phones were worn on the wrist by comic strip crime fighter Dick Tracy back in the '30's. Of course that wasn't really SF, was it ...
buildings destroyed in New York City (such as the
WorldTradeCenter )
- Not exactly science fiction, but "The Russell-Einstein Manifesto" 1955 http://www.pugwash.org/about/manifesto.htm describes destroying every building in New York City as "one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced".
dystopia
- "Civil rights groups... screamed that such action was a violation of basic human rights. In the wake of devastation, few Americans lent a sympathetic ear." -- The Illuminati by Larry Burkett 1991
Dystopias have always been. Can't call it a prophesy...
Communications Satellites.
Genetic Engineering
Cloning
Mind Control
Waldoes already on
SuccessfulScienceFictionProphecies
Robotics
- do selfpropelled and selfprogramming vacuums count? Not quite Rosie from the Jetsons though.
Solar-powered electricity generation
pocket calculator
- predicted by Asimov, I believe. Not likely, see Personal Computer entry above.
- very likely, see this http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=27 . "the feeling of power", 1957, also predicts that maths skills will decline due to reliance on automatic calculation and IIRC the computers in it are hand held devices.
The calculators in "The feeling of power" certainly aren't handheld - the military want to use human calculators to replace the machines in missiles.
Hypospray injection
Wearable handsfree communicators
- Like a StarTrek communicator badge, UniversityOfKentuckyHospital? is using a 2 oz. communicator clip that uses voice recognition to open up a 2-way channel using VoIP on their wireless LAN when you say the name of the person you're paging.
thin-panel video displays to hang on walls
I think there was one of these in BackToTheFutureTwo?. but by that time, LCD and plasma displays were already a reality, they just weren't big enough yet
brain implants
I'm sure there are earlier examples than Geordie's visor and TheBorg in StarTrekTheNextGeneration, but those are the two that come to mind first off. See http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050315_7929_tc024.htm for the reality.
And the top-voted futurism success?: Viagra
Fulfilled Science Fiction Prophecies