Reply To: Fate of the World

[JimmyT]

Breakable wrote:

Projections and predictions are easy to make, but they’re only as good as the facts they are based on. ..

..
So from a forecasting standpoint: our short term predictions tend to overstate progress. But long term our predictions tend to understate progress.
I would tend to agree with Aaron on this one. You can clearly see from mid-age posters that a lot of over-optimistic predictions failed to materialize
(flying cars, automated houses, futuristic cities, outer-planet colonies),
but they would have materialized in case fission became the source of plentiful, cheap and safe power, but it did not.

There is no disagreement here. The time intervals implied by Clark’s equations are arbitrary. Clearly the magazine covers and posters were overly optimistic. But perhaps we are still in that early stage where the linear view does surpass reality on some time frame. Perhaps looking ahead one century is not enough.

Cheap plentiful safe power is the goal here. So again, maybe they are just premature. As for the flying cars. Well, I just can’t wait for them to come crashing down on us surface dwellers as some nitwit is talking on his/her cellphone while flying his/her car. Some of the predictions were just not thought out.