Retro Futurism: Historical Predictions About the Future Turned Out to Be More True Than False

Wait! Hold on! Before you hammer out your post mocking this apparently foolish claim, let me explain what I mean by it.

When we look at illustrations of what people in the past thought the future would be like, of course the world we live in today looks nothing like that. But this is only to say that they got the aesthetics wrong.

The picture above is a good example. Humanoid robots exist now, they just don't look anything like that. The picture below looks nothing like Skype or Facetime, but is recognizably an expression of the same basic 'video phone' concept.

If you look at it in terms of predictions of technological capability, they are almost always right, at least to a large extent. We don't have flying cars, but not because we don't have the technological capability to build small personal VTOLs (see below) rather for reasons more economic and pragmatic in nature.

Of the various details they get wrong, from how widespread the use of a particular technology will be to what it will look like, what they almost never get wrong is that the technology depicted will become possible. Which is to say that it will one day be within our ability to create.

We live in a universe consisting of matter, energy, waves, etc. The stuff physics talks about. Technology is just various ways we've discovered to configure matter to exploit physical principles in a way which achieves some desired outcome.

So if you can imagine some form of manipulation or assembly of matter and energy which physics says is possible, and which would be useful for something, it is all but guaranteed that we will someday have the ability to do it. The pic below is another good example, as SpaceX has recently demonstrated success with a vertically landing reusable rocket.

As Disney said, "if you can dream it, you can do it". So long as it violates no fundamental physical laws, it will one day become possible to build it. How many people own one, what it will look and so on, that's what cannot be known in advance.