Monkeys as drivers and flights to Pluto or Predictions for 2020 that didn't go so well for our ancestors
It sounds a bit strange, but this is exactly how our ancestors imagined things would look in 2020. But not all predictions have turned 100% into reality.
Technological advances are very fast, and many of the things we do today with the help of devices would once have been undreamed of. Some things our ancestors predicted perfectly, but trips to Pluto or life within 150 years are not yet considered common reality.
The CNN news service has gone through its archives and put together unique statements from scientists, futurologists and other experts who thought that today's world would look somewhat different.
What were today's robots supposed to look like?
"Future and technology experts say that robots and artificial intelligence will become part of everyday life by 2020, completely taking over the physical work of humans," Elon University reported in 2006. Although this is far from being the case, robots are not yet taking over all physical work.
Interestingly, British futurologist Ian Pearson went even further, telling the UK's Observer magazine in 2005: 'By 2020, we will have produced a computer with superhuman levels of intelligence, capable of experiencing emotions. Such a computer will be able, for example, to crash an airplane, because it will be so frightened of the crash itself that it will do everything it can to land the plane safely."
Nanobots in the body and the threat of vegetarianism
Futurologist Ray Kurzweil wrote in his 2004 book that by 2020 we will have hundreds of nanobots in our bodies that will be able to make even better use of the food we eat and send it to the body exactly where it is needed.
The 1913 edition of the New York Times, in turn, contained a foreshadowing by the president of the now-defunct American Meat Dealers Association in an article entitled 'The Threat of Vegetarianism'. The document said that we were hurtling into a desperate future and that we were likely to give up meat and eat only rice and vegetables. It urged farmers at the time to raise more cattle and maintain meat production. Almost a century later, however, vegetarianism and veganism are really gaining in popularity.
Holidays on the moon
Space tourism has been addressed for decades. "By 2020, people will travel to the moon," Eric Anderson of Space Adventures said in 2009. Others have even predicted that space hotels will operate on nearby planets. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk went even further. "By 2020, there will be plans for tourists to travel to Mars."
Although nothing like this is a reality yet, space tourism is now on the rise and several companies are currently involved in it. One well-known example is entrepreneur Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which is planning to take the first 90-minute flight with passengers in the coming months. Space tourism is also supported by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is behind Blue Origin. He is expected to launch the final test flights of the Shepard spacecraft later this year. After that, the first passengers will board it. So we're probably not too far away from hotels on the moon.
Some predictions were way off
The further we go back in time, the more the predictions for 2020 diverge from reality. If the predictions back then had become reality, we would be communicating with aliens (who knows...) and time traveling today. Our lives would be extended by almost half a century and Mars would be very familiar to us. We would have landed there in the mid-1980s and arrived on Venus and Jupiter in the early 21st century. We would even be flying to Pluto, which was still a planet then. It was also predicted that in the 2020s we would be breeding some animals (mainly monkeys) to help us with household chores...
So let's see what new discoveries and technologies will surprise us in the next decade.
