Visions of the future...
As we step into a new decade, we take a look at what people in the past thought life would be like by the year 2020
Is it just us, or is there something about the year 2020 that sounds a little futuristic? Back when we were children, 2020 was the kind of faraway land in which sci-fi films were set. But now it’s actually here, how different does life look in 2020 to what was imagined in decades past? Let’s take a look at the predictions that somewhat missed the mark – and a few that came surprisingly true.
Our robot homes
By now we should all be living underwater if past predictions were anything to go by, or at least have a life-sized robot that does all the housework we were promised.
Automated homes were very much seen as the future in the Fifties and Sixties, complete with press-button kitchens that did everything for you, according to a TV film from 1952. Giant walking robots would also answer the door and light candles for us, said a Forties’ ad. While we don’t have a clunky automated man opening our doors, many of the predictions are quite accurate. From small robot vacuum cleaners sweeping floors to modern day virtual assistants such as Alexa carrying out voice commands to turn on lights or play music, many homes are increasingly automated. Meanwhile, a 1968 advert depicting the future showed a lady shopping by selecting pictures on her television before inserting her husband’s credit card, which seems a pretty accurate prophecy of the rise of online shopping.
Life on Mars
As recently as 1997, a magazine that looked at future trends, picked 2020 as the year when humans would finally land on Mars. While that’s not going to happen quite yet, NASA thinks 2030 could be the year astronauts land on the red planet. The Mars predictions also reveal the fascination with space that has long been part of looking into the future.
In the Seventies, TV show Space 1999 had humans living in a colony on the moon and exploring different planets. Even our holidays would be spent in space, so a magazine article in 1968 told us, suggesting, “a rocket ride to a hotel satellite and back, plus the vistas of the earth and moon, makes a memorable vacation jaunt” – an idea that if Richard Branson’s ambitions for space travel become a reality could one day be possible.
Being alive
There’s no doubt life expectancy has boomed in the recent decades but scientists really did think we’d be living to at least 150 by now. They were also predicting a vaccine for the common cold and peculiarly, that we’d evolve to lose all ‘useless’ toes to be left with just one big toe, according to a surgeon in 1911!
Meanwhile, a Thirties’ futurist thought we’d have long since abandoned our love of coffee and tea – “it will simply be no longer fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients,” he said – while others expected we’d all be eating delicious worm omelettes because of a lack of meat.
Most interesting, though, is the way the past painted a bleak picture of how it would feel to live in the future. In 1966 the BBC asked a group of schoolchildren to foresee the world in 2000 and many spoke of a time when a cabbage pill is all we have for breakfast, “people are regarded more as statistics than people” and “people and things will all be the same”. To what extent their predictions may ring true, we’ll let you be the judge.