Yesterday I talked about a failed prediction which was particularly popular in the late 1970s and early ’80s: orbital solar power, or more strictly speaking space-based solar power. This was a particularly startling failure because it was so very popular compared to most others. In that case and others, there are two questions really: why hasn’t it happened? And, why was it a popular prediction at the time?
This is usually expressed as “where’s my jetpack?”. Personally I’ve never rated jetpacks. I don’t see the appeal and am more a monorail and hovercar person. Nonetheless, the demand for jetpacks is predicated on the idea that a jetpack would be a good and fun thing to have. They do exist. One was demonstrated at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. They were first worked on in 1919 at the latest and they run on hydrogen peroxide. They tend to be difficult to steer, and I for one don’t like the idea of being that close to a large reservoir of high explosive. I suppose the appeal is similar to that of the motorbike, another thing I don’t get but which Sarada loves. All in all, jetpacks just seem a bit silly.
Another really very deeply impractical idea is the food pill. Whereas the total amounts of micronutrients needed for a day could be packaged into a fairly large pill, there are also lipids, proteins, carbs and bulk, and as the last suggests this is not something which could ever really be smaller than it already is, with the proviso that it could be dehydrated. There isn’t really a way to do this because the principles of physiology and biochemistry prevent it from being much more efficient than it is already. We evolved to eat whole foods, so that’s all we can really do. Parenteral and enteral nutrition is possible but complicated, and again the issue is the volume required. The only way off-hand I can think of doing it is by splitting a day’s nutrition into multiple doses and even then there would be problems with the digestive system adapting, and it wouldn’t be enjoyable. It’s a bit hard to understand why anyone would bother, except perhaps for purposes of space exploration.
Although there are various science fiction clichés which I could revisit here, summed up by the apparent ‘Friends’ quote about Monica’s and Richard’s relationship, “we’re talking hover cars and holidays on the Moon”, but which bizarrely I can’t find because when I Google it I mainly get results about children’s trousers (maybe I should try “vacations”?), and also by Phoebe’s floating city built to escape the ant people, I don’t really want to talk about those for now. We’ve now got so far into the future that ‘Tomorrow’s World’ isn’t even on any more and even discussions about where one might be able to locate one’s jetpack or protein pills are themselves old-hat. No, what I want to talk about now is the fairly short list of things which everyone expected to happen that didn’t, and why they didn’t. Sometimes the barrier is not scientific or technological, sometimes we should be very happy they didn’t happen because they were awful and dystopian, and sometimes they say more about the times they were unsuccessfully predicted in than the real future from their perspective. Therefore, there could be several lists of this kind because expectations of the future change as time passes. It’s been said of feature films set in the past relative to the time they were made that they often say more about the decade they date from than the decade they were supposed to have happened in, and the same applies to “futuristic” stuff. I remember noticing as a child that there was a shift sometime in the 1970s between an architectural and spaceship æsthetic involving whiteness and round portholes to a more Chris Foss-style idea of how the future would look. This would itself be superceded by cyberpunk and ‘Blade Runner’ a few years later, and so forth.
The period I want to look at is the early 1980s, perhaps the 19A0s in fact, and the popular but failed predictions of the time. These are:
- Orbital solar power. This is far and away the most popular wrong prediction and I went into it yesterday.
- Coercion by means of nuclear weapons by non-state agents.
- Nuclear war, either limited or apocalyptic.
- Lunar colonies.
- Runaway inflation.
- Holographic displays.
- Reduction in paid working hours as a positive thing.
- Widespread hydroponics.
- A new ice age.
- Controlled fusion.
- The Jupiter Effect.
It probably makes sense for these to be dealt with in the order I’ve presented them here, except for orbital solar power of course. The event which I’m trying clumsily to describe without using the words “blackmail” or “terrorism” is the idea that a surreptitious political movement which is prepared to use violence or a gang of organised criminals, and some would equate the two, gets hold of either a suitcase bomb or a dirty bomb, or perhaps even a full-sized nuke which they may have built themselves, and threatens the world with it. It isn’t at all clear why this hasn’t happened. Unilateral violence not overtly sanctioned by a government is prominent today, as with 9/11 and the mass murder of pedestrians by motorists and people using firearms. In Tokyo it even got as far as the use of Sarin in the metro and over here we have had a couple of incidents with polonium and nerve agents. Meanwhile, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nuclear materials became more widely available to any sufficiently determined member of the general public and the ability to acquire it was aided by the poor economic conditions making bribery and corruption around nuclear facilities more likely. The specific types of attack are suitcase and dirty bombs. A suitcase bomb is a nuclear weapon small enough to be carried by an individual in a backpack or suitcase, and has existed since the 1950s. They make a nonsense of the idea of M.A.D. as they just cannot be deterred by such methods, and since they’ve been in existence since the early days of the Cold War, the question arises as to what the point of all that was in the first place. They’re likely to consist of a diagonally-oriented tube separating two shaped nuclear charges which together exceed critical mass, which are then united to detonate the weapon. Unless abandoned, they are of course suicide machines for the bearer, but this is common in such attacks. A dirty bomb is a conventional explosive containing radioactive material which distributes the latter upon detonation. These are less severe in practical terms than suitcase bombs, but have a kind of terror factor which makes them more useful. In fact, distributing radioactive material over a wide area would reduce its radioactivity, although it wouldn’t exactly be marvellous. Larger nuclear weapons could also be purchased illegally, stolen, or manufactured surreptitiously. One of the strongest correlations found in people who engage in such activities is engineering, even if they are not involved in that side of the action, and in fact, without wishing to malign any engineers who might be reading this, this strongly validates my experience of engineers from when I was at university. Some of them, not all, are quite spectacularly horrible people compared to almost any other group. Please don’t go away with the impression that just because I don’t use the T-word, I actually think it’s a good thing. It’s more that it’s simplistic and useful propaganda for the forces of evil. From a more conservative perspective, it might also be a bad thing to allow them to terrorise in the first place, and calling them that helps them as well as the enemy.
There have in fact been a few incidents. The fictitious organisation Al-Qaeda is alleged to have had its name used in this context by people wishing to acquire nuclear materials, and others have done the same. The same cult which perpetrated the Tokyo Sarin attack also wanted to get hold of some, and in the Caucasus an attempt was once made to seize a Soviet nuclear warhead. Aleksandr Litvinienko’s death also has elements of this. The difficulty with examining these incidents, with the exception of the last, is that the terror aspect serves both parties, and therefore it may be convenient to attribute actions or attempts to a certain group whose veracity may be dubious. However, it is still odd that it hasn’t happened as far as most people know. Then again, chemical and biological attacks are not necessarily that different in their seriousness.
A related thing that didn’t happen is of course all-out nuclear war. It’s an aspect of my White privilege that I am able to claim that nuclear weapons have never been used against people since 1945. In fact they have, for instance at the Nevada Test Site and Bikini Atoll, and in fact there have also been White atomic veterans, either involved in above-ground nuclear weapons tests up to 1962 or who were in or near Hiroshima or Nagasaki at the time, just as there have been Britons at the time of National Service who have had nerve agents tested on them. These people are also victims or survivors and they shouldn’t be erased from memory. That said, there clearly has not been a major nuclear war even though probably the majority of the population expected this. Although there’s a clear historical process which has led to this becoming less likely, notably the end of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, I think this is a kind of selection bias process, so to speak, which also applies to smaller-scale independent use of nuclear weapons, although I’m not clear why. This relates to some extent to quantum immortality and the Mandela Effect. We exist now. This is close to implying that there has not been a nuclear holocaust. It doesn’t mean there haven’t been other timelines where it did occur, and it’s similar to our apparently charmed life as a planet, where we’ve largely avoided major disasters such as asteroid impacts and gamma ray bursts which could’ve wiped out all life here. It doesn’t mean there isn’t still a risk so much as it being a sine qua non of the fact that I’m sitting here typing this right now and you’re reading it in conditions of relative comfort, I hope. Basically, the leisure and opportunity to sit down and write this follows from certain events in the past not having happened such as a particularly major Novichok incident or anything which would have ruled out my existence or survival up until this point. Therefore, it may well be that the risk of nuclear extortion or the political use of violence in this way is greater than before and that it could happen at any time. This is where quantum immortality comes in. This is the idea that one is always in a timeline where one has survived so far, and that this will continue into the future. This works better for nuclear holocaust than nuclear extortion and the like, though, because they would be relatively minor events in the sense that the chances are they wouldn’t cause one’s death unless they happened locally. That said, if it’s inevitable that such acts will have a snowballing effect which lead to human extinction, maybe we are ruled out from existing or being conscious in that timeline.
Lunar colonies, and perhaps by extension orbital solar power, may be ruled out for different reasons. It’s possible that the human race, having settled there, would not expand further. Similar considerations apply to permanent large habitats in cis lunar space. However, once that has happened, good sense suggests that that would set a precedent for eventual further expansion, and this leads to a probability issue, along the lines of the Doomsday Argument, which I have of course mentioned many times on here. Suppose there are only a million worlds in the Milky Way which will ever be occupied by anyone on a permanent basis, and beyond that that each of those worlds, throughout its human history, will only ever have had a million people living on it. I know I’ve been through this before on here but it bears repeating in this post. That would mean 1 000 000 000 000 people will live off-Earth in the future and reduces the probability of being born at a time when the majority live on this planet to less than one in ten. However, this isn’t an explanation of why this hasn’t happened so much as an explanation, probably a flawed one, of how the probability works.
Runaway inflation is a case of assuming the future will be like the past, which I did just now by proposing that we will never leave this planet en masse. By the beginning of the 1980s it looked as if inflation would continue at a very high rate even though it was at least about to be gotten under control if it hadn’t already, by increasing unemployment and driving down wage demands. In fact what seems to have happened is that inflation now applies to the cost of housing more than other areas, and is also somewhat mitigated by Moore’s Law elsewhere. In 1981, average house prices had fallen 0.5% from the previous year and were at around £90K. Last year they were £230K having fallen from a boom in the late ‘noughties. On the other hand, automation increasingly means people are not paid to do certain tasks, which brings prices of many other goods and services down, and this is the result of Moore’s Law – the exponential increase of computing power, which is now reaching an end. Consequently, various factors have combined to reduce the rate of inflation in a manner not anticipated at the time.
This brings me to the subject of paid work, and I find this a bit mystifying. The general idea for quite some time, stil persistent at the start of the 1980s, was that hours would get shorter for paid work, and this makes sense for various reasons. For instance, the automation I’ve just mentioned should reduce average working hours and increase per capita productivity, and equal numbers of women and men in workplaces outside the home would partly increase demand in certain areas such as commuting or sandwich bars, but decrease it in others due to the same amount of work being shared out between twice the population. This is of course absolutely not what has happened, and in fact this was an early motivation in me starting this blog. Somehow, the number of paid jobs has increased but they have become less useful. I don’t understand how this operates. There is no central planning authority or means of dividing up labour for the whole of society, the country or the human race, and yet somehow the work which absolutely needs to be done by a human being has shrunk while the useless portion of work has multiplied. And this has happened while trade unions have lost all their power, so it has nothing to do with a drive to keep people in work from that source. There is an argument for saying that this is a good thing, but it’s based on the idea that most people are not self-motivated and that any job, even a harmful one, is better than no job. The reason it might be a good thing is that it could conceivably be good for one’s mental health to work in this way. I think most people’s experience contradicts this idea but that they may be in denial about it. Another factor here is of course sexism. Women still don’t get as far as men on the whole in their careers and men are less likely to be able to take as full a rôle in parenting as they might like. The existence of useless and non-stimulating work does fulfill a function, but it’s one it’s drifted into and doesn’t work very well. There are plenty of examples of enterprising and self-motivated people in the world, and on the whole when people are not in paid employment they continue to do useful work, or may even do more useful work than they did when they had jobs, but the usual argument for jobs is that they provide meaning for people’s lives. Most of the time they don’t though. It seems that this is based on the philosophy that people need to be kept occupied so they don’t cause trouble. Well, maybe we should be causing trouble.
I considered hydroponics earlier this year. It doesn’t seem that complicated and it can be an efficient use of space. There’s no problem with pests. However, not all plants are suitable because they can topple over into the water. It also depends on electricity, is labour-intensive, has expensive start-up costs and there are waterborne diseases. On the other hand, fewer pesticides are used, only a fifth of the water is necessary, growth is twice as fast and the production of nutrients is more efficient. I have to admit it isn’t entirely clear to me why hydroponics didn’t catch on because looking at that list, none of them seem to be major obstacles. One area where it apparently has caught on is in Cannabis production, though not legally. Whether it’s desirable is another question. There are somewhat related issues with yeast, algal and blue green algal production. One fairly popular futuristic idea is growing food from these sources, and it can be done but isn’t. I’m personally keen on this because of its tiny footprint on the planet, and the sea can also be used for these purposes.
I discussed controlled fusion yesterday. That said, it is quite odd how this prediction operates because it always seems to stay the same distance in the future from the time it’s predicted. It’s always thirty years away and has been for about a century when it was first thought of. What seems to be happening here depends of the Donald Rumsfeld principle: unknown unknowns. There is a long chain of problems each link whereof is revealed as soon as one of the known ones is solved, and by the nature of the unknowability its extent is unknown. One issue is found also in funding for human space travel: the time scale is too long for governments to deal with the finance. This would presumably mean that it’s more feasible in non-democratic countries, and in fact there has been some progress in China, perhaps for this reason. My own feelings about controlled fusion are similar to those about trans lunar human space exploration: I expected them both to be in the near future as a child but have now decided they will never happen. However, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that controlled fusion is politically unfeasible because there are so many other ways to provide for energy needs, and it really isn’t that marvellous or clean, as I’ve mentioned. I also don’t like the apparent implication that it’s the power source for totalitarian régimes.
The idea of a new ice age is understandable before the huge amount of confirmatory research on anthropogenic climate change was available. We are in fact due for one, other things being equal, but obviously they aren’t. It could be linked to the other predictions in one way. If orbital solar power or controlled fusion had been available earlier, this would have mitigated greenhouse gas emissions, assuming they had been adopted widely and replaced fossil fuels as sources of power. It’s hard to say what the motivations of people making the claim forty years ago were, because at the time the issue was much less politicised and it could simply be that there weren’t enough data to decide. It still isn’t inevitable that it won’t happen because the instability induced by trapping more energy from the Sun in Earth’s system could have unpredictable consequences. For instance, it has been thought that the collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica followed by an increased number of icebergs could reflect more heat into space and provoke a new glaciation. However, this is in itself a good reason to attempt to halt climate change from human sources. It’s possible we have in fact prevented the entire coming ice age, which would’ve lasted dozens of millennia, but not the one after. Nigel Calder was an influential exponent in the expectation, and being editor of and a writer for the ‘New Scientist’ may have had some influence on the popular consciousness of this issue at the time. He also made a lot of television documentaries. In the last few years of his life he became quite a prominent participant in climate change denial but he wasn’t typical of that group because he had worked on the issue several decades earlier when information was more ambiguous and there were less data. In this respect he was very unlike David Bellamy, whose denial I can only attribute to cognitive decline.
Holographic displays are a bit of a quandary. These were conceived of in two different ways. One was of a small, contained device which was able to produce three-dimensional images and the other was of something which would, for instance, display solid images in a living room whose viewer would be in the midst of them. This has similarities with VR and AR, which do exist, so in a sense this did happen, but there are no holographic displays. There are 3-D displays which rely on perspective and presumably don’t work very well and only work for one person, but the puzzling thing is that there are no mass-market displays which use holographic principles, and in fact holograms seem to have gone out of fashion. The difficulty seems to be the ability to convert video data into fringe patterns in real time. It’s been claimed for nearly a decade now that all the technology exists for holographic displays. I would expect nanotechnology and smart materials to be able to do this, but perhaps my understanding is limited. This could be Dunning-Kruger. I wonder if holography could be similar to ray-tracing.
This leaves the Jupiter Effect, considered to be an embarrassment by the guy who thought it up. This is a little similar to one proposed mechanism for accounting for astrology (I’d say there’s nothing to account for there, but still). It was thought that the alignment of planets, including Pluto, on 10th March 1982, which were all within 95° of each other, would cause a spate of earthquakes. A closer alignment had occurred eight centuries earlier without incident. This was expected to cause earthquakes, but according to some also a pole shift, a new ice age (there it is again), inundations of the land and hurricanes. Preppers and religious fundamentalists were involved. Although the claim was thoroughly trounced by events, it’s notable that the same kind of responses to the expectation of disaster come up over and over again. There were doomsday preppers in 1980, not just in response to the expectation of a nuclear war but also for this.
The question therefore arises of what these failed predictions have in common. They’re unlike sporadic erroneous predictions in that those can be considered individual errors due to lack of expertise or “sanity checking”. These are consensus beliefs, and some of those did come to pass, such as ebooks, video streaming services and the internet. Some of them could still happen, and it could be an issue of the time scale involved. Others seem to be at a constant distance and recede with the passage of time, another example being the Mars landing. Some seem to be ruled out by statistical or probabilistic factors. Several of them are linked: controlled fusion, a lunar base, orbital solar power and a new ice age are connected for a start. The Jupiter Effect is simply a failed hypothesis which didn’t have strong scientific support at any stage. The questions now present in my mind are these: What do most people expect to happen in the next few decades that won’t? What do most people expect to happen that will? How can we tell the difference between the two?
A Box Of Chocolates 