Back From The Future: 1995's predictions of 2025 life
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I'm a bit upset we can't have this today.
In the meantime, those really inefficient gas guzzling cars still rule.
Even Uzbekistan and Morocco now operate high speed trains, and a high speed connection of the Baltics into the rest of Europe is being built.
(It is a bit weird that the New World as a whole is so bearish on HSR. For example, a Trans-Canadian high speed rail would connect all the major metropolises in a single line, as most of the Canadian population lives close to the US border. At the very least, a Toronto - Ottawa - Montréal - Québec line would make a lot of sense. Further west the terrain might just be too unforgiving.)
"The Shanghai maglev is the world's first commercial high-speed maglev ... Prior to May 2021 the cruising speed was 431 km/h ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathen_train_collision
The slowing of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train is caused more by economical factors like ridership and electricity costs.
With a single line, you would also need to choose between serving Edmonton (like the CN mainline) or Calgary (like the CP mainline). VIA rail currently skips Calgary even though it's the bigger/faster growing city.
Really, you need at least 3 lines because you also have to go both north and south of Lake Huron. And that's not even getting into Atlantic Canada.
Edmonton and Calgary would require two lines, yes, and quite long ones. These may be already too far away.
[0] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/maps-tools-publications/...
A lot of people can live in a place it's where it's difficult to build traditional rail, let alone HSR. Also places where HSR might work can be filled with people and existing construction which you can't always just uproot for rail.
If you travel, say, from Rome to Florence by Frecciarossa, the line goes through six galleries of total length of some 40 km.
Human settlements are a bigger challenge. People don't like to be uprooted, and small communities along the way don't benefit from HSRs, so they have an incentive to oppose them.
That is right around 500 KM/H. I think we are technologically capable of this if a government really _wanted_.
Fascinating. I get predictions about something large-scale like the internet, but this seems like a rather specific to predict, doesn't it?
> regular manned missions to Mars and a human colony on the moon aren't any more realistic than they were back in the 90s.
Fingers crossed that the Artemis program gets us closer to the latter.
I was using the internet in 1995 - and pretty sure at least part of that connection use was over fibre, so I don't imagine someone trying to get away with predicting that.
But the path to my house was still a phone line - so I assume the original prediction was more about that fibre eventually running to our houses - certainly something many of us were looking forward to back then particularly any time someone in the house picked up a phone and killed our connection :)
(EDIT: have added an amendment in reply to this comment after reading some of the original PDF)
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As for high contrast digital paper, that was also already part of the collective wishlist
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age [1] came out in 1995 and featured an e-book with an embedded AI and nanotech based display surface
BUT e-ink was first investigated at Xerox PARC in the 70's and was already under development by 1995 at MIT's media lab (commercialised in 1997 but hardly as bug a leap as it sounds) [^2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Allusions_to_T...
Does seem to mostly be "here are some people in touch with current developments happening in the world thinking about their next phase" more than full-blown futurism - but still super interesting to read (if only to see the vestiges of tech optimism pre-dotcom-enshittification)
A few things which leap out that weren't included in the original post:
- "everything will be smart - that is, responsive to its external or internal environment"
Predicted the glassy eyed dream at the time, but not the more cynical reality we got where that smartness more often benefits the seller than the consumer
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- "in-depth personal medical histories will be on record and in full control of the individual in some form of medical smart card or disk"
Another fun combo of rarely safe prediction based on developments of the time mixed with (in hindsight) overly optimistic assumptions about commercialism
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And the bit summarised as purportedly predicting "(the internet)" actually has a pretty neat bit which was missed
"face-to-face, voice-to-voice, person-to-data, and data-to-data communication will be available to any place at any time from anywhere."
Predicting Skype/zoom seems a tad more interesting (even though things like Dick Tracy or 2001: A space odyssey had long had us wishing for it before 1995)
The preceding bit aged less well
"...broadband network of networks based on fiber optics; other techniques, such as communications satellites, cellular, and microwave will be ancillary."
Interesting that they appeared to be emphasising an _increase_ in wired data transit
But not surprising, as back then any cellular comms were far from impressive in comparison to the big-ass wired links you could use from universities
(That said, even back then we had microwave links acting as secondary high speed links for campuses which didn't yet have fibre or coax installed)
The Mother of All Demos was in '68, though. Some of the past (now legendary stuff) like this or the Lisp workstations (Interlisp-D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKjFJDZmWNM) still looks futuristic today.
With the Shanghai maglev in 2001, it looked like this was a given.
Instead, it’s still too expensive?
Anyone predict the US still wouldn’t have a bullet train in 2025?
This sort of technology would be significant if widely adopted.
It makes more sense to focus our money on slower speed trains that are still fast enough and use much less energy.
Maglevs that went smoothly at 62mph (100km) would be a big improvement.
Medium speed maglev trains are also a thing: https://crrczelc-europe.com/medium-low-speed-maglev-changsha...
Where do you get maglevs ant low speed are less efficient? They are frictionless. Of course, I don’t even care if they are. You know what they’re more efficient than? Cars!
Building medium-speed and high-speed maglevs are part of the solution to getting people out of cars.
They are building them in China. Let’s see how far they get.
China built almost 30,000 miles of HSR before the US finished any.
Maybe maglevs will turn out to be one of those things that just doesn’t work in America but works everywhere else.
I predict the US will still not have a bullet train in 2055 either. The US just has very little institutional ability to build new/improved infrastructure.
That I'm only willing to predict one section and not the enough to be useful proves your analysis of why is correct.
Another factor in the US is that our railroads are generally freight oriented. Routing to have three ground based networks is challenging (road, freight rail, passenger high speed rail), especially in urban areas where right of way is expensive and also over mountain passes. A lot of urban freight rail lines are currently unused; some of them become greenway rail trails, others sit unused and may be at risk of encroachment, but often the alignment isn't useful for high speed rail anyway.
In some places you might have shinkansen, multiple private narrow gauge networks, metro and regular roads going through the same piece of land.
Most of them were using it either at work or their university (often one in the same) and so had much faster connections. Dialup did exist, but it was still a small niche that was just starting to get someplace. Even when you had AOL, you typically were still in the walled garden not touching the internet itself.
95 was already passing into in the "even my mom uses the Internet now" and regular ISPs popping up all over the place offering that as a dial-up service.
though we didn't have AOL up here in Canada, so I dunno
Never used the service though.
Call it staticpunk or something to jazz it up.
In general, SF overestimates the short term change but dramatically underestimates the long term change.
If they correctly account for long term change, especially after introducing their big twist, then they won’t have a society that reflects modern society, it will just be totally alien.
There is quite a lot that focuses on one, or a linked series of changes, but to highlight those it plays down other possible changes. I think a lot of near future hard SF does this. The problem is its obsolete 20 years later!
Rather then pretend that the future is the Jetson's they made houses still look like houses, with house interiors that you would recognize today. However there is Future tech still just embedded or hidden away, unless you go into the labs etc.
But I expect in 2094 we still live in the same houses, work on the land, enjoy sun and the sea, maybe still employed, but some change will be happening.
The big miss wasn't that cell phones would shrink to fit in a pocket, it was that they would be cheap enough to use. In 1995 you paid dollars per minute to talk and most people who even had one avoided using it.
Not sure that one counts. They missed the important trend, which was that the rate of increase was slowing, and that it was slowing more quickly than thought possible. Off by "1.2 Bangladeshes" isn't really an A+ (or a B+). But then I remember still seeing yearly articles about how overpopulation was going to turn the future into a nightmarish hellscape at least through the mid-1990s, perhaps out of habit they'd been cultivating since the 1960s.