Time Travel discussion

Reading The Door Into Summerby Robert A. Heinlein one of the most interesting aspects of the book is seeing how one man's prediction of the future, even as few as 40 years, can be so off from reality. As a writer I find it to be one of the most intimidating aspects of writing sci-fi and time travel. Heinlein's excellent writing was more than enough to make up for his faulty predictions, like doctors wielding automatic cigarettes during examinations, or the complete abscense of computers. His book is still an excellent read in the 21st century, despite the errors, but what future commonalities are we as members of this decade/century blind to? What I would love to hear from this group, would be your favorite Best/worse prediction of the future you have read or seen in film, and if you had to make one sure-fire prediction of the future 100 years from now, what would you bet on?

Hey, you want to predict the future, get an astrologer. The goal of science fiction is not to be a crystal ball. They are novels (or short stories or whatever) -- fiction!

One of the common themes in stories about time travel is that there is a potential for the timeline to be changed. So, using the example of Heinlein's predictions, perhaps he was right initially but some time traveler jacked with things and changed the future (our present). Did I just blow your mind or what?

As for my top prediction for 100 years from now, I'm thinking that people will no longer have smart phones or tablet/laptop computers. They're just going to have chips implanted directly in their brains that will do all the things those devices are used for now. Yes, it may be a bit distracting, but it will be so much more convenient. It will be a pain waiting in line for the latest ibrain update on release day, but it will so be worth it to have the new tech before your lame friends and neighbors!

Fletcher- I love that outlook. I'm definitely a big proponent of timeline changes. I thought they used that to great effect in the latest Star Trek movies. Sending Spock back through time was an elegant solution to keeping the fans of the original series happy while opening the door to a whole new universe of possibilities. Keeping in mind that any time travel story may not be happening in our timeline is a fun way to sidestep critics of what is commonly viewed as our reality. I like your iBrain idea too. I likewise feel the next logical step to smaller hand held electronic devices would be devices you don't have to hold at all.

I was reading a futuristic sci-fi novel recently. It was written in the '70s and still seemed to assume computers in a world with inter-planetary travel would still be big, clunky, and somewhat dumb. It's amazing sometimes the limitations that we set for the future ... alongside things that would probably never happen (like people populating Mercury for mining purposes).

It is tricky writing a story set in the future. Sometimes we don't think big enough and sometimes we overextend our predictions. If you can avoid giving an actual date for your future, you'd probably fare better than having future readers laugh at predictions that never came true. But then there are books like The Martian Chronicles that is still a classic even though we know there's nobody living on Mars and the environment isn't suitable for humans without spacesuits. The scenario in that book is never going to happen no matter how far into the future that we go. But it's still a great book viewed through the lens of the time in which it was written. And now that we've discovered that the very soil and dust of Mars could kill us (http://www.newscientist.com/article/d...), we may never be able to colonize Mars or even visit it without everyone expiring. Therefore, I think it puts all books about visiting, colonizing, and/or terraforming Mars into the the realm of impossible realities.

I don't know if we can say that just because Heinlein didn't specifically mention computers in the future setting of his book that he was a poor predictor of the future. Perhaps he assumed computers were a given and not significant enough to mention. And as I recall, he spent much of his time in the mountains. I have an aunt who lives in a remote part of the Colorado mountains, and they get no cell phone reception and the older residents do without internet services so they have no need of computers. This explanation is probably a stretch, but I thought it was worth mentioning. What does everyone think about H.G. Wells prediction of the distant future with the Morlocks and Eloi?

Don't forget that the writer, however skilled, is a creature of her time. We live and move in our era, the way fish swim in water, without perceiving it.
Case in point: you could go read THE EGYPTIAN, by Mika Waltari. It was a historical novel, a best-seller in the late 50s or early 60s. It is set in Pharaonic Egypt. You would think it would feel like Egypt under the Pharaohs. But no. It feels and sounds, ineluctably, like it was written when Eisenhower was president. There is no one word or scene or character or phrase you can point to. But irresistibly, if you read it, you will feel that it was a 50s novel.

John wrote: "What does everyone think about H.G. Wells prediction of the distant future with the Morlocks and Eloi? "

Some days I think 2 separate sets of people is an inevitable future: the stupids and the smarts (for lack of a better name). The smart people breed less but control more and the the stupid people breed more yet control less. But the idea of some being underground-dwelling monsters and some living above ground and being near mute? Nah. I think we'd be more likely to see a world of lazies like in Idiocracy or Wall-E before we'd see that.

Nathan wrote: if you had to make one sure-fire prediction of the future 100 years from now, what would you bet on?

My prediction would involve somethign along the lines of genetic engineering, removing genetic disorders from the equation. I would hope we would not get to the point of custom ordering babies. Anyone read

Beggars in Spain ? I still need to get to the sequels. One of my favorite all time science fiction reads.

I'd say the most difficult science fiction scenarios on Earth are two to four decades into the future. Less than that, and you're likely to get the scenario mostly right. More than that, and you can extrapolate so generally that you won't likely be proven wrong - not to mention that you've bought yourself some time to get into another career if you are drastically wrong.

Paul wrote: "I'd say the most difficult science fiction scenarios on Earth are two to four decades into the future. Less than that, and you're likely to get the scenario mostly right. More than that, and you ..."

Funny. I was going to reply to this and then thought to look up to see if I'd already said what I was planning to say. Past me and present me apparently agree. 18 days is apparently not too long of a time period for future projection. Whew.

Good. Also means that likely no one monkeyed around with your timeline in that 18-day interval.

Nathan wrote: "Reading The Door Into Summerby Robert A. Heinlein one of the most interesting aspects of the book is seeing how one man's prediction of the future, even as few as 40 years, ..."

America will not be the preeminent power in 100 years.
The life of every empire is finite, and we peaked sometime ago. Now most of us are too busy going to the mall or playing video games to study math, engineering, or other sciences. We've become a nation of consumers, of takers rather than makers.

I love the idea of future prediction. Some people assume with the passage of time brings along better and better technology. I have a phrase I use at work a lot...Bigger...Better...Broken....

I don't want to be a pessimist. I do believe our food, and our weapons, commerce, and information technology will be drastically different in 100 years.

I have been watching almost human a new show on fox which involves cops and robots teaming up to fight crime in the year 2048. The human cop has a robotic leg...that needs charging overnight like a cell phone. I specifically watched the latest episode with an eye for "future tech" The bad guys were using "Face Makers" digital displays over the top of an actual face...Future mask if you will. The issue that I have is that the show does not exist to be a text book of the future...discussing a top down view of society of how things may of change demographically, politically, or even physically.

Why are cops using robots? Besides the obvious answer of sending a machine to do a deadly job...Does this mean people do not want to be cops in the future? Is there a population reduction and there is simply not enough people to staff out a police station? Crime is gotten out of control on a scale that can not be contained by humanity?

All these things come to mind but are not explained outright. I am just watching a cop show in the future...explanations must be inferred by a day in the life of the star.

A few future predications.

I think in terms of technology AI is vastly over stated. The problems in making sentient computers are huge especially when we have so many virtually free and abundant brains walking about.
Computers will have a pseudo intelligence however in that it looks intelligent but won't really be so.
They will eventually blend into the living space being voice controlled.
Communication will improve and gadgets such as phones will disappear to be replaced as someone said with embedded chips or tiny devices, watch, broach type thing again all voice controlled.
Transport will have to be all electric for environmental reasons and no flying cars I'm afraid to dangerous.
Outposts on the moon and Mars but no large populations more a backup of human DNA in case of a disaster on Earth.
Exo planets capable of sustaining life will be discovered and some way of sending human DNA will be sent to travel over many thousands of years to populate these planets.

Steven

Just for the fun of it, if we look at what past people predicted about the future in earlier centuries, we will find that they mostly got things very wrong. One culprit that helped cause that was of course the then unpredictable wild explosion in our sciences and technologies. Another culprit was the seeming inability of Humanity to evolve socially and morally as fast as our science did. Let's look at some examples.

About no one in the early 1800s predicted that we would fly, much less go into Space. Yet, we went from the first flight ever to the first Human walking on the Moon in only a bit more than six decades. On the other hand, our predictions about the conquest of Space after WW2 proved wildly optimistic (2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY anyone, or the TV series SPACE 1999?).

'The War to end all wars' statement that came to describe the First World War while it was fought. Well, that one didn't go too well, thank you. We managed to overdo ourselves in barbarity and destruction in World War 2, then followed on with a long and still growing list of wars all around the globe. We even managed to fall back down to the level of barbarity one would have expected from wars of the Antiquity or of the Dark Ages (ISIS, with its enslaving of prisonners, public beheadings and burning men alive inside cages; genocides worthy of Gengis Khan, like the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Rwanda Genocide and Mao's Great Revolution, which was drenched in blood).

Computers? What's that? That was what you would be told as late as the start of the 20th Century. Nobody predicted the emergence and lightning speed rise of that new technology, yet it now is deeply embedded all around our World and touches all the aspects of our lives in a way no other technological invention ever did to Humanity.

One visionary that stood out in the past and proved at least partially correct was Jules Vernes in the mid 19th Century, even though the people of today would laugh at how crudely his invented concepts (submarines, space travel, flying ships) were described. You have of course other great visionaries, like H.G. Wells, but they are for the most part relatively modern, recent thinkers.

The only fairly safe prediction we could do today would be to say that Humanity will one day send people to the other planets and moons of the Solar System. When? How? How much? Many ambitious plans are already being discussed about that, but most of them will probably fall flat on their faces when they will hit economic and political realities.

Oh, I nearly forgot the one safe prediction that could be done about our future: we will have more wars!

In so many cases the predictions of future life were bleak and off-putting. However the Star Trek writers always held a vision in which humanity had changed for the better, risen above barbarity, greed and vice to the philosophies and aspirations of - bizarrely - mediaeval and older cultures. I have no faith in their optimism. As Michel so rightly comments, 'we will have more wars'.

Who would imagine that we would triple our lifespans, and more than double the planet's population in just my lifetime?

And leave so many in poverty while we send satellites up to improve our GPS system? And create cars that can parallel park themselves?

So true, DJ Zippergirl!

The 1990s series 'Time Trax' gave an interesting angle in the physical development of humans of the future: they could run much faster, were more powerful and their powers of thought were better (I hope I'm remembering this correctly!)
Crime had continued to flourish, though :)

(I loved that series...)

Star Trek Universal Translator!!

https://www.facebook.com/waverlylabsi...

One technology to watch closely: genetic engineering. It has the potential to do much good, but also to lead to abuses of monstrous proportion. Will we be wise enough to use that technology well? That's the million dollar question.

Lincoln wrote: "Star Trek Universal Translator!!

https://www.facebook.com/waverlylabsi..."

Now, that, is pretty cool!

The greatest threat to humanity's future, I believe, is tribalism. This takes many forms, from religious extremism (ISIS) to 'let's make [fill in country name here] great again' aggressive nationalism. (I'm not just talking about America here - Russia and China are every bit as tribal, if not more so.) Humanity faces global problems and yet seems to be reacting to them by exaggerating existing tribal divisions. This tendency is currently accelerating because of pressures such as the growing refugee crisis and climate change, and it does not bode well. Civilisation may survive for the next 100 years, but if so, I think it will be by the skin of its teeth.

On a totally different tack, E.M.Forster managed to predict the Internet in his story ‘the Machine Stops’ in 1909. Not bad going, especially as this was his only science fiction story. See this BBC article.

My favourite bit of bad prediction is in the 1950s ‘Kemlo’ SF stories (I don’t imagine anyone reads those now) by E.C.Eliott, in which children born in space in the near future don’t need to breathe air, because they were, you know, born in space. Ahem. We haven’t had kids born in space yet, but I don’t think it’s going to work out like that - at least I’m not holding my breath (sorry).

H.G.Wells did a not-totally-inaccurate prediction of WWII in ‘The Shape of Things to Come’.

Nathan wrote: "Reading The Door Into Summerby Robert A. Heinlein one of the most interesting aspects of the book is seeing how one man's prediction of the future, even as few as 40 years, ..."

I always thought that futuristic settings in books were just the author's imagination.

Lincoln wrote: "Star Trek Universal Translator!!

https://www.facebook.com/waverlylabsi..."

Lets pause all the doom and gloom predictions on this thread and chill out with this optimistic Star Trek prediction :)

....but of course, doom and gloom rules as the translator turns a "You are so beautiful" to a " Your booty is so full" resulting an obvious slap in the face, and one country president's "we will nurse your country's wounds" to "we will nuke your country to ruins" resulting in obvious apocalypse ;)

Brenda wrote: "Hey, you want to predict the future, get an astrologer. The goal of science fiction is not to be a crystal ball. They are novels (or short stories or whatever) -- fiction!"

Exactly! It's not real and why should anyone assume they are trying to predict anything.

I agree with Andrea that it is just the author's imagination.

And yet it is undeniably true that Wells and Verne predicted the future.

Thanks, an interesting and enjoyable thread.