List No. 016
HEINLEIN’S PREDICTIONS
Robert Heinlein
1949
Robert Heinlein was one of the great science fiction novelists and author of numerous bestselling books. In 1975 he was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master, and he was the recipient of many other awards during his career. In 1949 he compiled a list of predictions for the year 2000. They were eventually published in February 1952, in Galaxy magazine.
So let’s have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong—but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.
1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door, c.o.d. It’s yours when you pay for it, which the government is doing at least on an experimental basis.
2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.
3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from space.
4. It appears utterly impossible that the United States will start a “preventive war.” We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.
5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a “breakthrough” into new technology which will make every house now standing as obsolete as outdoor privies. The housing is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day.
6. We’ll all be getting a little hungry by and by.
7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called “modern art” will be discussed only by psychiatrists.
8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer, and psychoanalysis will be replaced as a growing, changing “operational psychology” based on measurement and prediction.
9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered. The revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish “regeneration,” i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.
10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this Solar System, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be abuilding.
11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple queries, and transmit vision.
12. Intelligent life of some sort will be found on Mars.
13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.
14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.
15. We will not achieve a “world state” in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.
16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.
17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continentwide basis by a multiple electronic “brain.”
18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear, because sheep destroy grazing land.
19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “civilization” be wiped out.
Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:
Travel through time.
Travel faster than the speed of light.
Control of telepathy and other E.S.P. phenomena.
“Radio” transmission of matter.
Manlike robots with manlike reactions
Laboratory creation of life
Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.
Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
Nor a permanent end to war. (I don’t like that prediction any better than you do.)
