Stuff You Should Know - How Futurology Works

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

Science fiction writers have made some amazingly accurate predictions over the years, but in 1945 the pace of technological change created a field that spun off of sci-fi forecasting, futurology. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here and it's Stuff You Should Know from the Future, but not really. How you doing? I'm fine.

Well good, that's good. I enjoyed this topic, I thought it was kind of neat. Yeah, it was funny, like when you're reading about futurology and futurologists, AKA futurists, you tend to want to make it like more than it actually is. And when you look into the topic, it keeps having to be beaten down just because of the name alone.

Yeah, it sounds like a little bit like a wackadoo. A wackadoo? You say you're a futurist. A seer, and sometimes they're thinking about, they're using these really neat techniques to predict the future. They're talking about some really mundane stuff, boring stuff, economic forecasts, things like that.

How much oil will be left in 30 years, that kind of thing. But then on the other hand, if you're a futurologist, you may also be tasked with figuring out what technology we're gonna be using in 30 years, or what color the shiny jumpsuits we're all gonna wear will be, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think one of my favorite things is

to look at past future predictions. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, there's nothing that'll make someone look less knowledgeable than going back to what they thought the future would look like, in the year 2000, like back in the 1930s or 40s, or sometimes some of those things happen. Yeah, and then it's amazing.

Yeah, that's like, wow, you know. Because sometimes, these guys are like, really, really dead on. And I was reading an article, I think it was in Harvard Business Review, and it was a post by Paul Saffo, who runs a venture capital firm, I believe, called DeCern. Yeah.

And Paul Saffo was saying, he was trying to get across that sci-fi authors and futurologists, their paths overlap quite a bit, but really, there's pretty big distinctions. And even in this article, they got lumped in together. Because sci-fi writers do definitely use futurology techniques. But Paul Saffo was saying, yeah, but a real futurologist,

you have to use logic. Whereas if you're a sci-fi writer, you can just use your imagination. You don't have to back it up with anything. Yeah, that's great. If you're a futurologist, you have to use logic that makes sense to whoever's hearing your prediction. Yeah, and I think that's one reason why

some sci-fi writers have been right on the nose with some future predictions, because they're not hampered by logic. And they can just free form, you know? Yeah, but then it's just a lucky guess. No, I don't think so. I think they're still applying a lot of the same rules of futurology.

But they're just not bound by, you know, the laws of, well, not the laws, but, you know. The laws of logic? Yeah, exactly. I'm with you. But that's the best science fiction, though, I think, is something that logically makes sense. Yeah.

Because then it's just fantasy. Yeah, that's true. So, futurology is recognizing and assessing potential future events. I could have sworn Jonathan Strickland wrote this, by the way, it read, but it was not. No. It's very Strickland-esque.

Nicholas Gerbys. Yeah, that's Strickland's alter ego. I wonder if it is. Never met this Nicholas Gerbys. But the point Gerbys makes, which I think is good, is it's a product of our times in many cases, like, depending on where we are as a society, and like, he makes a great point, during the Civil War,

there probably weren't a lot of, like, rosy predictions for the future, American Civil War. Sure. But in the Gilded Age, people are a lot more optimistic, so they may have, you know, it's a whole different deal. Like, during the Cold War, for instance. Right. A lot of paranoia, a lot of cynicism.

Probably not gonna be a rosy outlook for the future. Right. Like, during the Gilded Age. When it was rosier. Yeah, way more optimistic than the Cold War. Which is kind of ironic, because the Gilded Age didn't have anything to be optimistic about. They were just pretending, hence the name.

Yeah. The thing is, what you've just said, though, is kind of an argument against futureology. Cause one of the big critiques of it is that a futureologist, they're not doing anything. Even if you're commenting on the past, or the future, you're still really commenting about your present. Your contemporary time, because that's what you...

Or recent past. Sure. Yeah. That's what you've lived through and experienced. That's all you can really reflect on. Is, and futureology seeks to go beyond that. Well, yeah, that makes sense, though. If you look at this thing that is happening now,

or just happened, then what is going to be happening in that thing in 10 years. Right. And it's a lot of times based on how the direction is currently going. Yes, okay. So, Gerbys makes a pretty good example, that the cell phone grew out of the telegraph,

which ultimately is related further back to the smoke signal. Sure. Right? Yeah. But if you were a futureologist hanging out around somebody who was sending smoke signals, would you be able to predict the cell phone?

Probably not. Probably not. Could you predict the impact of the automobile, or the highway system? Right. Maybe. But would you predict that people would have sex in the backseat of a car?

Because it provides a little, well, I don't think they did. Or could you- Urban sprawl. Yeah, could you predict ex-herbs and edge cities, just because the highways got built? Yeah, and not a lot of people did, even though a lot of people said, there's going to be horseless carriages one day,

and they're going to change things big time. People are going to be able to move around a lot more. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that everybody saw every result of the automobile. It was a game changer. Yeah. As what you could call it.

Agreed. So what we're saying here, and if it sounds a little weird that we're at once supporting and criticizing futureology, that's basically the fun thing to do when you talk about futureology, is to criticize it and be awed by it. Because a lot of times they really are super right. That's right.

Futureology has been around for a long time. I mean, since people were writing fiction, there were people predicting the future. But as far as things didn't really get going as far as being meaningful until after World War II, when the US started developing technological forecasting. Basically, it was really important to try and see where things were going militarily.

Because it was super expensive to develop new technologies. It could take a long time. So they started thinking, hey, we need to get some people on board that can hopefully predict where we're headed here so we can make the right decisions. Yeah. Because if it takes a really long time, like you said, to develop a weapon,

by the time you have that weapon deployed in the field, you're going to need to know it's not already obsolete. The only way to do that is to predict what kind of warfare you're going to be engaged in. Because this is a time, like at the end of World War II, so many inventions came out of World War I and II war machine inventions that things were changing so quickly that there was actually, you can kind of put modern futureology

into the lap of one guy, an Air Force general named Hap Arnold, who saw that things were changing so fast that his Air Force needed to basically predict the future and see what direction it needed to go. So he looked around and he started tapping people to do that. One of the first people he tapped was a scientist, an aeronautical engineer named Theodore von Karman. Yes, he was a super smart dude.

And he led a team that did predict a lot of stuff, like drones. And as far as the military using drones, not your uncle who flies it around the neighborhood, just to film stuff. He predicted the rise of Brookstone. Target-seeking missiles, supersonic aircraft, and even the atom bomb.

All of this was in one report to Hap Arnold. And this guy knocked it out of the park. But he and his group were very much limited to small academic and military circles. Like the general public wasn't aware that this was going on. But his group, von Karman's group, so accurately foresaw the direction that modern warfare was going, that you can also very easily make the case that, no,

he basically created a roadmap to the future that the Air Force followed. So his prophecies were self-fulfilling. Because he said, go this way. And the Air Force went that way and created all this stuff. Yeah, and then the military and well, the brand corporation specifically, it grew out of the US Air Force and Douglas Aircraft in the mid-40s.

They said, well, having one person to say these things was great. But what we need is a team and a consensus among this team. So they kind of, well, not kind of. They very much patented a technique. They called the Delphi technique, DELPHI. And that is basically a technique where they're trying to get a greed on consensus

from a number of people. So there's this very famous story about how the Navy, I think, lost a submarine, a nuclear submarine, or the Russians had lost a submarine, something like that. There was a lost sub that they wanted to find. And they had no idea where it was. So the Navy polled all these different experts

in all these different fields that might have something to do with nuclear submarines, weather, aeronautics, people from NOAA, all these people, right? And asked them, where do you think this sub is? And no one hit it on the nose. But when they basically used statistical distribution of these various opinions, guesses of professionals, it led them right to that sub.

And that's what the Delphi technique does, too. It takes opinions of experts in various fields and says, what do you think of this? And everybody sends in a questionnaire anonymously. And there's no group meeting. So the group doesn't bow to pressure. No leaders emerge. They're giving their unvarnished opinion.

And then after those opinions come in, they take that information and send it out again. So it goes in rounds and rounds and rounds until they finally come to a group consensus that in the future, we're all going to be wearing metallic blue jumpsuits. Yeah, and what they're doing is generating what's known as a scenario.

And a guy named Herman Kahn, KAHN, worked with Rand in the 1950s. And he's the one that kind of coined the term scenario as it applies to futurology. A pretty good definition I found was, scenario is a detailed portrait of a plausible future world, one sufficiently vivid that a planner can clearly see and comprehend the problems, challenges, and opportunities

that such an environment would present. So it's saying, in the future, we're going to have a scenario where there are going to be robots in every house. Yeah, yeah. And one of the biggest ways that they work on scenarios is with something called back casting, which is starting at the end, which is you've

got a robot in every house and then go backwards. To how you got there? Yeah, to how you got there. Brilliant. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, and scenarios, that's a pretty cool scenario. They can also be as mundane as running a fire drill, where you're envisioning the fire broke out

in the high school gym. Right. And so everybody needs to get out. That's a scenario. It's as simple as that. Yeah. The weather forecasts or economic forecasts that are run through computer algorithms,

the computer algorithms, the model, the process that it's going through is the scenario, and it spits out a possible prediction. It's almost like a fact, then cause. Right, yeah, you know. Yeah, excellently put. Thank you. So Herman Kahn worked with Rand.

And did you look him up at all? Oh, yeah. He's one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove. Yeah. He was described as a super genius. Yeah, he was super smart. And he kind of was a bit of a celebrity at the time. He wrote a book in 1961 called On Thermonuclear War,

and then went on to form, left Rand to form the Hudson Institute, where he basically was like, we're a group that is going to forecast the future. So he became, it was like a super popular book. Yeah. And he spawned a lot of other books, similar books. Well, we need to take a break, but we're getting, we'll get right back to this in a second.

MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashier and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, you were just talking about Herman Kahn being the super genius who is something of a celebrity. I read that Timothy Leary intimated that he had taken acid with him. I believe it.

He was a part of the inspiration for Dr. Strange Love. And this book that he wrote called The Year 2000, A Framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years, it basically established this outlook that America and capitalism could do anything thanks to basically technological inventiveness. Yeah, here's, let's hear some of these. There was a list in that book, 100 technical innovations

very likely in the last third of the 20th century, 100. Some of the first 10 multiple applications of lasers, boom. High-strength structural materials. Nailed it, wouldn't you think? How low is it? New or improved materials for equipment and appliances? No, that's easy. Yeah.

Anyone can say that. Sure. I'd be better material in the future now for 2050. Longer range weather forecasting, more reliable weather forecasting. No, I don't know about that one. I think that was a miss. How about this?

Here are a few of the other ones. New techniques for cheap and reliable birth control, for sure. Yeah, the pill. I don't know if the pill was around. We should do a whole thing. It may have been the same year, because it came out in 67. Was it?

Yeah. Well, this book came out in 67. Right, right. Widespread use of nuclear reactors for power. Duh. Improved capability to change sex of the children or adult. Gender reassignment, we did a great episode on that. Pervasive business use of computers.

Yeah, they're all over. Personal pagers. Yeah, they came and went. And then one of the other ones was home computers to run households and communicate with the outside world. Yeah, the internet of things. They also predicted the rise of the credit economy. Oh, really?

Yeah, that we currently are in. Interesting. Yeah, so that was just like a list, like a sidebar, basically. Yeah, in the book. In this book. But the whole idea that America and capitalism in the West could invent its way out of any problem we possibly ran across in the future was the premise or the position of this book.

And it caused an enormous fear in academic circles. And not just academic circles, because this book was one of the first to introduce to the public that there were such things as think tanks like Rand. Yeah. And that club of Rome. Yeah, and that these people were sitting there thinking about the future and were writing books about it.

And it kind of became a hip thing. But the club of Rome was basically diametrically opposed to the outlook that Hermann Kahn had. And the club of Rome was a business consortium that conspiracy theorists say is basically the seat of the New World Order. They're still around. They are.

And the club of Rome basically said, no, we are establishing the gloom and doom camp that there are such things as resource depletion over population, and we are basically doomed. Yeah, I mean, we've covered this a lot on the show, different people that have made wild predictions about we're going to run out of this by this year.

Thomas Malthus. Yeah, very Malthusian. One of the books that came out of the club of Rome in 1972 was called Limits to Growth by Danella H Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jurgen Randers, and William Barrens at MIT. And they had a very dire apocalyptic outlook of the future. As did a lot of other people at the time. And a lot of these were way off base.

A lot of these dire predictions. It's happened over and over again. Yeah, and so on the club of Rome's website, they defend the Limits to Growth book, basically saying that it's often miscited as predicting the collapse of civilization due to renewable resource overuse. And it doesn't do that.

But they did use these same kind of techniques that Herman Kahn and some of his other colleagues were coming up with by taking population information, food production data, industrial production, pollution, and non-renewable resource consumption, and then running scenarios through this model that they built using computers. And coming up with the scenarios they came up with

were kind of grim. The thing is, is even though they missed the mark, they still helped establish a very young idea that we can't just throw your McDonald's styrofoam on the ground. You can't drive a car that gets two miles per gallon. We can't live like everything is just forever abundant, that there's no such thing as scarcity.

Yeah, it's a double-edged sword, though. Like, I totally agree. But then it also, when you're wrong about these things, it gives cynics something to point to to say, well, gee, we didn't run out of oil in the early 1980s, like you said we would. And we definitely didn't do anything about it. Yeah, I mean, man, that is a great point.

It's a very great point. But at the same time, what you're seeing here between the limits to growth and the year 2000, we still see this today with climate change. It's like, let's do something about climate change. The other people say, no, we can invent our way out of it. And besides, if we do something about climate change, it's going to mess with the economy.

And these people are saying, forget about the economy, we are all going to die. Yeah, or not necessarily forget about the economy, but maybe you can do both. Right. You know my whole deal with that has always been, just like, why take that risk? Well, we humans aren't very good at preparing

for future risk, which is, I think, one of the reasons why futureologists are so revered and awed, but also mocked and scorned, because they're doing something that almost flies in the face of human nature. Yeah, you're really putting yourself out there when you predict some of this stuff. There was one other episode that just reminded me

of the 10,000 year clock. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a great one. Yeah. So the United States military, obviously, has used it for years. Then beginning, when was this? In the 60s or 70s that business got into it?

So in 1972, I think, Royal Dutch Shell heard somebody at the top, heard that there wasn't going to be any oil by 1985, and they went, wha? Yeah, businesses basically said, wait a minute, there are people that can actually use models to determine what the future might look like. Right. How can we use that to make money?

Well, let's throw money at them and find out. Exactly. A couple of other places, too, that were nascent think tanks, like Rand was the Stanford Research Institute Futures Group in the California Institute of Technology. Yeah. Early think tank breeding grounds. Just smart people walking around thinking about the future.

But that wasn't enough. You can't just say, this is what I think it's going to be like. You have to back it up. And we'll talk about how they back it up right after this. FACTORIA On the podcast HeyDude The 90's called David Lasker and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life,

step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. How do they back it up? Well, they use different techniques. If you're a futurist or a futurologist, you're going to be using techniques

that are pretty recognizable. But the way you put them together and the things you sort out is what's going to make you successful or not successful, right? So you like brainstorm ideas? Yeah, that's probably where you start. Yeah. It's just like blue sky territory, as they say.

Yeah, you imagine things using scenarios or games. Apparently game theory. But we got to do that at some point. Yeah, I've been avoiding it. Me too. So we could mess it up really bad, but we'll do it. That changed the futurism field tremendously when they came up with game theory,

because it's a pretty good way of predicting how people will work. And that's one of the big confounding factors, is you can predict something, follow every single one of these steps that we're talking about right now, and then people will just cut to the left all of a sudden. And your prediction just fell to the wayside, because humanity went this way real quick.

Yeah, or somebody invented a game changer, a game changing product or innovation that nobody saw coming. Yeah, what's they called disruptive technology? Is it? Yeah. That's good. I like that.

Not a bad band name. Oh, I wonder if it's out there. If so, it's made of Silicon Valley rich guys. Yeah, it's like my side band. Right. Do you want to gather professional opinions using, say, the Delphi technique? Yeah.

You want to do historical analysis? Sure. Current trends are very huge and can help you as well. And then, like you were saying, I think you call it backmasking? No. That's turned me on, dead man. Right. From the Beatles.

Yeah, that's what they do. They listen to the Beatles backwards. What was it? It's not backmasking, I know. But where you envision the future, and then you work your way backward from it. When you do this, you do all this stuff together. And again, backcasting.

Backcasting. And when you're using this along with computer algorithms that can model the economy or the weather or oil consumption or something like that, you can come up with something that you could rightly say is a prediction or a forecast for the future. Where we're going to be. That's right.

Again, though, just things happen. Like, for example, Herman Kahn did not predict the oil crisis that came the year after he wrote another famous book in 1972. He wrote a response, I think, to limits to growth and just totally missed the oil crisis. But how could he predict that? Because the oil crisis came out of the OPEC oil embargo.

That was punishment for the US's being involved in the Yom Kippur War. So you couldn't see that coming? No. And that's the big problem with futurology. Yes, exactly. Our own US government has been wrong. The US Department of Interior announced twice in 1939

and then in 1951 that we only had 13 years of oil left. So weird that both times, it was 13 years. They don't like to bother people, so they wait until there's 13 years left and they sound like it's just such a specific number. It is. What else?

Well, we've talked about Moore's law before. That has aged a little better than some other futurology predictions because it has been revised over the years, which is sort of a cheat. A little bit, but still. What I really meant was this. I think he went from 18 months to two years or something like that.

But what's funny is Gerber stakes his position in this article. He's saying like the limits to growth in the other club of Rome stuff, they missed the mark because they predicted catastrophe. And Moore's law predicts technological innovation, so it's successful. So clearly, Gerber agrees with the Hermann Kahn group

rather than the club of Rome group. I don't think it's subtle. I think you can't just say like the gloom and doom camp has just been completely eradicated or proven wrong. Agreed. Yeah, and Moore's law, I don't think we said specifically. It predicts the number of transistors on integrated circuits and computers doubles every two

years. And like we said, it's been updated. And it's been pretty consistent. And so with Hermann Kahn's popularity and then the big high profile book publishing argument that he got in with the club of Rome, that led to like a spate of other futurology books. Yeah, I remember it being a big deal when I was a kid.

I remember a lot of people talking about the near and far future. The one that I ran across in this article that I had heard of, but I didn't know anything about, it's Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. I remember that, I think. Did you read it? No.

The cover, I guarantee, would just give you nostalgia. I'm sure. But it came out in 1970. And it predicts a future where too much rapid change, technological change, and advancement, it happens too quickly. And people get all sorts of stressed and just worn out and basically have all manner of terrible reactions to it.

And I'm like, whoa, that guy predicted 2015. So like a person's emotions couldn't handle? Yeah, we're just overwhelmed. Oh, OK. Through too much rapid technological innovation. Happens too quick. Do you think we're overwhelmed? Like, I get stressed out by like, say, social media

or something like that. Yeah. I wonder if it's a certain people of a certain age. Maybe. Yeah, I would guess if you're born into it, you're used to it. So it would probably more likely apply to a transition population. Like us.

The transitional generation, is that what we are? Don't you get stressed by social media? Don't you get like just tense and? Yeah, I mean, I kind of just hate it. Or having information, all this information, and all of it's just so thin. Content-wise or value-wise, but there's tons of it. Yeah.

And it's always coming at you. Yep, always. This stuff wears me out. It wears me out, too. I got the future shock, Chuck. You got the Jimmy Legs? Yeah. No, I totally agree.

I'm like that. I just want to shut it all down. Just shh, everybody. Not podcasts, though. That should live on. So we talked about science fiction writers and how they are easily off the hook. Because they're just writers, right?

They're not supposed to predict the future. But they have been, you can't dismiss it, because they've been on the money or close to it a lot over the years. Because like we said, they're not hampered by the rational laws of today. They can just say whatever they want. And if they're wrong, it's like, hey, dude,

I'm just writing stuff. Yes. This is fiction. Right. But a few of the highlights, Jules Verne, mid-19th century, predicted going to the moon in a spacecraft. Not only that. So he predicted it would be shot out of a cannon,

basically, to the moon. But the thing that he really got, though, was that he placed the moon shot in Florida. Like 137 miles from Cape Canaveral, where they do launch rockets to the moon. Not bad. No. And for the same reason, too, it's close to the equator. Oh, is that why?

It's one of the reasons why. Plus, Cape Canaveral is largely protected by the Gulf Stream from hurricanes. Like, as a hurricane comes ashore, right before it starts to get to Canaveral, it goes out again and then hits North Carolina. Interesting. That'd be an interesting conversation to have been in on.

Oh, when they were picking places. Like, where should we launch this? I mean, where should we put all of our money into it? H.G. Wells, he predicted tanks in 1903. Supposedly, he was the first guy to really think of himself as a futurist. He predicted the atom bomb in 1908. Aerial bombing in 1908.

What the name, Robot, was actually coined by a science fiction writer and a Czech writer named Karl Kopeck, and in 1921, he named robots. I think the all-time winner, though, is Hugo Gernsbach. And Hugo Gernsbach, if you're into science fiction, you recognize his first name, because he's who the Hugo Award is named after.

You may also recognize his last name, too, if you're a Hugo Gernsbach fan. But back in, I think, the 1910s, he was writing? Yeah, he wrote a book called Ralph, 124C41+. He predicted everything in this. Yeah, you know what that means? It's actually a play on words.

One, two, it means one, two, four, C for one another. You get it? Wow, yeah, that's great. One, two, four, C, four, one, and then another is the plus sign. Yeah, yeah. That alone, I was sold. Yeah. I was like, I love this guy.

It's just like that Van Halen album, OU812. Exactly. So what does he predicted? He predicted solar power, like the realistic use of solar power. He predicted plastics, video phones, tape recorders, jukeboxes, loudspeakers, tinfoil, rust-proof steel, synthetic fabrics, all in one book.

And he's famous in the Hugo Awards named after him, because he wanted to make science fiction more science-based using that same logic. So he would have been almost a father of futureology. Oh yeah, for sure. Here's a few other things from that book. This one, to me, I'm surprised no one's done this yet. The appetizer, which is at a restaurant in an advanced,

scientifically advanced restaurant, it'll be a room that you wait in before you get your table that's flooded with gases that make you hungry. Oh yeah. Not bad. Yeah. Just have a seat in the appetizer room. Right.

We'll be ready shortly. There's like bloody fingernails that scratch into the walls as people are trying to get to the other room where the food is. The telotograph, which is basically a fax machine. OK. The telephot, which was a picture phone, had a universal translator, where

they translate any language right there in your hand. Yeah. Not bad. And then this one I love. The Vacation City was a suspended city in a domed, suspended city 20,000 feet in the air that used a device that nullified gravity. And in Vacation City, no mechanical devices

are permitted because it was supposed to be a true escape. That's awesome. From the mechanized world. Waiting for that one. And this was in 1911. Yeah. He predicted just that there would be a need for that. That's like that town in West Virginia, Green

Something, West Virginia, where people who have electromagnetic sensitivity go because you're not allowed to have any electromagnetic stuff. Oh, really? Because there's like a radio telescope, where there's something there that could be interfered with. Yeah. And you could go be Amish.

Can you just be Amish? No. Like, hey, I want to be Amish. If you're Harrison Ford, you could be. Yeah, or Woody Harrelson. Yeah. Right? You got anything else?

How about these predictions for the future? There's a couple in here that are kind of funny. 10 predictions that missed the mark. And these are real predictions. In 1967, US News and World Report said that by the end of the century, we will launch our freight across the continent with missiles. Like, you order something from Amazon in New York.

Instead of having a fulfillment center nearby, they just put it in a missile and shoot it to you. Yeah. Didn't happen. No, but drones are coming. Really? Are they still on that? Probably.

In 1955, a guy named Alex Lewitt predicted nuclear power vacuum cleaners. This one, I think, would be pretty great. Dissolving dishes. And ask what it would be like in the year 2000, a science writer named Waldemar Comfort. There's a lot of, man, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. He's a fabulous science writer with a funny name.

Consonants in a row. He said you would basically put your plate in 250 degree water at the end, and it would just dissolve it. No more dishwashing. Bucky Fuller predicted that Canada would be a subtropical climate because we built a dome over it. And that didn't happen. No, it didn't.

Which is strange, because Bucky Fuller was a pretty sharp dude. Here's another one. Was he really? You have Buckminster Fuller? Oh, I didn't pick up on that. He's who Bucky Balls are named after. Really? Why?

I don't know. He may have invented them, I'm not sure. What's a Bucky Ball? It's those little balls that are magnetic spheres that you can shape into Bucky Balls. Yeah, yeah. Here's one, a Scottish geneticist that said in the 1920s that in the future,

one-third of the babies would not be born. Oh, only one-third would be born as a result of pregnancy. And the other babies would be born in a lab. Would they be grown, basically? Exogenesis. Yeah. Here's the last one. Chuck, you ready?

1975, the Research Institute of America, which sounds pretty smart, said that by 1975, I'm sorry, this is several years before that, we would all be driving personal helicopters. Yeah. Did not pan out. Probably never will. I don't know if I'd want a personal helicopter.

You know, I was, for Emily's birthday, I rented a cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. Did you take a personal helicopter there? No, but I was sitting on the deck, we all were, and way across the valley on the side of the mountain was this huge, huge house. And I heard a sound of a helicopter, I don't know what it's like, and I saw blinking light.

I got out binoculars, and this dude had a helicopter. Wow. And he took it, and he flew it down about two miles to the lake at the bottom of the valley. And I guess he has a lake house and a mountain house. And the easiest way to get there is to make the four-minute helicopter flight. That's crazy.

Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Wow. I want to know who that guy is. That nut guy could be a lady. Yeah, it could be. What am I saying? Could be Carly Fiorina. Yeah.

Who's that? She's the woman who's running for GOP president candidate. Oh, right. Fiorina. That's right. Gotcha. Go ahead. Oh, sorry.

Let's see. Well, if you want to know more about futurology, you can type that word into the search part, howstoveworks.com. And since Chuck had an anecdote about helicopters, it's time for Listener Mail. It sort of looked like one of those Magnum PI ones, too. Well, if I did have a personal helicopter,

it would look an awful lot like that. I'm sure it would. Hey, guys, my name is Shelby. I'm honored for you to be reading this. My husband and I love your show. And you've solved our dilemma as to what to listen to in our car together. I want to let you know you did a great job on the HIV AIDS

podcast. However, I think you missed telling a really important story about the AIDS crisis. Just before the AIDS crisis broke, a method for treating hemophilia called a clot. In fact, your concentrate was developed to finally let those suffering from the disease live into adulthood and completely change the landscape of the disorder.

By the time HIV was discovered to be a blood-borne virus, many of those suffering from hemophilia already had it, not to mention that many also contracted hepatitis. However, the pharmaceutical companies did not begin to pasteurize the drug in spite of their knowledge that it was spreading HIV until a strong public outcry prompted a government intervention. I think the story is not told all the time.

And the injustice that these individuals suffered at the hands of a big pharma is undoubtedly one of the greatest our country has seen. There's an extremely informative and sad documentary on the topic called Bad Blood, a Coltionary Tale. Anyway, that's about it. And I'm sorry if I bummed everyone out. That is from Shelby.

Shelby, thank you for not only that illuminating email, but also the documentary you recommended. We're always looking for those. Absolutely. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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