The Daily Sceptic’s Almanac of Bad Futurology
One of our regular contributors, Mike Wells, has suggested we compile an almanac of bad prophecies as the end of the year approaches and the usual suspects are making their predictions for 2024. Here’s Mike’s starter for 10:
- One telephone connection in each American town will meet the likely demand.
- The Titanic is unsinkable.
- Farm collectivisation is the way to feed the Communist masses.
- Flying boats are the future of intercontinental air travel.
- Singapore is an impregnable island fortress, and the bomber will always get through.
- Nuclear-generated electricity will be so cheap there’ll be no point printing bills.
- 8-track is the solution for in-car stereo, with Betamax ideal for home video.
- Diesels cars will clean up London’s traffic pollution.
- Masks will halt the spread of Covid.
- Air source heat pumps will keep our homes cosy (so that’s global warming sorted – phew!)
If you would like to add to this list, make your suggestions in the comments or email us at thedailysceptic@gmail.com, putting ‘2023 Almanac’ in the subject line. We will then publish the best of them on New Year’s Eve, possibly breaking them down into categories such as ‘climate’, ‘politics’, ‘technology’, etc.
Happy New Year.
Stop Press: A friend of Mike’s has added a few suggestions of his own:
- There is probably a global market for about six computers (usually attributed to IBM).
- We don’t like their sound. Groups playing guitars are on the way out (Decca, refusing the Beatles).
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi– with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock.’
Monty Python, Life of Brian, Boring Prophet (but how right he was….)
Love that film 🙂
How about, everything stated by ‘scientists’ and elitist intellectuals on the first earth day 1970?
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocalyptic-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/#:~:text=In%20January%201970%2C%20Life%20reported,10.
“Heavier-than-air-flying machines are impossible” – Lord Kelvin
“Nuclear-powered vacumn cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years time”- Alex Lewyt
“640K ought to be enough for anybody” Bill Gates
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
My father Geoff Tootill was instrumental in the building of the first stored program computer at Manchester in 1948. He told me that discussing it in the canteen, celebrating after its first successful execution, they reckoned that UK government would need maybe half a dozen of these machines, principally the MOD. They thought the US would probably want a few dozen because they always do things on a grand scale in the US…
In 2005, Neil Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu.
In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009….
Oh yes. One of Pantsdown’s massively fictional predictions has to figure.
I suppose it would be unfair to include all of them.
No, no. Report 9 wasn’t a prediction. /sarc
(My emphasis added).
I rather like this one
Fusion power is only ten years away.
No. I’m sorry but that’s plain wrong.
Fusion power is 30 years away. Always has been and always will be.
😀😀😀
Truly the fuel of the future.
We can probably add grid scale battery storage being 10-20 years away and always will be.
President Jimmy Carter April 1977:
“World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.
World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production.”
2009 – Senator John Kerry: ““It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now,” he wrote. “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now.”2013 – US Navy predicts summer ice free Arctic by 2016 ““Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3, one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer.” 2012 – Arctic sea ice is melting at a pace so much faster than once thought that the latest projections say it might disappear by as soon as 2022, according to measurements from the European Space Agency. 2020 – A new analysis, using global climate models, predicts that most of the Arctic Ocean could become ice-free during summer by 2050. This new forecast, which used continuous and consistent satellite observations generated via ESA’s Climate Change Initiative, suggests that the future of the Arctic’s sea-ice cover critically depends on future carbon dioxide emissions. 2023 – Summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean might… Read more »
THE ARCTIC IS MELTING
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge
that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us,
must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity
of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high
northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the
last two years, greatly abated….
….. this affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have
been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this
time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that
discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the
advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and
the commerce of distant nations.” A request was made for the Royal
Society to assemble an expedition to go and investigate.
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th
November, 1817, Minutes of Council, Volume 8. pp.149-153, Royal Society,
London. 20th November, 1817.(from) http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
Who said “predictions are very difficult, especially about the future”? ——-It should be noted also that doomsday scenario’s have a 100% fail rate.
People will have to carry on wearing masks in public basically forever. (Susan Michie in 2021).
What do these people [English politicians] know about THE VIRUS me and my colleagues, who have been studying it from the start, don’t? Lifting the mandate will have the gravest consequences for both the UK and the world within a fortnight, possibly even earlier.
(WHO special envoy for COVID commenting on the planned lifting of the mask mandate in the UK in January 2022)
A real classic: Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf halten weder Ochs noch Esel auf!
[Erich Honecker being ‘witty’ during the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the GDR in October 1989. Neither ox nor donkey can stop the homerun of socialism! Ox and donkey are the animals supposed to have witnessed Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. They’re also traditional insults for people deemed to act foolishly either because of general and intellectual clumsiness or because of inbred intransigence.]
The actual date was 14th of August 1989 and the occasion was public release of the first GDR-produced prototype of a 32-bit CPU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7reIMSpBNA
Didn’t the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) say in 2008, “we have 96 months to save the Earth”
https://www.rediff.com/money/slide-show/slide-show-1-just-96-months-to-save-the-world-says-prince-charles/20090710.htm
As climate and ecosystem have thus irretrievably collapsed six years ago, it’s maybe really time to abandon future climate targets. What good could still come from them?
Yellowstone will erupt leaving us with no summer for 25 years. Net Zero will be halted Overnight. Electric car and Heat Pump companies will go into administration. Instead of pretending to save the planet, politicians will now pretend they can get rid of the particulate matter blocking out the sun with a new Aerosol tax, and climate activists will now superglue themselves to Mount Vesuvio claiming the government isn’t doing enough to save us from the volcano crisis.
‘Everything that can be invented has been invented’.
Charles H Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office 1899.
The Ardennes is inpenetrable. Marshal Petain in the 1930s.
“We are using more oil per year than the planet makes per year – and soon there will be none left.”
“Trains will never be able to carry people at speeds over 21 mph because all the air will be sucked out.”
“Battery Electric Vehicles will save the planet.”
“Guns will soon kill people.”
“Our 0.4% of carbon dioxide will kill the planet faster than all the other carbon dioxide.”
“Vote harder to be free.”
“I have a willy and I will marry your son. Or your daughter, depends.”
funny
Surprised nobody has come up with obvious one.
The covid vaccines will be safe and effective.
Vaccinated people will become dead-ends for the virus.
The Maldives will be underwater in 30 years – Reported in 1988. Yet they continue to build hotels on the beaches!