This Old Book Predicted Everything

hey 42 here some advanced warning that we're going to start with a tale that might make you feel just a little bit inadequate especially if you've been spending lockdown eating too much and playing the sims but if you can handle that let's get right to it has the world ever seen a human being as well rounded as leonardo da vinci the bonafide renaissance man a self-made polymath the guy could do it all from his humble start in life the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant born in a small hamlet in tuscany he would go on to achieve excellence as a painter and inventor who contributed to civil engineering chemistry geology geometry hydrodynamics mathematics mechanical engineering optics physics pyrotechnics and zoology that's right leonardo da vinci made significant contributions to more fields of study than you have gcses despite his undoubted genius da vinci faced well a lot of doubt in the same way that the mona lisa was for a long time considered merely a well-regarded painting rather than one of the most famous and best-loved masterpieces in the world da vinci's grand ideas were met with skepticism in the 15th and 16th centuries da vinci made sketches for helicopters diving suits war machines and more well before they were ever actually built in some cases these wouldn't be built for hundreds of years in the future he even sketched a self-propelled cart that could easily be the first forerunner of the modern car but his contemporaries weren't so amazed with da vinci's doodles bayezid ii an ottoman sultan who'd commissioned da vinci as part of an engineering project rejected his proposal for a 280 meter single span bridge longer than the typical bridges of the time it would have been the longest in the world but the sultan believed the ambitious design was impossible and da vinci didn't get the job mit researchers built a scale replica of the bridge in 2019 to test whether the bridge would have worked as intended that is held itself up and together only by the compressive forces within it and lo and behold they found the design was flawless whilst davinci was exceptional for the sheer volume of inventions he devised that were well ahead of their time when it comes to predicting how far out inventions might change the world around us one profession stands out science fiction authors any decent sci-fi world must contain well science fiction that is technology or inventions that transform the world and bring with it a completely new way of life and sure enough the sci-fi community has made some pretty bold predictions over the years and whilst we've yet to be overthrown and enslaved by a skynet style ai like in the terminator films there are plenty of inventions and predictions that have come true minority report painted a wild picture of what 2054 would look like but hey we're not there yet so it could all come true although one terrifying aspect of the film has already come to fruition amongst the eye transplant and mutated physics the targeted advertisement john anderton is bombarded with lines up fairly well with what we experience on a daily basis somehow another advertiser has got our name our likes and is trying to flog us a product we mentioned in passing to a friend with an earshot of some smart device at least they don't actually shout at us yet the film also features government surveillance that uses eye recognition technology which while still not commonplace is definitely in use around the world but widespread surveillance was predicted long before that you can't mention dystopian levels of government spying without looking at george orwell's 1984 one of the most powerful books in the genre it paints a bleak picture of a world where big brother and yes that is where the show's name comes from is always watching it's hard to look at the 2013 revelations about the nsa and the widespread nature of surveillance of entire populations and not believe that we're closer to orwell's vision than the powers that would be like us to think take for instance the topic of social ratings that has cropped up a lot lately china has enacted a large-scale social credit score system to track and monitor its citizens behaviour both online and offline which i've discussed in previous videos if you don't behave how the state wants you to or for example post something the state doesn't approve of on your social media you can be denied loans despite having a good income as more and more countries consider adopting social rating systems the world is looking increasingly dystopian every year these days anything you say online can be used against you perhaps it'll be tomorrow maybe years down the road anyone with an online presence can be under the threat of having their posts and comments twisted and used against them this is a huge ongoing concern for influencers such as myself in short it's more important than ever before to protect your data and think twice before posting ambiguous photos of yourself or other potentially compromising information that's why kaspersky started the kaspersky social ratings project they are developing steps for what people like you and me can and should do to prepare themselves and secure their private data follow the link in the description to learn more from kaspersky on how social ratings can affect you and how to better prepare and protect yourself where would sci-fi be without space travel it's no surprise that many fans believe science fiction proper began with jules verne who's being called the world's first full-time science fiction novelist alongside journey to the center of the earth and 20 000 leagues under the sea verne wrote from the earth to the moon in 1865 it tells the story of the baltimore gun club who builds an enormous space gun and fire three people in a ship to the moon verne was thorough in the scientific details of his novels and even performed calculations on the requirements of the novel's canon some of which turned out to be very accurate nasa has acknowledged that the columbiad vern's fictional spaceship closely resembled the actual apollo spacecraft whilst the enthusiasts amongst you will know that nasa's command module for the successful 1969 lunar landing was the columbia both missions even take off from florida and land in the pacific ocean similarities neil armstrong pointed out during a tv broadcast on his way back from the apollo 11 mission from earth to the moon also details the weightlessness that astronauts would experience in space something that verne would have had no way of knowing at the time putting a man on the moon wasn't the only prediction jules verne got right in his sci-fi works his short story in the year 2889 imagined what life would look like 1 000 years into the future he described the daily news as being spoken every morning to subscribers around the world rather than being read in newspapers we didn't need to wait a thousand years for this though just 30 odd years later the first radio broadcast made listening to the news a reality as well as radio the 1920s gave us the iconic sci-fi film metropolis one of the first full-length films in the genre despite receiving a mixed reception including being panned by sci-fi great h.g wells it's grown to be considered one of the finest silent movies it wasn't until 1937 that we got our first proper robot and by proper i of course mean that it was a seven foot 260 pound steel bmf called electro that could walk talk count smoke and inflate balloons you know your basic essential functions robots and their sci-fi imaginings continue to advance with isaac asimov penning his famous laws of robotics in 1941 in a short story that would later become irobot metropolis also featured video calling but since there are some more famous examples of that we'll revisit skype's predecessors later despite slating metropolis h.g wells best known for the war of the worlds also seemed to have the ability to look into the future in his writing in 1933 he wrote the shape of things to come a so-called future history predicted a second world war starting in january 1940 this estimate was only a few months out and his detailed accounts of air raids of berlin lined up with what would come to pass a few years later following world war ii author arthur c clarke proposed some more peaceful uses for the v2 rocket which the germans had developed clark reckoned the rockets could be used to put satellites into orbit and that if put it the right height they'd stay locked to the same point on the earth's surface this popularized the idea of geostationary satellites which still use the clark orbit today for tv intelligence weather forecasting and defense applications staying with satellites sort of we move in a seamless segway to the jameson satellite a short story by neil r jones written in 1931 in it the protagonist professor jameson asks for his corpse to be sent into orbit around the earth hoping that the low temperature close to absolute zero preserves his body until it might be resurrected sure enough all it takes is 40 million years of waiting before the advanced cyborg race to zoroms find him and bring him back to life american academic robert essinger who'd read the james and satellite as a child later founded the cryonics institute and spent his lifetime dedicated to cryonic's research his own body alongside those of his two wives his mother and a few hundred other believers are stored on ice in the hope that modern medicine will one day be able to restore them cool but he made a serious novice mistake you don't freeze both your wives just your favorite one written the same year as the jameson satellite aldous huxley's brave new world is a dystopian classic that also predicted the widespread use of chemical antidepressants soma is the novel's mood-altering pill which soothes and placates the population huxley's vision predated prescription antidepressants by 20 years but once the link between chemicals and depressants was established their popularity soared prozac quickly became ubiquitous in western society and was the third most commonly prescribed drug in the us by 2008. from fifth place on the 20th century's best english novels we moved to a sci-fi novel that was almost universally derided for the quality of its writing the oddly named ralph 124 c 41 plus its title a play on words as 124c for one another maybe the peak of its artistic merit but ralph is packed with successful predictions alongside solar energy tape recorders and not only television but even idle channel surfing the novel contains a detailed description of exactly how radar would work when marconi made a working radar in 1933 ralph may as well have been the instruction manual there's even a passage about video calling where a character uses a video phone called a telephoto to see and talk with a friend but if we're talking about famous sci-fi skype predecessors we can't ignore 2001 a space odyssey alongside the newspads that look remarkably like ipads the film's picturephone captivated audiences with multiple attempts to make them successful over the years in the very same scene dr floyd inserts what looks like a credit card to start the call given they were far less common in the 1960s this prediction of the ubiquity they later enjoy is fairly impressive credit cards were also predicted in sci-fi as far back as 1887 in edward bellamy's novel looking backwards which told the story of a man who goes to sleep that year and wakes up in the year 2000. bellamy's description of these credit cards included that each person used his to procure at the public storehouses found in every community whatever he desires whenever he desires it which totally obviates business transactions of any sort between individuals and customers and well if that isn't a description of ordering something off amazon and collecting it from a self-service locker i don't know what is sticking with modern conveniences arguably even more essential than a credit card to many people these days is a mobile phone alongside the tachyon beams and photon torpedoes star trek inspired the first mobile phone motorola engineer martin cooper based his prototype on captain kirk's communicator although at two and a half pounds and with just 20 minutes of battery life i'm not sure many people would consider it particularly mobile by modern standards still it paved the way for smaller phones that eventually led to the screens we love being glued to today star trek also features replicators that can print food and objects in seconds and whilst i don't think these directly inspired 3d printers they definitely were a sign of things to come there are even companies who now claim to be able to separate and put together individual molecules in essence allowing us to build almost anything from its most basic building blocks onto another inspired handheld device except this one definitely isn't something you want to hold to your ear nuclear physicist jack cover made the first stun gun in the 1970s and gave it its now household name taser where did he get the word from he chose it as an acronym for thomas a swift's electric rifle referencing the 1911 novel tom swift and his electric rifle the key neared amongst you will have noticed the a isn't in the book's title and indeed tom swift is never given any other names but cover realized the word was far easier to pronounce with another vowel in it though tom swift's electric rifle is used to hunt big game in africa and can shoot through walls the real taser was actually developed as a weapon for air marshals so they could stop hijacking attempts without shooting a hole in the very plane they were trying to save firing a gun is one thing you're not meant to do on a plane another is have headphones in during safety briefings and takeoff at least but the development of smaller and smaller earbuds makes it even harder for air hostesses to actually tell if passengers are actually listening to her instructions on how to secure a seat belt instead of trying to find a song on their phone that perfectly matches her flailing appendages and yes you guessed correctly ear buds are another invention that sci-fi writers dreamt up long before they were made reality fahrenheit 451 written in 1953 and a staple of english classes the world over describes seashells which were tiny wearable headphones that fit inside the ear providing an electronic ocean of sound music and torque what the novel didn't predict is the awkward social encounters these would create when you start talking to someone only to realize too late that he's busy listening to something infinitely more interesting than you through tiny invisible earbuds but hey it also mentions friends communicating through a digital wall which is probably predicting facebook so who needs socializing in person when you can do it online from the comfort of your toilet if you fought predicting airpods on facebook in 1953 was impressive how about predicting blogging in 1835 that's exactly what 19th century russian prince no i'm not making this up vladimir odofsky did in his novel admittedly the novel was titled the year 4338 so he overestimated how long it would take for us to reach the point where anyone and everyone could write a blog full of angsty poetry and buttock clenchingly enthralling stories of self-loathing and anxiety during a trip to the supermarket clearly that was a higher priority for us than vlad realised but still for him to have written over 100 years before the dawn of the internet that houses would be connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate and that the regular updates people published would cover a family's health household news thoughts and comments all to be shared with the world he definitely predicted over sharing with total strangers who really couldn't care less about how your guinea pig is doing or your toddler who also resembles a guinea pig maybe by the time we do actually get to 43 38 we'll all finally admit that we don't give a about each other's kids and pets now there's arguably one science fiction novel that stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to making predictions stand on zanzibar written by john brunner in 1969 the book's title comes from a claim that the start of the 20th century that the world's population could all fit stood up on the isle of wight in 2010 when the novel is set brother predicts the earth's population will be 7 billion and would thus require an area the size of zanzibar brother was almost spot on the world's population reached 7 billion in 2011 and that was just the first of many impressive predictions the book also includes the us being plagued by terrorism and random acts of violence often at schools the rise of china as america's most powerful rival a european union of nations that nevertheless sees the uk siding with the us gay and bisexual lifestyles becoming mainstream in-flight entertainment motor vehicles running on electric fuel cells global tv news channels sent via satellite laser printers the marginalization of tobacco following a social backlash a real-time social network much like twitter the list goes on although one small detail is almost too hard to believe a world leader called president obama barack obama of course was elected u.s president in 2009. though critics have called some of the predictions of fluke it's an impressive list nonetheless and finally we finish on something that is well i'm not going to beat around the bush it's not a highbrow sci-fi classic it's the simpsons it's hardly a reimagining of the technological limits of our world and yet it has famously got a fair few predictions right who would have thought that donald trump would run for let alone become president when that episode aired in march 2000 but i'm not going to go through various things the simpsons got right because despite some accurate social commentary they're bound to have done so across 700 episodes that's besides the point the reason i want to talk about the show now is a time that they not only predicted the future but actively influenced it a 1994 episode featured a bully called kearney asking a friend of his to take down a memo on his newton which was apple's early attempt at a personal digital assistant the memo was meant to read beat up martin but the device misreads his handwriting as eat up martha this phrase became a mantra for apple engineers years later when working on improved ios software their former director of engineering said avoiding an eat up martha moment motivated the ios team to ensure the keyboard and also correct features for text input were far more accurate so perhaps the lesson here is that whatever predictions are made for the future good or bad we stand to benefit most if we can learn from them and strive for better thanks for watching and don't forget to check out the kaspersky social ratings project via the link in the description

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 909,267

Rating: 4.9038229 out of 5

Keywords: sci fi, science fiction, future, predictions, predict, come true, back to the future, true, scifi, list, fiction, science fiction movies, simpsons true, the simpsons predicted, the simpsons predictions, sci fi movies, dust science fiction, science-fiction

Id: -PZaIgWalB8

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020