The February 12, 1922 Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT) published this page, speculating on the world 10,000 years hence. The piece is a shortened article by Hugo Gernsback with illustrations by Louis Biedermann. Excerpts appear below.
The up-to-date scientist has little difficulty in predicting certain things that will happen in ten or fifty years, but a hundred centuries hence is a larger order, even for the most intrepid imagination. That practically nothing of our present civilization will be left after 10,000 years may be safely predicted. We may also prophesy that human beings, a hundred centuries hence, will live in entirely altered circumstances from those in which we now exist.
Our illustration depicts one of the future cities floating high in the air, several miles above the earth. The question of sustaining such a large body in a rareified atmosphere will prove to be of little difficulty to our future electrical engineers. Just as we construct leviathans of the sea to-day, some of them weighing as much as 50,000 tons we shall construct entire cities weighing billions of tons, which will be held in space not by gas balloons, propellers, or the like antiquated machinery, but by means of gravity-annulling devices. Already experiments have been made whereby it has become possible to reduce the weight of substances by electrical forces.
See also:
Closer Than We Think
Gotta give them credit. Unlike alot of what we see on this site, these folks were humble enough to admit they have no idea what's happening in the next century or two...they've gone out 10 millenia!
ReplyDeleteI dunno, 10,000 years seems like a long time 'til I get my jet pack. They are definitely correct about not much surviving from the world of 1922, as evidenced by the spelling of "to-day".
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it looks like male pattern baldness will never be cured, so I guess I can give up on the expense of Rogaine.
I'm wondering why we would ever need floating cities. Other than the "Hey, look what we can do" factor, I can't imagine it ever being a practical solution to anything.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I have no idea what things will be like in 10,000. That is a very long time.