> "Passenger planes with speed beyond Mach four" and "superconductive magnetic levitation railways at 500 km/h" probably seemed like reasonable extrapolations of current trends at the time.
"The Shanghai maglev is the world's first commercial high-speed maglev and has a maximum cruising speed of 300 km/h (186 mph). Prior to May 2021 the cruising speed was 431 km/h (268 mph)..."
That is right around 500 KM/H. I think we are technologically capable of this if a government really _wanted_.
500 kph is too much, but 250+ kph high speed trains surely proliferated nicely since then, at least in the Old World.
Even Uzbekistan and Morocco now operate high speed trains, and a high speed connection of the Baltics into the rest of Europe is being built.
(It is a bit weird that the New World as a whole is so bearish on HSR. For example, a Trans-Canadian high speed rail would connect all the major metropolises in a single line, as most of the Canadian population lives close to the US border. At the very least, a Toronto - Ottawa - Montréal - Québec line would make a lot of sense. Further west the terrain might just be too unforgiving.)
The terrain is sort of difficult in the Canadian Shield, but it gets easy in the prairies, and then very difficult as you head west into the Rockies. I think the bigger problem going north and west of the Quebec City/Toronto corridor is the sparse population.
With a single line, you would also need to choose between serving Edmonton (like the CN mainline) or Calgary (like the CP mainline). VIA rail currently skips Calgary even though it's the bigger/faster growing city.
Really, you need at least 3 lines because you also have to go both north and south of Lake Huron. And that's not even getting into Atlantic Canada.
Looking at the Canadian population density map [0], the Windsor-to-Québec line seems to be hitting the sweet spot for having enough people, and the total distance of about 1000 km between both ends would fit into the pattern as well.
Edmonton and Calgary would require two lines, yes, and quite long ones. These may be already too far away.
Population density maps alone will always lead you astray when it comes to building things like HSR if you don't also map in the terrain. It's not super challenging to build light frame buildings and asphalt roads on steep grades, marshes, curvy river valleys, frozen tundra, or even cliff faces. It's much harder to build train tracks, factories, skyscrapers, and other heavy buildings in such places.
A lot of people can live in a place it's where it's difficult to build traditional rail, let alone HSR. Also places where HSR might work can be filled with people and existing construction which you can't always just uproot for rail.
Some countries that built extensive HSR networks (Italy, Spain, Japan) have a lot of challenging terrain.
If you travel, say, from Rome to Florence by Frecciarossa, the line goes through six galleries of total length of some 40 km.
Human settlements are a bigger challenge. People don't like to be uprooted, and small communities along the way don't benefit from HSRs, so they have an incentive to oppose them.
That accident happened long ago, on a testing track, due to bad signalling/communications, leading to maintenance equipment still on the tracks, and the maglev running into that.
Run the electric trains on green energy. It’s 2025. I was told 10 years ago renewables were ready and cheaper than fossil fuels. What’s taking so long?
In the meantime, those really inefficient gas guzzling cars still rule.
Seems like the author kind of missed (or buried) the point when summarising the "global fibre-based broadband network" prediction as simply "(the internet)"..
I was using the internet in 1995 - and pretty sure at least part of that connection use was over fibre, so I don't imagine someone trying to get away with predicting that.
But the path to my house was still a phone line - so I assume the original prediction was more about that fibre eventually running to our houses - certainly something many of us were looking forward to back then particularly any time someone in the house picked up a phone and killed our connection :)
(EDIT: have added an amendment in reply to this comment after reading some of the original PDF)
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As for high contrast digital paper, that was also already part of the collective wishlist
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age [1] came out in 1995 and featured an e-book with an embedded AI and nanotech based display surface
BUT e-ink was first investigated at Xerox PARC in the 70's and was already under development by 1995 at MIT's media lab (commercialised in 1997 but hardly as bug a leap as it sounds) [^2]
Ah, just saw that the author has included the original text as PDF so don't have to speculate about original intent after all
Does seem to mostly be "here are some people in touch with current developments happening in the world thinking about their next phase" more than full-blown futurism - but still super interesting to read (if only to see the vestiges of tech optimism pre-dotcom-enshittification)
A few things which leap out that weren't included in the original post:
- "everything will be smart - that is, responsive to its external or internal environment"
Predicted the glassy eyed dream at the time, but not the more cynical reality we got where that smartness more often benefits the seller than the consumer
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- "in-depth personal medical histories will be on record and in full control of the individual in some form of medical smart card or disk"
Another fun combo of rarely safe prediction based on developments of the time mixed with (in hindsight) overly optimistic assumptions about commercialism
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And the bit summarised as purportedly predicting "(the internet)" actually has a pretty neat bit which was missed
"face-to-face, voice-to-voice, person-to-data, and data-to-data communication will be available to any place at any time from anywhere."
Predicting Skype/zoom seems a tad more interesting (even though things like Dick Tracy or 2001: A space odyssey had long had us wishing for it before 1995)
The preceding bit aged less well
"...broadband network of networks based on fiber optics; other techniques, such as communications satellites, cellular, and microwave will be ancillary."
Interesting that they appeared to be emphasising an _increase_ in wired data transit
But not surprising, as back then any cellular comms were far from impressive in comparison to the big-ass wired links you could use from universities
(That said, even back then we had microwave links acting as secondary high speed links for campuses which didn't yet have fibre or coax installed)
>Predicting Skype/zoom seems a tad more interesting
The Mother of All Demos was in '68, though. Some of the past (now legendary stuff) like this or the Lisp workstations (Interlisp-D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKjFJDZmWNM) still looks futuristic today.
460km/h seems close enough to count for the article’s prediction, especially if the mentioned population difference is considered acceptable. IMO predicting the future shouldn’t just be about predicting the future of the USA. Many countries are more advanced in their respective ways than the US.
Not just the cost of building it - though that is significant, but also cost as in the needed energy. Wind Resistance goes up by square of speed and so running high speed at ground level is cost (and environment) prohibitive. There is one other cost - acceleration time - no amount of money could get NYC subways to that speed - the next stop arrives before you get up to speed.
It makes more sense to focus our money on slower speed trains that are still fast enough and use much less energy.
Maglev are less efficent than steel wheels at those speeds. Of course proper maintenance would make the subway smoother and help a lot. france has run regular trains almost to almost 575km/h - though if you really want higher speeds maglev is better but nyc couldn't use those speeds on the subway (though other rail should go faster in the city for service reasons)
Yeah, everyone knows you wouldn’t run a nyc subway at 300 mph.
Where do you get maglevs ant low speed are less efficient? They are frictionless. Of course, I don’t even care if they are. You know what they’re more efficient than? Cars!
Building medium-speed and high-speed maglevs are part of the solution to getting people out of cars.
They are building them in China. Let’s see how far they get.
China built almost 30,000 miles of HSR before the US finished any.
Maybe maglevs will turn out to be one of those things that just doesn’t work in America but works everywhere else.
> Anyone predict the US still wouldn’t have a bullet train in 2025?
I predict the US will still not have a bullet train in 2055 either. The US just has very little institutional ability to build new/improved infrastructure.
For the USA, there are two complications. First, it’s expensive due to imminent domain considerations. Second, there’s a lot of nimbyism in local town halls. So, even when the cost can be overcome, people will scream about it and get it stopped.
Eminent domain, not imminent. There's no connection to time, but the state has the absolute power to seize property; in many countries (including the US) this is limited by constitution and regulation to specific purposes and to require just compensation.
Another factor in the US is that our railroads are generally freight oriented. Routing to have three ground based networks is challenging (road, freight rail, passenger high speed rail), especially in urban areas where right of way is expensive and also over mountain passes. A lot of urban freight rail lines are currently unused; some of them become greenway rail trails, others sit unused and may be at risk of encroachment, but often the alignment isn't useful for high speed rail anyway.
Amtrak's Acela started in 2000, and it's sort of high speed. It's hobbled by FRA rules (weight and strength minimums far in excess of what is used in Europe).
> most of them were doing so to the accompaniment of a screeching dial up modem
Most of them were using it either at work or their university (often one in the same) and so had much faster connections. Dialup did exist, but it was still a small niche that was just starting to get someplace. Even when you had AOL, you typically were still in the walled garden not touching the internet itself.
in 95? nah. 93, 94, yes. though for nerds like us, different story
95 was already passing into in the "even my mom uses the Internet now" and regular ISPs popping up all over the place offering that as a dial-up service.
though we didn't have AOL up here in Canada, so I dunno
Is there a genre of science fiction that deliberately tries to downplay the amount of change that will occur between now and the future? Would it just be unpopular so no one tries?
I think it mostly estimates the wrong changes. Sci fi from the first half of the twentieth century overshot in its predictions of universal flying cars and interstellar travel, but generally missed the internet or the idea that women would be in any way involved in the science. And it's amazing just how many plots up until the end of the last century assume mobile communication isn't routine
Yeah. I think it is because most SF is not actually about predicting the future, but analyzing modern society. So, they take modern society and make one or two big changes that allow the author to discuss their thing.
If they correctly account for long term change, especially after introducing their big twist, then they won’t have a society that reflects modern society, it will just be totally alien.
Sometimes. A lot of SF assumes FTL travel, which we have no reason to think will ever be possible (and even less possible when you realize they also are assuming to time dilation effects).
It’s not really a movie but a vibe, the movie Her does a really good job of “more of the same”. It’s obviously a different time than our own but things largely look the same. I liked it as it gave it this really anachronistic future vibe, like fashion had gone back to 70s styles and nobody has a tv, but it’s actually because projections have gotten so good that everyone’s phone is just a projector on the wall. Hidden technology.
The Worldwar series from Harry Turtledove plays this from an alien perspective. A big, powerful and very stable alien empire sends a probe to Earth, the probe sees knights fighting on horseback. Perfect, our next target! When their sublight invasion fleet finally arrives, the second world war is in a full swing - and humans don't really use knights anymore.
I remember Steven Spielberg's Extant series kind of made a realistic effort in this direction.
Rather then pretend that the future is the Jetson's they made houses still look like houses, with house interiors that you would recognize today. However there is Future tech still just embedded or hidden away, unless you go into the labs etc.
There is actually an expectation that any movie that happens in the future to be a SciFi one. I we _do_ expect some sort of change from today. Either mad max style, terminator style or expanse style other more positive ones, you name it. But would be quite unexpected to make a movie, set to 2094 and everything looks the same. We just know, as a civilization, that something changes.
But I expect in 2094 we still live in the same houses, work on the land, enjoy sun and the sea, maybe still employed, but some change will be happening.
It would make an interesting plot point - like the main characters discovering the no-development stasis is artificially maintained. Or alternatively that there is an illusion of progress, yen thing never actually change for some reason.
I think there is a lot of it but it is not a specific genre.
There is quite a lot that focuses on one, or a linked series of changes, but to highlight those it plays down other possible changes. I think a lot of near future hard SF does this. The problem is its obsolete 20 years later!
I want someone to lampoon tech problems of today still existing in the future. Sorry, we've gotta push software updates iOS 186.3 which will require 30 minutes.
It's fascinating that they completely missed smartphones or even a mention of a handheld computer like device. They were spot-on about the birthrates though.
Cell phones reduce drama in a plot. If you let phones seep into the plot at all, you then have to bend over backwards to explain why one character can't simply call another at any time. A lot of shows pretend they don't exist.
But, but, but! Triangulation by infiltrated and gag-ordered by corrupted government carrier/ISP! End to end encryption! Trojans! Malware! Hacked Wi-Fi! Burner phones! Bought with anonymous and forbidden cash, or even stolen! War driving! The possibilities are endless!
Not sure that one counts. They missed the important trend, which was that the rate of increase was slowing, and that it was slowing more quickly than thought possible. Off by "1.2 Bangladeshes" isn't really an A+ (or a B+). But then I remember still seeing yearly articles about how overpopulation was going to turn the future into a nightmarish hellscape at least through the mid-1990s, perhaps out of habit they'd been cultivating since the 1960s.
Bad Religion had a song Ten in 2010 that predicted 10 billion people by 2010. Not only were they wrong about the total population, they were overly pessimistic about the ability of societies to feed and support that many people.
I'm highly confident we never reach 10 billion. There's a somewhat (small, but realistic) chance we never reach 9 billion. This is even without anything quite so dramatic as a dinosaur-killer meteor. And it's not even slightly good.
Which is strange because the palm pilot was only a year away (this in R&D), and there were other hand held organizers.
The big miss wasn't that cell phones would shrink to fit in a pocket, it was that they would be cheap enough to use. In 1995 you paid dollars per minute to talk and most people who even had one avoided using it.
I'm a bit upset we can't have this today.