11 Astounding Predictions That Came True

A super link from Charlie over at Interesting Pile:


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Many literary forecasts of our technological future have already come to pass: the atomic bomb, the submarine, and even the iPad. Discovering passages of science fiction that turned out to be eerily accurate predictions is certainly quite entertaining.

It’s also a point of controversy among Sci-FI enthusiasts. Eric Rabkin, a professor at the University of Michigan and the 2010 winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction scholarship, explains why.

“First, there’s the infinite monkeys problem. If you have an infinite number of monkeys randomly pounding on typewriters for an infinite length of time, the odds are 100% that at least one of them will … write Hamlet,” explains Rabkin. “In other words, with thousands of [science fiction] writers turning out tens of thousands of visions of the future, in what sense is any coincidence between a future element and what comes to pass a prediction?”


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Consider this a full disclosure: the following list is not exactly academic or even scientific. But the members of The Science Fiction Research Association who helped us compile this list agreed that these 11 science fiction prediction passages were entertaining enough to share.

The iPad: 1968
We all giggled earlier this year when Apple announced the iPad. Some of us made jokes about certain feminine products. But it looks like Arthur C. Clarke went down the the same naming route with the “newspad.”

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke:

“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination…”

Furthermore, I've already posted an earlier article about Arthur C. Clarke's predictions from 1964. They go wayyy beyond the iPad. Here was the video from that post:



The Atomic Bomb: 1914
“Though the term ‘atomic bomb’ had been used before Wells, it seems that he came up with the term on his own, and he was the one who popularized it,” says Dr. Patrick B. Sharp, who discusses this connection in his book Savage Perils. “He was extrapolating from the work of Frederick Soddy, a British chemist who worked on radioactivity.”

Leo Szilard, who participated in the Manhattan Project, cited this specific passage in a letter to Hugo Hirst (which is part of a collection of letters in The American Atom):

“It is remarkable that Wells should have written those pages in 1914. Of course, all this is moonshine, but I have reason to believe that in so far as the industrial applications of the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists.”

The World Set Free by H.G. Wells:

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s work that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release of energy was gold. But the thing was done—at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power.

Continue to the rest of this amazing article..

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Special note: I personally left off the "Sci-Fi" in the title because I don't think many of these warrant a reference to science fiction - at least not in the sense that most non-SciFi enthusiasts would define science fiction.