We live in the XNUMXst century, the first century of the third millennium, in an era that most of all attracted forecasters and science fiction writers of the past as a time that is neither too close nor too far away from them. A period of several decades fits within the limits of human life, which means that the end of this period (if we take today as a starting point) can, on the one hand, be imagined as something relatively real, and on the other hand, give free rein to fantasy.
But scientists began to describe hitherto non-existent things back in the Renaissance, inspired by the expansion of knowledge about the world around them that was taking place before their eyes. The biggest legacy left here is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci.
Perpetuum mobile of forecasts
The great explorer was literally interested in everything around, in his notebooks there are a lot of questions: why fish move faster than birds, what the language of woodpeckers looks like, how locks are repaired in Lombardy, whether light pigs stretch in length and width or only in width, and so on. The boundless curiosity that struck all the biographers of Leonardo replaced his education, forced him to conduct experiments and mentally try on what he saw in nature to human capabilities.
In the era of long-distance travel, giant buildings, the development of tools, people needed new technologies to implement their plans. Many engineers and mechanics were involved in their development, but Leonardo went the farthest. Studying the world around him, he suggests that a person can fly, swim under water, look beyond the horizon, formulates the principles of aeronautics, sketches and works out the ideas of a helicopter, submarine, parachute, diving suit, tank and other things reinvented almost 500 years later .
Observations of natural processes led Leonardo to invent many devices of the future, such as ball bearings, and the need to find technical ways to implement ideas led to the ideas of a rolling mill, a metallurgical furnace, an excavator, an elevator, and much more.
Naturally, not all of da Vinci’s works turned out to be realizable. For example, a perpetual motion machine, on which not only he worked, but even earlier less famous engineers (Villars d’Honnecourt, Mariano di Jacopo). True, Leonardo himself came to the conclusion that such an engine was impossible.
Hyperloop by Jules Verne
The empirical method of constructing a new one from elements that have become known in one way or another, in fact, formed the basis of invention. When the Belgian Simon Stephen put a boat with a sail on wheels in 1600, this can in principle be considered a foresight of the automobile and other vehicles.
It is clear that if a person has a means of transportation – a boat or a cart – and a source of energy, then it is only a matter of time when he guesses to connect one to the other.
Conventionally, as progress develops, a sail can be put on a cart, then a steam engine, then gasoline, electric; give the cart itself special shapes and sizes, put it on rails or a magnetic cushion, “launch” it into underground tunnels or overpasses … The flight of fancy is limited only by available materials, energy sources and environmental conditions. – when the inventor assumes that such materials and conditions do not yet exist, but someday they will appear, he thereby begins to design the future.
The recognized visionary Jules Verne used this technique with might and main. Often, he simply took inventions that had barely appeared at that time and developed them to an unthinkable scale (Kir Bulychev, by the way, argued that all science fiction writers actually do this). What if you build such a huge gun that the projectile fired from it can reach the moon? What if we take a submarine – by the time 20 Leagues Under the Sea was written, their prototypes already existed – but very large? What if we imagine a balloon, but powered by electricity? And what if you imagine a car capable of flying, driving, and swimming on and under water at the same time? It is clear that the plausibility of each idea depends on the elaboration of details, but this determines the talent of the storyteller.
Attempts to create the same amphibians cannot even be called completely unsuccessful. Prototypes of submarine aircraft were quite built in the XNUMXth century, however, they turned out to be impractical, and automobile aircraft are manufactured today by many companies, and only legal and economic factors, but not technological ones, prevent their serial production. But Jules Verne correctly guessed that spaceships would be made of aluminum.
Peru Verne owns a little-known dystopia “Paris in the XX century” (c. 1863-1864), where the writer describes the society of the future for the first time. The publishers considered the novel raw and refused to publish it, but already in the 1990s it nevertheless saw the light and amazed readers.
Jules Verne predicts an extensive system of electromagnetic underground (which he “powered” from compressed air – almost everything works on it in “Paris of the XNUMXth century”, and the compressed air itself is stored in huge tanks and pumped there by thousands of windmills). Another of the predictions – skyscrapers, a city-wide street lighting system, unmanned “gas-cabs” on hydrogen engines, complex computers, an extensive electro-phototelegraph network – the prototype of all future communication systems right up to the Internet – in general, with a fairly high degree of accuracy reproduces not only XX, but also partly XXI century.
Of course, no one stocks compressed air these days, but hydrogen cars are very real and may soon begin to replace gasoline-powered cars. By the way, the writer, we must give him his due, in this book honestly indicated what his ideas were based on: for example, the Lenoir internal combustion engine (1859) was installed in the machines, to which Jules Verne only “thought out” hydrogen as a fuel, the pantelegraph invented Giovanni Caselli (1855), wood is turned into paper according to the Watt-Burgess method (1851), and so on.
The idea of moving objects through tunnels using compressed air was realized 50 years before the novel in the form of pneumatic mail, and 50 years later, in 1909, Scientific American published an article about a vacuum train based on just an electromagnetic field. It was this idea that originally formed the basis of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop a century later.
Ahead of the locomotive
The development of electricity production and the advent of radio gave a powerful impetus to the technical dreams of the late 1900th and early XNUMXth centuries, in the era of the undivided dominance of steam engines on land and at sea. John Watkins in XNUMX in “What Might Happen in the Next Century” described the air conditioning system and wireless worldwide telephone communications, the transmission of color photographs by telegraph, and images by wire to screens. In addition, the engineer predicted the transition from coal in households to electricity, the cultivation of fruits and vegetables in large greenhouses, again heated by electricity, high-speed electric trains, electric musical instruments, electric kitchen appliances, and so on. The possibilities of electricity seemed limitless – Watkins believed that even drugs in the future would not be swallowed, but injected through the skin by means of an electric current.
Not everything, however, he managed to foresee: the giant beans and berries never brought out and, unfortunately, flies and mosquitoes did not disappear. But here are some predictions, perhaps not literally, but already guessed in the XNUMXst century – for example, the fight against car traffic in large cities or the remote delivery of goods, albeit not through pipes, but by drones. He also had other interesting proposals – for example, the world standard free education.
However, many of these ideas, especially video communications and automatic transport, were then in the air and were not found only in Watkins. The person visualized dreams of flying, transmitting information over a distance, working less and eating better. Science was supposed to help in all this. Fantasists intensively “extracted” new sources of energy – Hugo Gernsbeck imagined solar batteries, Herbert Wells – nuclear energy. Gernsbeck, the founder of the world’s first science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, in the novel with the strange name “Ralph 124 C 41+” can be found with radar, the same electromagnetic trains, and video conferences through “telephones”.
Rarely are more original reflections. So, in 1924, John Haldane suggested artificial insemination, and Edward Bellamy – in 1888! Described credit cards.
When science fiction began to be written by real scientists, its “golden age” began. Lists of “inventions” by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, joined by Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury and others, would take up too much space. The most common trends are numerous assistant robots, computerization, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. According to Clarke, today we should have already landed on Mars, cloned a person, abolished money and turned one material into another at the atomic level. According to Asimov, in this, 2019, a manned station was to appear on the Moon, and people were to come to cooperation for the sake of peace. Philip Dick believed that today it would no longer be possible to distinguish androids from people – the action of the film Blade Runner based on his works, by the way, takes place in November 2019, that is, “just now” (in the original source, however, it is indicated 1992).
Fiction is bolder than communism
In the USSR, the discussion of the future was also given sufficient attention, and it was not limited to the mere expectation of communism. The fantastic genre, as ideologically dubious, was not as developed here as in the West, although this did not prevent the appearance of both the Strugatskys and Ivan Efremov (also a scientist who described an exoskeleton and a geostationary satellite in his books back in the 1950s), and Alexander Belyaev. However, the non-fiction genre was quite acceptable – in 1952, for example, the book “Reporting from the XNUMXst Century” was published, where scientists from different fields discussed what their research would lead to.
In addition to utilitarian forecasts for the creation of thermonuclear reactors, an increase in electricity generation, the widespread introduction of plastics and the creation of artificial fabrics, Reportage … also had bold ideas, such as the emergence of underwater agronomy in state farms on the shelves of the northern seas, where “submarine mechanics in space suits on nimble underwater machines” would breed useful plants and animals, transfer all transport to batteries, or ordinary genetic modification of living organisms. The possibility of “synthesizing DNA in a flask and, transplanting it into an organ or organism, to achieve the necessary changes in it”, “constructing” cattle “according to the project” seemed very tempting to the communists of the 1950s – if only they knew that their heirs in the State Duma of the XNUMXst century would to introduce bills for a total ban on GMOs in our country…
Some predictions of science fiction writers come true, others do not – because by and large they do not predict the technologies themselves, but only guess what will become widespread and what will not (here it is customary to quote the well-known legend that how Dmitri Mendeleev considered the most difficult problem of the future to clean up an incredible amount of manure from the streets – after all, there will be more and more horses!).
As Arthur Clark himself said, he “only represents a fan of possible futures.” Humanity, on the other hand, chooses from this fan what it considers possible and expedient – or maybe it just stumbles upon a more successful method of implementation in scientific search – and in fact, it can still return to any of the ideas expressed. The fact that there is still no base on the Moon does not mean that it will not appear – today, at least, they are working on it. The main thing is that strategic goals are still achieved, and in this sense, all predictions come true.
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