1922 aerial captain predicts floating cities by the year 12,000

Posted by John Brownlee, May 9, 2008 6:30 AM | permalink

Over at Paleo-Future, they have a scan of an article from the Februrary 12, 1922 issue of the Ogden Standard Examiner. Twitchy about predicting a more near-by future that might be flung back in his dotage, the author decided to predict the world of 11922 A.D.... a world in which sunken-chested bald men in jet packs zoom through the stratosphere to visit domed basilicas kept aloft on radioactive propulsor jets. Why would humanity make its cities so catastrophically disaster prone? A Captain Lawson ("of aerial fame") suggests that the inexorable impetus of human evolution will command us to build our cities at the top of the atmosphere, just as it commanded us to crawl upwards from the ooze of the deep sea floor and conquer land. Ah, the eerily accurate sooth saying of the randomly addressed ex-military man!

10,000 Years From Now [Paleo-Future]

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Jake0748 , May 9, 2008 9:37 AM

Hey John, These cities won't be kept aloft by radioactive jets, but according to the article, "by means of gravity-annulling devices".

Jeez man, GET REAL! :D

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#2 posted by John Brownlee , May 9, 2008 10:20 AM

Ha! I love it. They may as well have just said magic.

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#3 posted by semiotix , May 9, 2008 1:07 PM

A lot of those 1920s Popular Mechanics (etc.) writers were still around to be laughed at when their predictions of flying city-cubes by 1950 didn't come true. This guy has the right idea--predict things about a future that will have forgotten you millennia ago.

Humans will telepathically control the very fabric of space-time and colonize the 9th dimension... by the year 1,000,000,000,002,008. I'll stake my reputation on it.

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#4 posted by Tenn , May 10, 2008 7:12 PM

The illustrations are great, though.

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#5 posted by dainel , May 11, 2008 6:41 AM

#2, The "gravity annulling devices" do not have to be anti-gravity machines (we haven't seen any evidence of anti-gravity yet). They can be kept aloft with dark energy. We cannot create dark energy just yet, but hey, we still have 9,991 years to work on it. :)

#3, You don't have to wait until past the heat death of the universe. In Charles Stross's Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/ when that happens, the current generation already born today is still living. It all depends on whether you believes Bill Joy or Ray Kurzweil.

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#6 posted by hcmeyer , May 11, 2008 11:00 AM

I think the Captain Lawson is this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Lawson

who is responsible for a puzzling sign on I-94 south of Milwaukee:

http://www.onmilwaukee.com/sports/articles/lawson.html

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#7 posted by morehumanthanhuman , May 11, 2008 7:23 PM

This is why I want the LHC to be turned on so we can figure out the science to do this.