Elderly bloggers and internet junkies in the year 2062 reminisce about the good old days of social media and social networking. I’m not sure how they get the idea of “hipsters” out of these folks. This video was produced to promote Social Media Week 2012. Link -Thanks, Lauren O’Neil!

Open fires and chimneys will be replaced by home heating and air conditioning systems, with hot or cold air at the turn of a “spigot” (faucet or tap.)

Stores will buy food ingredients in bulk and prepare ready-cooked meals at cheap prices which people can reheat at home. Customers will also be able to get meals delivered by automobile. (That said, Watkins also suggested food could be delivered to homes via pneumatic tubes, and that customers would send back the crockery and cutlery when they finished eating.)

Color photos will be sent around the world, with images shot in China appearing in US newspapers within an hour.

Read more at Geeks Are Sexy, where the predictions are sorted by whether they came true or were way off the mark. Link

Man, I used to love me some Buck Rogers In The 25th Century when I was a kid, and not just because I had a serious crush on co-star Erin Gray! The sci-fi was just far out enough to hold your attention without making you learn an encyclopaedic amount of factoids, and the fashion was dy-no-mite!

All kidding aside, as a kid growing up in the 80s Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica fed my geeky addiction to sci-fi like no other show could, and kept me firmly planted in front of the television, my mind racing at the possibilities presented in each episode.

Head to the link to find a bunch of sci-fi elements Buck Rogers predicted would become a part of mankind’s future. They’re hilarious and mostly outdated, although if any of them do come true the future will be a scary place indeed!

Link

We’ve brought you the stories of how some famous logos have *evolved, but what about the future? At Stock Logos, we see how some logos become simpler over time, and that trend is projected into the future. Of course, some of these companies are projected to encounter, um, “circumstances.” Link -via Boing Boing

*Previously: Tech, Car, Hollywood, Food, Beer, and Fast Food.

In 1964, forward-thinker Arthur C. Clarke predicted instant global communication, e-commerce, and remote surgery. Fifty years ago, everyone had some idea of what the 21st century wold be like. Some of those ideas turned out to be ludicrously wrong. Others were eerily correct. Gamma squad has a collection of videos that show predictions of both kinds, so you can judge who was worth listening to way back then. Link

Historic LOLs has a collection of German prints from around a hundred years ago illustrating predictions for the year 2000. In this one, we’re supposed to be able to walk on water, with the help of balloons and a waterwheel. Other pictures show moving sidewalks, personal flying machines, underwater tourism, and remote surveillance -all things that actually happened, although not quite the way they were pictured. Link

Doctor Who Future Sonic Screwdriver – $25.95

Attention Doctor Who fans! Behold the Doctor Who Future Sonic Screwdriver from the NeatoShop!  This is a replica of the screwdriver of the Tenth Doctor ( as used by River Song in Series 4).  It has authentic red and blue lights, a neural relay indicator panel, and awesome sound effects.

Be sure to check out all the fantastic Doctor Who items available at the NeatoShop!

Link

In the past 39 years life has changed significantly with the advent of cell phones and the World Wide Web, but what will life be like 39 years from now? This neat info graphic asks people their opinion of where we are headed in that time frame. Feel safe knowing that only fifty eight percent feel that another world war will happen by 2050. See full graphic at the link.

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Since humans were able to conceive of the concept of time they have wanted to know the future. And with the advent of Google we have come even more expectant of having any and all information at our fingertips. Have you ever found yourself wanting to Google something that doesn’t exist yet? Sports scores to a game that hasn’t been played? Find results for the 2012 presidential election? Well now someone has cataloged future events for each year as determined by the first page of Google search results. What comes up is an interesting list of visions of what’s to come. Only a small portion of the time line is shown here. Link

Predictions about the future tend to give us some ray of hope, but fiction can be totally depressing. Unrestrained fantasy, action, and shock value often make movies about dystopian futures into hits. Here’s a list of 18 movies that all start out with a description of the future: “In a world where…” life as we know it has changed to something awful and our victim/hero dares to do something we consider normal, causing conflict with the powers-that-be. Make your selections carefully. Link [edit 3/17/11 by Alex - be careful, malware redirect has been reported on this link] -Thanks, Danny!

“If you’re looking for a 1960 model, this may well be it.” Those were big words back in 1948, when this short documentary was produced by Popular Mechanics. Which will it be: a three-wheeled golf cart that resembles a flying saucer, an airstream camper on wheels, or a souped-up model T with the dashboard of an airplane? Link -via Nag on the Lake

Robert Rowthorn, an emeritus professor of economics, likened religion as a gene (after all, you are most likely to "inherit" your parents’ religion) and came to an interesting conclusion:

Rowthorn’s model shows that, even when the religious defection rate is high, the overall high fertility rate of religious people will cause the religiosity allele to eventually predominate the global society. The model shows that the wide gap in fertility rates could have a significant genetic effect in just a few generations. The model predicts that the religious fraction of the population will eventually stabilize at less than 100%, and there will remain a possibly large percentage of secular individuals. But nearly all of the secular population will still carry the religious allele, since high defection rates will spread the religious allele to secular society when defectors have children with a secular partner. Overall, nearly all of the population will have a genetic predisposition toward religion, although some or many of these individuals will lead secular lives, Rowthorn concluded.

Link

Since the 80s, virtual reality has been the holy grail of video gaming and entertainment.  It has often eluded the most brilliant minds who endeavored to develop it. However, two Russian brothers recently have cracked the VR code by simply putting prospective gamers inside a giant hamster ball. The ubiquitous VR headset is equipped with gyroscopes that measure the position of the gamer’s head and swivel the view of the game accordingly. Gamers enter the ball and, thanks to the wheels on which it is mounted, are able to walk indefinitely within the virtual world just as they could in the real one.

See a video of this game in action, and read about the other 8 developments at Geeks Are Sexy. Link

The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of air pressure pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.

Now, this idea might seem a little nutty – I’ll admit it seems rather fanciful. But the people behind Foodtubes point out the UK transports 180 times more water than food everyday, and all of that is done using pipelines with minimal pollution and no traffic jams.

Up to 200,000 food-carrying trucks could be taken off British roads, which would save 40 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

As a cartoonist-tinkerer, I have made an effort to imagine future gadgets. It seems that products first exist in a “theoretical” realm, waiting to be born once suitable electronic and materials technologies are available. Over the past 5 months, I have shared my past and recent product concepts in Neatorama’s Museum of Possibilities. Here are two examples of my past product predictions: Inflatable gear for motorcyclists and helmet cameras.

In 2009, it was reported that a motorcylist’s life was saved because he was wearing a newly-developed product, an air-bag jacket!

(Image source: Impact Jackets)

(Image source: hit-air)

In 1983 and 1990 I conceived of cameras fitted to helmets. I suggested that while such devices had likely been hidden in hats ever since small, portable cameras were invented and became popular, there would now be a demand for them inside hats and helmets. It seemed several trends were converging to make camera hats inevitable: the trend toward exercising outdoors to compensate for increased hours spent working indoors in offices, the decline in family ties that was pushing exhibitionism – the need to show strangers who you are and to demonstrate your capabilities – and the need to record and share one’s daily life with others.

(Image sources: clockwise from upper left, DogCam Helmet Cam, singletracks, Mr. SEC, RealAction Paintball, emotioncam, and GadgetMania)

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

Matt Novak of Paleofuture Blog came out with the first episode of Paleofuture TV series. This one is all about what people of yore thought the future would be when it comes to food. Oh, how absolutely, hilariously wrong they were …

Take a look: Link

We can always dream up new products that make life easier, no matter how difficult they would be to actually produce. In 1939, Popular Science predicted that we would one day received newspapers printed at home with data transferred by radio broadcasts. That particular invention never came to be, at least in the sense it was envisioned at the time. Why print out the news when you can just read it on your computer screen? This item is one of nine products that were never developed, although some of the end results came to us by other inventions. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

In 1936, Sh?nen Club magazine published an illustrated article entitled “World Transportation Invention Competition,” which took a look at the future of transportation.

The illustrations don’t look anything like the beater I drive.

Link – Via Laughing Squid

On this date in 1939, the New York World’s fair opened. One of the exhibits was a ride called Futurama, sponsored by General Motors. Visitors got a glimpse of what life would be like in 1960, particularly the vision of an interstate highway system and urban planning. Separation of industrial, commercial, farmland, and residential areas were presented as an admirable goal. Curiously, new highways bypassing the slums was proposed as preferable to improving those neighborhoods. Read more about Futurama and Futurama II (at the 1964 World’s Fair) at Wired. Link -via Metafilter

This would only replace food’s caloric aspect, so we’d still need to take vitamin and nutritional supplements in order to provide the body with new matter as cells die off, according to Patrick Tucker, director of communications for the World Future Society. Still, there’s a certain cold comfort in knowing that if worse comes to worst, nanotechnology might give us a food pill that, taken every 10 years or so, would power our bodies if the planet loses the ability to do so — or if we’re forced to leave the planet, as Stephen Hawking suggests.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Flickr user GE Healthcare)

(YouTube Link)

Based on the Argentinian Political Advertisement, “The Truth” by RECREAR, “Lost Generation” was made by metroamv as an entry in AARP’s U@50 contest.  It won second place.

Further, the core of the technology will be the mobile camera and the placement of processed information on top of live streaming content from the camera.

We are already seeing some of it with mobile GPS applications, but 2010 will be clearly put these applications on the top shelf of mobile apps. This will allows users to get every information by integrating physical reality and virtual world.

Apple’s Tablet, the rise of online TV and more at the Link.  (Photo: Wikipedia)

Rob Spence, a filmmaker from Canada, had his eye wounded in a shooting accident as a child. Presumably furious at its weak character and lazy work ethic, Spence asked doctors to just completely remove it a few years ago, and now he’s getting it replaced with a small camera (of the type normally used for colonoscopies,) a battery, and a wireless transmitter – effectively turning him into a human documentarian capable of recording, broadcasting, and relaying literally everything he sees, as he sees it.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by rappin.

This is a great little video, an excerpt from Disney’s "Magic Highway USA", showing what people from the late ’50s thought would be the future of transportation.

It’s really neat to see how far we have come, and how far we haven’t. Some of the predictions have come to some manner of fruition, such as real-time traffic stats, navigation, and autodriving vehicles. While some are still pretty far out and "Far Out!" like atomic-powered and solar-powered cars.

– via techeblog

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by mjgolli.

Photo: Tom Bonaventure/Getty Images

There’s also speculation about recreating processes like limestone formation -which usually takes nature thousands of years- that eats carbon from the air.

Nanoarchitects are aiming to speed the process up to a matter of days. They believe it could be done simply by coating the walls of buildings with tiny droplets of engine grease. The grease would be laced with a common salt such as magnesium chloride. When the magnesium reacts with carbon dioxide in the air, a solid magnesium carbonate pearl begins to form.

This serves as the seed for the growth of white, wheatsheaf-shaped carbonate crystals. The large surface area of a droplet of grease maximises the interface between the magnesium and the atmospheric carbon, speeding up the rate of the reaction. Within days, the grease would be transformed into a sparkly crystalline coating similar in appearance to heavy frost or snowfall… A green city…would look like Narnia under the White Witch, crystal white and beautiful. The carbon choking our planet could become a harmless decorative feature.

Link

This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison’s extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.

Arison explains that she has finally dropped the fear that has held her back from doing more about what she has perceived. Armed with the insight gained through work with Florida-based psychiatrist Brian Weiss, a proponent of regression therapy and the exploration of (take your pick) deep memories or past lives, she says she is ready to go public with her visions and bring together her spiritual and business goals.

Unfortunately, seeing the future isn’t the secret to her wealth. She got rich the old fashioned way … by inheriting her fortunes! Link

(Photo: Andrea Bruce for The Washington Post)

Voted Best Short Film at the New York Comedy Festival, a tongue-in-cheek look at the thin line between Utopia and dystopia.

– via buzzfeed

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

Link via Instapundit

“Designed for the Hudson Yard area of Manhattan, Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm aims to provide New York with a sustainable food source while creating a dynamic social space that integrates producers with consumers. Based upon the ‘material logic of plant mechanics’, the biomorphic skyscraper is modeled after the plant cells of ferns and provides space for farms, residential areas, and markets. These organic structures will harness systems such as airoponic watering, nutrient technology and controlled lighting and CO2 levels to meet the food demands of future populations.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Could flexible organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, be the future of lighting? Don’t worry; I don’t understand that sentence either. Keep reading for a jargon-free explanation.

On General Electric’s research campus in Niskayuna, NY, there is a machine that prints lights. This machine is so good at its job the lights it creates could make traditional lamps and lighting fixtures obsolete. In what sounds to be a relatively simple process, the semitrailer-size machine coats an 8” wide plastic film with chemicals and seals it with a layer of metal foil. When an electric current is applied to the plastic sheet, be prepared to throw on a pair of shades as it emits an ethereal blue glow.

Light from the sheet is produced using compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). OLEDs are currently used in television and cell-phone displays and have been embraced by large
manufacturers such as Siemens and Philips.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

The retro-fitted futuristic world of the film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford may not be as far away as one might think. Director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic dealt with such classic questions of “what does it mean to be human” while depicting the city of Los Angeles in the year 2019 as a smoggy dystopian future, a cultural melting pot brimming with skyscrapers, flying cars and inescapable corporate advertisements. Almost 30 years later the film is hailed as an overlooked masterpiece and has inspired multitudes of designers, engineers and artists.

Now you can also add “Real Estate Developer” to that list. Sonny Astani, a Los Angeles real estate mogul, is hoping to make one part of the film’s dystopian future a reality with 14-story animated billboards.

The plan is currently undergoing environmental review and pending approval by city officials. Officials are wary of anything billboard-related at the moment as downtown L.A already has its fair share of distracting lights and signs that have drawn complaints from area neighborhoods.

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.