Trying to predict the future is never an easy task, and there have been countless outlandish predictions that now seem laughable or even completely insane. Some time ago, I found an old Italian magazine buried under a lot of other stuff in my room, with a title that immediately caught my eye: “Futuro” (Future), and dated from January 1998. On its cover there is a depiction of a futuristic city, and a text saying “Cronache dal prossimo secolo. Come vivremo, come viaggeremo e comunicheremo negli anni duemila” (Chronicles from the next century. How we will live, how we will travel and communicate in the 2000s). This really intrigued me, so I spent some time reading this magazine and I will share what I found, and we will see how people looked at the future 25 years ago, what they predicted correctly and where instead they were wrong.
The first page immediately contains a disclaimer saying that not everything they predict is going to happen for sure, and many more unpredictable events might happen instead. The magazine is divided into five sections: “Abitare” (Living), “Trasporti” (Transportation), “Comunicare” (Communicating), “Medicina” (Medicine), and “Ambiente” (Environment), closing with an year-by-year chronology of the future decades.
The cover of the magazine, with the depiction of a futuristic city.
Living
The “Living” section opens with a large depiction of the proposed Millennium Tower, a 800-meter-tall skyscraper to be built in the middle of Tokyo Bay. This of course has never been realized, but they guessed the height of the tallest building in the world correctly, as the record is now held by the Burj Khalifa, erected in Dubai and inaugurated in 2010, which stands at a height of 828 meters. The next few pages show futuristic concepts for ecologically friendly cities filled with trees among huge skyscrapers, and more realistic-looking construction projects on land reclaimed from the sea. A small section is dedicated to what we now call smart house, explaining how we will be able to control everything in our homes remotely. This is actually fairly accurate, as home automation technologies are becoming more common every year.
This chapter continues with some predictions about space colonization. The first one is that in 2050 there will be a city on the Moon with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and it is expected to be a popular destination for tourists. The following section is even more optimistic, predicting that men could step foot on Mars by 2010, which obviously did not happen. The authors also envisioned that a satellite would study the Martian geology starting in 2001, and that is exactly when the NASA Mars Odyssey mission was launched with that goal. The final prediction about Mars was that a dedicated telecommunications satellite would be orbiting the planet in 2004. This was actually in NASA’s plans, but its launch was initially moved to 2009 and then completely canceled.
Concept art for a colony on the Moon.
Transportation
The second chapter is about transportation, and it starts with predictions about high-speed and magnetic levitation (maglev) trains. The authors expected the French TGV to reach Amsterdam, Berlin, and Warsaw in 2000. Now it actually only reaches Amsterdam, but there are other high-speed systems all over Europe. They also predicted that a high-speed rail network would open in South Korea in 2001, and they were not too far off, as in reality it was inaugurated in 2004.
A paragraph is dedicated to maglev trains, with expected speeds of up to 550 km/h. The first lines were predicted to open between Tokyo and Osaka in 2000 and from Berlin to Hamburg in 2003. While the speed record for maglev trains is now over 600 km/h, we are still quite far from making these trains common. The only true maglev line now operational connects the city of Shanghai with its airport with a top speed of 430 km/h, and it was inaugurated in 2004. A few other short maglev lines operate in China, Japan, and South Korea but only with speeds up to 100 km/h. Japan is currently building the first long-distance maglev line in the world between Tokyo and Nagoya. It is expected to open in 2027, with an extension to Osaka planned for 2037. Meanwhile, plans for a maglev in Germany have been canceled and it doesn’t seem like these trains will operate in the country any time soon.
Next, the magazine predicted self-driving cars with sensors able to sense possible collisions, connected to GPS, and with systems able to estimate the best route and travel times. While self-driving cars are still in the process of being developed, everything else has actually been realized. The authors then predicted huge supersonic planes that travel at Mach 3 (over 3,000 km/h), improving the technology of the Concorde airliner. The Concorde was actually retired in 2003 mostly due to its high costs and, while new supersonic aircrafts are now under development, they are still far from being used for passenger transport.
Predictions about spaceplanes traveling at 25,000 km/h and connecting New York and Paris in less then an hour now seem crazy, especially because they were expected to start flying some time between 2020 and 2030. For subsonic aircrafts, the magazine predicted planes able to carry over 800 people, and Boeing actually made the Airbus A380-800 with a capacity of up to 853 passengers. It was introduced in 2007 but, due to high costs, its production was halted in 2021. Another outlandish prediction about planes was that there will be a system of tunnels where aircrafts would be able to fly underground. This seems like pure science fiction, but the authors noted that tunnels could be more viable for trains, which could travel in a vacuum. While this idea is not new, a similar concept now known as hyperloop is in the early stages of development.
This section again closes with predictions about space exploration. No specific dates are given, but it was correctly predicted that a spacecraft would reach a comet, as the ESA probe Rosetta did in 2014. Meanwhile, we are probably still a few decades away from having the predicted space hotels orbiting the Earth and being able to travel to Mars and beyond for tourism.
Planes flying underground in a system of tunnels.
Communicating
The section about communications opens with the prediction that everyone will have a “personal number” that is unique for each person, and could be moved between different mobile phones, landlines at home or at work, and other systems. I don’t think anything similar has ever been realized, but I’m not entirely sure. The next page correctly predicted that we would communicate mostly using electronic devices, satellites, and optic fibers.
The next paragraph is one of the craziest, as it tried to envision the future of the Internet. According to the authors of this magazine, in the early 2000s the amount of information exchanged on the Internet would be so huge and unbearable that the entire system would collapse. Because of this, they predicted that an “Internet 2” would be established and reserved only for scientific research and professional activities. This new network would reach speeds up to a few megabytes per second, while the slower and more chaotic original Internet would be used by common people to talk and shop online. It seems like they underestimated just a little bit the potential of the Internet, but I guess that in the late ‘90s it would have been really hard to predict our current world dominated by social media, which did not even exist at the time.
Medicine
The entire chapter about medicine is fairly optimistic, predicting that we will have all kinds of technologies to substitute body parts with mechanical replacements and to slow down aging. It is also predicted that the sequencing of the human genome, which was actually completed in 2003, would allow by 2020 to know in advance every person’s genetic predisposition to hereditary diseases, cancer, and tumors. Unfortunately we still have not fully reached this goal but, as predicted in the next pages, the mortality rate for these diseases has decreased.
The final pages of this section are dedicated to the fight against HIV/AIDS. No specific predictions are given here, they just say that research on possible cures and vaccines is ongoing. Despite the improvements of the past 25 years, this is still true to this day. On these pages there is also a sentence pointing out that just a few years earlier it was almost unthinkable having to deal with a new pandemic like AIDS. This is a bit ironic since, as we all know now, another unpredictable pandemic would hit the world just over two decades later.
Environment
The following section of the magazine is about the environment. However, after quickly pointing out that our planet is warming, they move on to talk about earthquakes and volcanoes for a few pages. According to the authors, new technologies and the use of statistical analysis would help predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but this is still far from being a reality. They also predicted that the largest earthquake of the following decades would hit Japan. While the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was stronger and deadlier, the second largest one since this magazine was published has indeed been in Japan in 2011. The next pages of this chapter are dedicated to the very far future, explaining how in a few hundreds of millions of years the continental drift will form a new supercontinent similar to the past Pangaea.
The magazine then focuses on clean energy sources, correctly predicting that the use of wind power and solar energy would rise and become cheaper. A paragraph is dedicated to nuclear power, and it says that in 20 to 30 years nuclear fusion could be a reality. This prediction now looks accurate, as the first breakthrough in nuclear fusion was accomplished in December 2022. The final pages of this section are mostly filled with warnings about environmental problems such as global warming, deforestation, desertification, and pollution. The predicted temperature increase by 2050 is said to be between 1.5 °C and 3.5 °C and, while this projection is a bit pessimistic, we are now really on track to reach a 1.5 °C warming by that year.
Tha last paragraph here talks about possible energy sources like hydroelectricity, biomass, and geotermal power. It concludes by saying that hydrogen-fueled cars could become a reality by 2010. In 2014 Toyota manufactured the first mass-produced car powered by hydrogen fuel cells, but it does not look like this type of vehicle is going to become economically viable soon.
Chronology of the future
The magazine closes with an year-by-year chronology of the first few decades of the 21st century, and it includes some really wild predictions that sometimes contradict what was said in other sections. The calendar begins with the year 2000, when the authors predicted that NASA would inaugurate a successor to the Space Shuttle. This still has not happened but it could become a reality in the next few years, after the successful Artemis 1 mission in late 2022. Another prediction for 2000 was that gravitational waves would be detected, but the first observation of this phenomenon only occured in 2015.
2001 was predicted to be the year in which there would be a breakthrough in the prevention of cancer, which sadly still has not happened. Meanwhile, the magazine predicted that a sample-return mission to an asteroid would be launched in 2002. They got this almost spot-on, as the Japanese Hayabusa mission to the asteroid Itokawa was launched in 2003, returning to Earth with some samples from the celestial body in 2010.
Unfortunately, we still do not have a vaccine for AIDS, which this magazine predicted to be developed by 2003. We also still do not understand fully the process of high-temperature superconductivity, predicted to be explained by the same year. Another prediction for 2003 was that 10% of the automobiles sold in the United States would be non-polluting but, as of 2020, electric cars only made up 2% of the sales in the country. Meanwhile, as predicted here, an infrared space telescope was really launched in 2003, the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was predicted to be inaugurated in 2004, but it actually became operational in 2008. By 2004, the authors also expected the invention of facial recognition systems for ID verification, which became a reality during the 2010s. However, nothing much has been done to develop the predicted odor-based recognition systems.
The first phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which aimed to measure the distance of billions of astronomical objects, was completed in 2005, as predicted here. The Human Genome Project was also expected to be completed in the same year, but this actually happened two years earlier, in 2003. We still do not have a way to accurately predict volcanic eruptions or a reliable treatment for AIDS, both of which were expected for 2006. Similarly, there is still no way to definitively prevent cancer, which was predicted to be discovered in 2007.
The authors predicted that airplanes would refill the ozone layer with man-made ozone in 2008, which even now is not in the realm of possibility. Fully reliable self-driving cars were also expected by the same year, but now they are still being tested. The authors also expected that robots would help us clean and do other household chores in 2009. While robot vacuum cleaners are now pretty common, other kinds of more complex domestic robots are still being developed.
2010 was expected to be the year in which we would be able to predict large earthquakes, but we are still far from being able to do that. The authors also predicted electric cars to be economically viable by the same year and, while it is hard to settle a specific timeframe for this achievement, now this kind of vehicle is becoming cheaper to produce and maintain. Other predictions for 2010 were that a simultaneous translation system would be developed, and that machine learning methods would emerge. Both predictions are fairly accurate, as we now have apps that can translate speech in real time, and machine learning algorithms are widely used.
The entire chronology of the future between 2000 and 2011.
However, we still do not have supersonic Mach 4 planes or spaceplanes to reach a space station orbiting the Earth, which were predicted respectively for 2011 and 2013. The same can be said about a reliable cure for tumors or a vaccine against cancer, also expected for 2011 and 2013 respectively. Artificial replacements for body parts were expected to be developed by 2012 and, while still not common, this kind of technology has seen much improvement over the past two decades. For 2014, the authors predicted huge developments in the study of the brain, and it is true that we made a lot of progress on this subject since this magazine was published.
A really optimistic predicition for 2015 was that the first permanently inhabited lunar colony would be established, a goal which we are still far from accomplishing. They also expected the 800-meter-tall Tokyo Millennium Tower to be completed by that year but, as pointed out earlier, the even taller Burj Khalifa in Dubai was inaugurated in 2010. Maglev trains were expected to be developed in 2016 and, as we saw in more detail in the transportation section, we now only have some short and mostly low-speed lines.
Robotic pets and nurses were predicted for 2015 and 2016. Both predictions are somewhat accurate, as robotic pets exist, even though they are very expensive, and robotic nurses have started to be introduced in the past few years. The magazine predicted that computers would be able to simulate the complexity of human brains by 2017, and this is also fairly correct, as artificial intelligence has made a huge progress in this direction lately. However, there are no boats powered by magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, which were predicted for 2018.
Predictions for 2019, 2020, and 2021 are all about improvements in medicine and the study of the environment. The authors also expected for 2020 the development of an effective method to achieve human hibernation, which is still far from being a reality. Self-healing robots were predicted for 2022, and this is fairly accurate, as this kind of technology has seen some success in the past few years. The prediction for 2023 is a bit weird, it only says that we will have a “connection between computers and human sensory organs”. If this means that computers would be able to replicate all five senses, then we are still in the process of researching this technology.
The next predictions are for 2025, when the authors believe that life expectancy will exceed 100 years. According to the United Nations, the global life expectancy in 2021 was 71 years, while the highest value for a single country is achieved by the Principality of Monaco, with 86 years. For 2025, the authors also expect entirely new animal and plant species to be artificially created. The predictions for 2030 are that there will be more robots than humans and that we will have entirely automated houses that can change the setting of each room at will. This feels like science fiction but I guess that we will wait and see.
The final predictions are for sometime between 2031 and 2100. These include the construction of a space elevator, the colonization of Mars, the possibility of artificially replicate any part of the human body, the detection of some unspecified new particle inside quarks, the discovery of extraterrestrial life, and finally the determination of the true nature of dark matter.
The entire chronology of the future from 2011 onwards.
Conclusion
Overall, it was really fun and interesting to see how people expected the future to look like 25 years ago. The authors of this magazine were definitely optimistic about improvements in medicine, transportation, and space exploration, with predictions that sometimes border on science fiction. The impact of the Internet was extremely underestimated, as they focused more on the development of robots, not even anticipating the rise of smartphones. However, many other predictions were fairly correct, sometimes with surprising accuracy. It has to be said that while it is easy to laugh at some of these predictions now, trying to foresee the future is extremely hard and it surely looks like the authors made a lot of research while writing this magazine. Thus, we need to give them credit for trying and actually getting many things right. I’ll be sure to come back to this magazine in a few years to see if more predictions became real.