Mayan apocalypse: it's not just the religious who try to be prophets

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/dec/21/mayan-apocalypse-science-prophets

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Predicting the future is a mug's game, and we religious believers are of course mugs by definition, so it's no surprise that we insist on embarrassing ourselves that way. Friday's end of the world Mayan-style is only the latest in a line that runs from the New Testament, through to today's US evangelicals forever pushing back their predictions a few years at a time.

To be fair though, the glories of science have lured its believers into prophecy too. Just as God's omniscience convinced Christians that they could see into the future, the enviable track record of science convinces secular prophets that they can see new Jerusalems or great tribulations around the corner.

In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote a sermon for Strand magazine in praise of "this power called science which has laid hold of us". Entitled Fifty Years Hence, it looks forward to the 1980s and sees nuclear powered cars running at 120,000hp for a year before needing to visit the nuclear station. We would control geography well enough, by then, he says in a less than neighbourly moment, to "shift Ireland into the middle of the Atlantic".

His most confident statement of all could hardly be more wrong, or more unhappily so: "Climate would obey our orders".

He foresaw Skype, to give him credit, as later science fiction writers did, but concluded that with such communications we would abandon cities and all go back to the countryside. He believed scientists, by designing new microbes and hormones, would grow chicken breasts in underground factories.

So science would make life better in the west, Churchill thought, but be put to dystopian uses in Russia. There an army of human clones would be grown under glass, mentally stunted, perhaps "adapted to mechanical tasks and with no other ideas but to obey the Communist State".

Two decades later, the science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein wrote an article for Galaxy magazine, telling readers what life would be like in the 21st century. Admittedly it's a little early for those of us confined to the present to judge how much he got right, but it's safe to say that he was better on some subjects than others, and that space was one of the others.

He saw space travel coming, but said that by 2000 we would have visited all over the solar system, found life on Mars, be building interstellar craft and directing most of our military into fending off the heat rays of the little green aggressors. This, I suppose, is the tendency of prophets to see reasonably well so long as present trends continue, but to fail to foresee changes of direction, such as they way travel technology developed rapidly throughout the 20th century, then stalled giving way to communications technology. (Though to be fair, if the war of the worlds had happened, we'd probably have kept at it.)

Similarly, he reckoned that travel at "a thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace", which may or may not happen, but is looking less likely now than it did in 1950.

Talking of communications though, Heinlein scored a direct hit with mobiles: "Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple queries, and transmit vision." He also foresaw that "Contraception … will change our entire social and economic structure".

On the other hand, Heinlein believed that in the 1960s, building technology would so improve it would "make every house now standing as obsolete as privies". Whether the time will come when "So-called 'modern art' will be discussed only by psychiatrists" remains to be seen.

Back in 1900, the US engineer John Elfreth Watkins wrote a description of life in 2000 for the Ladies' Home Journal. He consulted "the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning", and these oracles proved rather more prescient than the later ones. He foresaw submarines and air-conditioning, TV (though not privately owned) and ready meals, tanks, freezers and medical x-rays. He clearly had supernatural powers.

He was not infallible though. Watkins predicted that houseflies and rats would be extinct. He had a big fruit and veg fixation – "Strawberries as large as apples … currants will be as large as oranges", "Peas as large as beets" – and reckoned greengrocers would be arrested for letting customers breathe on exposed food. But he did foresee seedless grapes.

Where he was over-optimistic was in how benign improved technology would be in its results. He reckoned that thanks to better health and fitness Americans would be about 5cm taller, but not that they'd be 14kg heavier. Public transport would be so fast and cheap as to make city apartment blocks unnecessary, and being in tunnels it would leave cities silent. University education would be free for all, as would children's healthcare.

He foresaw high-fidelity music broadcasts, but not I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here. He envisiged wave farms to generate power, but imagined they would be embraced with alacrity. He foresaw ubiquitous cars, cheap international travel, central heating and hot-housing, but could give readers no idea of the cost to their civilisation.