| Friday, September 7, 2007 |
13:28 - Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing
http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/09/05/footomobiles/
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Look what the author of the awesome xkcd comic found (via evariste): "Footomobiles". The Future of the Past.
I freaking love this stuff. I love inaccurate visions of the future, the older the better. I remember 1800s-era satirical cartoons describing the World of Tomorrow, showing "warfare in the skies"—giant platforms of land ripped from the ground and held aloft with hundreds of hot-air balloons, with Napoleonic-looking soldiers arrayed on top of them shooting cannons at each other—and pneumatic tube transportation anywhere in the world ("All right, who's for Bengal?").
What's really funny is seeing the Star Trek writers trying to grapple with the fact that we've steamrolled right over the projected "future history" of Roddenberry's imagining, with nary a penal colony ship sent into space and nary a World War III... nary even another moonshot since the original series went off the air.
But the best of all is when people make a prediction that's tongue-in-cheek at the time, ridiculous a few years later—and then reality a century down the road.
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Brian Tiemann
