[extropy-chat] Re: Bad Forecasts!

[Christian Weisgerber]

natashavita at earthlink.net <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> While at my work, I came across this information at Stanford.  If anyone
> says to you, "Cryonics will never work", "Human lifespan will never exceed
> 123 years", or some unextropic rationale, you can always reply with one of
> these statements below.

This silly listing keeps getting posted here every year.  How about
adding some other failed predictions for balance?

Where are the nuclear tugs that supply Arabia with antarctic icebergs
for freshwater?
Where's my flying car?
Where can I book that vacation with a hike up Olympus Mons or at
least a visit to Tycho?

Mocking people with hindsight is easy.  Unless you understand the
reasons behind why these forecasts were made and why they proved
to be incorrect, you are just babbling stupidly.

> "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." 
> --Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

Literally taken, this turned out to be mostly true...

> "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a
> means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
> --Western Union internal memo, 1876.

Yes, and they had good reasons for this.  A while back, c't magazine
had an excellent multipart essay by Gundolf Freyermuth where he
examined the cultural history of communications.  The telephone is
a huge anomaly.  Over the course of history, communications has
increasingly moved into the written domain, a trend that has lately
picked up again (email, SMS, IM).

> "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." 
> --President, Royal Society, 1895.

Superficially this is so stupid that I would dearly love to learn
the rationale behind it.  Birds fly, bird are heavier than air, so
heavier-than-air flight clearly is possible.  (Some phrasings of
this quote even leave the qualification "machines" out.)  The argument
must be about scaling, power density, etc.  Should be very interesting
for those of us with an amateur interest in physics.

Or maybe the original statement really was that stupid.  I mean
there are still people out there today who claim with a straight
face that the human mind must have some mystical part, soul, whatever,
that a machine can never possess.

> "If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The
> literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." 
> --Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
> "Post-It" Notepads.

Yup.  And generally, when the literature says it can't be done,
this amazingly turns out to be true.  Rare counterexamples
notwithstanding.

> "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction
> and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react.
> He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." 
> --1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket
> work.

Well, that showcases that the editorial writer didn't understand
the conservation of momentum.  And he didn't have today's excuse
of seeing it all the time violated in movie/TV fiction.  Of course
a lack of understanding (or willful neglect of) the conservation
of momentum is pretty much required to become a science fiction
writer.  You see, this very thing that makes rockets work also makes
it darn hard to fly around with rockets in the solar system.

> "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
> --Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

Rather true at the time the statement was made.  Initial use of
planes was limited to battlefield reconnaissance.  The statement
obviously fails to account for the amazing progress aviation would
make in the subsequent three decades, but then it isn't phrased as
a prediction.  Military history buffs correct me, but I don't think
any major military failed to catch on to the importance of planes
in the time between WWI and WWII.

> "Everything that can be invented has been invented." 
> --Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

Known to be an urban legend.  (As I suspect are some more in the
list.)

> "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction". 
> --Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
> 
> "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
> intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." 
> --British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

Oh yes, the history of medicine is very interesting.  Much of modern
medicine that we are so used to only dates from the late 19th and
early 20th century.  The quackery that was previously dominant is
truly appalling.

> "640K ought to be enough for anybody." 
> -- Bill Gates, 1981

I'm still confounded by this.  As those of us who understand a bit
how those PC-thingies work and who are old enough to remember those
times know, the 640kB limit is an artifact of IBM's original PC
architecture, something outside of Gates's control.

And of course the IBM PC was only a quick hack and never designed
as the starting point of a computing architecture for decades to
come--undoubtedly IBM could have done a much better job if they had
understood what role the PC would play.  Which leads us back into
failed prediction territory.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de