The Juice News strikes again with an amazingly prescient rendition of the year 2012.
Posts Tagged ‘prophecy’
The Future According to Google
Monday, April 18th, 2011XKCD has an excellent timeline of the next century as determined by Google prophecy.
The good news? Jesus and Atlantis return to Earth…fairly regularly. Humans will domestic and have sex with robots, Cyprus will achieve its goal (?), and a 14 bladed razor is on the horizon.
The bad news? Printed newspapers may become obsolete and in 2051 the atmosphere will finally escape it’s terrestrial bounds and re-merge with space.
The mixed news? Dogs driving cars by 2053.
Tags: erroneous predictions, futurism, Google oracle, prophecy, the future, xkcd
Posted in Editorial |
Posted in Editorial |
Illuminate the Future Circa 1900
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
In December of 1900 the Ladies Home Journal predicted how life would be different in 100 years. Most of the list is frighteningly accurate.
“These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 – a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”
Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express.
So far this is the most inaccurate of all predictions. American trains have yet to break 60 mph and last time I checked the trip from NYC to SF takes diggity-eight days.
Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.
Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.
Prediction #15: No Foods will be Exposed. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce. Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.
Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.
LMAO 
Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world
Prediction #25: Oranges will grow in Philadelphia.
Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
For more retrofuturism check out the PaleoFuture Blog or archive Datachurch and take a look at it next week.
Western Eschatology or “What To Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive”
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Gary Lachman has written an excellent editorial for Disinformation concerning the Western fascination with messianic apocalypse and the very probable continuation of the world past 2012.
Much has been written about 2012, pointing out both the value and the flaws in Argüelles’s and McKenna’s interpretations. I don’t intend to repeat those here. The strangeness of the ideas did not repel me. At the time that I came across them, I was reading Rudolf Steiner, who had his own prophecies concerning the third millennium, which, to be honest, were rather vague. I had also already spent some years in the Gurdjieff “work,” so odd ideas were not a threat. What troubled me then and today is what I call the “apocalyptic gesture,” a point I raised recently on the Reality Sandwich website, much of which is dedicated to the 2012 scenario. The desire for some once-and-for-all break with the given conditions of life seems, to me at least, to be embedded in our psyche and is a form of historical or evolutionary impatience. Social, political, or cultural conditions may trigger it, but in essence it’s the same reaction as losing patience with some annoying, mundane business and, in frustration, knocking it aside with the intent to make a “clean start.” While in our personal lives this may result in nothing more than a string of false beginnings and a lack of staying power, on the broader social and political scale it can mean something far more serious.
In his Study of History, an account of the rise and fall of civilizations, the historian Arnold Toynbee argues that there are two stereotypical responses to what he calls a “time of troubles,” the crisis points that make or break a civilization. One is the “archaist,” a desire to return to some previous happy time or golden age. The other is the “futurist,” an urge to accelerate time and leap into a dazzling future. That both offerings are embraced today is, I think, clear. The belief that a saving grace may come from indigenous non-Western people untouched by modernity’s sins is part of a very popular “archaic revival.” Likewise, the trans- or posthumanism that sees salvation in some form of technological marriage between man and computer is equally fashionable. The 2012 scenario seems to partake of both camps: It proposes a return to the beliefs of an ancient civilization in order to make a leap into an unimaginable future. What both strategies share, however, is a desire to escape the present. Given our own “time of troubles,” this seems understandable enough.
Tags: 2012, apocalypse, archaic revival, arguelles, consciousness, eschatology, futurism, gary lachman, mckenna, messiah, prophecy, steiner, timewave zero, transhumanism
Posted in Editorial, News |
Posted in Editorial, News |
