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| Jules Verne |
In a science fiction
story published in English in the United States in 1889, entitled In the Twenty-Ninth
Century and subtitled One
Day of an American Journalist in 2889, Jules Verne made several
scientific predictions that, according to him, would take almost a millennium
to be put into practice. Let us look at a few of the most interesting:
•
The average lifetime of the human population will
have increased from 37 in 1889, to 68 in 2889. According to the UN, the average
longevity in the world exceeded 68 years in the five-year period from 2005 to
2010, almost nine centuries before Verne’s forecast. Here, as elsewhere, he
underestimated.
•
The land and sea voyages of the nineteenth century
will have been replaced in the XXIX by air
travel, or intercontinental underwater pneumatic tubes.
At present, little more than a century after Verne’s story, although air travel
has achieved great primacy, land and sea travel continue to exist, and for
distances less than a thousand kilometers make a successful competition to air
travel. Intercontinental pneumatic tubes, on the other hand, are still science
fiction, although there some recent
steps in this direction.
•
Technology will have taken giant steps thanks to
the invention of methods for the use of inexhaustible energy sources, such as solar,
geothermal, hydraulic or wind. Verne was not misguided, except
that he believed it would take 900 years to arrive there. Although truth is,
right now, 130 years after his prediction, this has not yet been fully
achieved.
•
Newspapers will no longer be published on paper, as
subscribers will receive the news via phone. To put this into practice, Verne assumed
there would be telephone booths everywhere, where customers could get in touch
with the newspaper and hear the news of their interest. This prediction is not
bad, as the press via mobile phone has become one of the most spectacular
advances of our time.
•
Verne does not just foresee the massive use of the
telephone, but also predicts the telephoto, through which one can send, not just
sounds, but also images, which allows the readers of newspapers to see photographs
and moving images at the same time that they are listening to the news. Also, the
owner of the Earth Herald newspaper
can communicate with his wife, who has traveled to Paris from America to buy
hats (:-). What we call a screen,
Verne calls a telephotic mirror,
but both things are obviously the same. For Verne, the ability to send images at
a distance must wait almost a millennium before being discovered. Actually, it happened
just a few years after his death.
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| The hidden side of the Moon (photos by the DSCOVR satellite) |
•
In a millennium, we’ll have contacted extraterrestrial intelligences,
the inhabitants of Mercury, Venus and Mars, although we won’t have managed to
understand those who live on Jupiter. Verne says that in the XXIX century we won’t
know yet if the Moon is inhabited, because its hidden side will not have been
observed, and plans would be made to circumnavigate the Moon and discover what
is on the other side. It is evident that Verne alludes here ironically to his
own novel, Around
the Moon, where he left that question open, but it did not occur
to him that in less than a century we would be able to send space capsules to
the farthest planets of the Solar system, let alone the Moon.
•
Curiously enough, in this story Verne suggests a
way to contain the proliferation of the Chinese: imposing a maximum birth rate on that country, similar to the one
child rule that was applied at the end of the 20th century and ended as a failure.
•
A somber and successful prediction by Verne is bacteriological
warfare, although he argues that this so terrible that it will
never be applied. Fortunately, until now, this prediction can be considered
correct. Let us hope that it will remain so.
•
There is a curious detail, or rather a small
blunder by Verne: In the XXIX century people will dress by getting into a dressing machine and won’t need
the help of a valet de chambre. He did not come up with a simpler
solution, which has taken place much earlier than he suspected: that we would
learn to dress ourselves, without the help of servants or machines.
•
In addition to the amazing discoveries predicted by
Verne in this story, we must mention those that, according to him, won’t have
been solved in a millennium, among which it is worth mentioning three: a cure for the viral cold; human hibernation; and the immortality serum.
In my opinion, this
story by Jules Verne should be considered as the most ambitious sci-fi work of
this writer, who is rightly considered as one of the fathers of this literary
genre.The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Literature and Cinema: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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