J. B. S. Haldane - If You Were Alive in 2123

One of my favorite things to do while surfing is to cruise the Time magazine archives, this time I did a search on oil prices and focused on the period from 1923-1940.

While there was some interesting articles on oil monopolies, I stumbled upon this article from 1923:

2123A.D.

A new candidate for the world's championship in scientific prediction has arisen to challenge Mr. Herbert George Wells. He is J. B. S. Haldane, reader in biochemistry at Cambridge University, who in the August Century, lays bare to the dazed layman what you might expect If You Were Alive in 2123. The paper created a sensation when it was read at Cambridge. Haldane advances his theses only as personal deductions from present tendencies.

Though these predictions are for the year 2123, I was amazed at how close many of them actually have been.


This one sounds very familiar these days.

5) When the coal and oil fields are exhausted, the final substitute will be neither water power nor radium energy, but wind and sunlight. Surplus power will be generated by the formation and storage of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The latter is, weight for weight, the most efficient known method of storing energy. It will be universally cheap, decentralizing industry, and producing no dirt.

Originally posted by JacKatMtn

5) When the coal and oil fields are exhausted, the final substitute will be neither water power nor radium energy, but wind and sunlight. Surplus power will be generated by the formation and storage of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The latter is, weight for weight, the most efficient known method of storing energy. It will be universally cheap, decentralizing industry, and producing no dirt.

Emphasis mine.

man... you gotta love the good old days... I'm assuming this is a hoppin' way to say "produces no pollution".

They've had the free energy source years ago, but oil companies took over. Thus the cause of high gas prices and messed up environmental pollution.

reply to post by coven


OR the new hip phrase greenhouse gases

The man did have some obcure predictions like the one about reproduction, this one hit me like the MASTER RACE deal, but I guess with the state of medicine at the time, one of the goals would have been to try and promote the fittest.

11 ) Children will be born " ecto-genetically," i. e., ovaries from superior women will be kept alive in suitable cultures, artificially fertilized from selected males, and the embryos protected until able to endure air. The resulting improvement in the quality of the race will save civilization from degeneracy.

- from OP source.

Kind of scary, but leaving out the superior race part he is pretty close on this one as well.