Last year we saw a timeline of the future based on science fiction movies and just last weekend we cracked open a 1987 time capsule to examine the 2012 predictions of sci-fi authors of the day. Now, someone’s gone to the trouble of combining the two, the result a foretelling of the next 800,689 years, according to the imaginations of HG Wells, Larry Niven and Robert A Heinlein, among others.
You can check out the timeline in full over at The AWL — it’s easily the most entertaining thing you’ll read this weekend. If it’s to be believed, the 2180s will see most of our progeny employed as bounty hunters, likely chasing cats with phasing abilities.
Shortly afterwards, the world will become a “socialist utopia”… after a nuclear war, of course. Less than 200 years later, we’ll be inundated with aliens and the planet’s 75 billion (!) person population will be sandwiched inside thousand-storey apartments. It’s alright though, in 2611, we’ll have colonised over 900 worlds… but it’ll do little to prepare us for the menace of 2966: robot cats! We can only hope they don’t share the power of their organic ancestors to walk through walls.
It makes a strange sort of sense, though it helps to be able to cherry-pick the best paragraphs from so many works to generate coherence — but that’s hardly an easy task!
[The AWL]