The Daily Sceptic’s 2024 Almanac of Bad Futurology

Thank you for all your suggestions of what to include in the Daily Sceptic’s 2024 Almanac of Bad Futurology. (Mike Wells kicked this off with 10 suggestions a couple of days ago.) Here are the best of the bunch. They bear out the wisdom of Niels Bohr’s famous quote – or was it Yogi Berra? – that predictions are very difficult, especially about the future.

There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi– with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one… (Bad Prophet, Monty Python’s Life of Brian)

Heavier-than-air-flying machines are impossible. (Lord Kelvin, 1895)

Everything that can be invented has been invented. (Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office 1899)

In 15 years, more electricity will be sold for electric vehicles than for light. (Thomas Edison 1910)

Chancellor Adolf Hitler today proclaimed the arrival of the Nazi millennium, predicting that the next 1,000 years would not witness another revolution in Germany. He was equally positive that the National Socialist movement had now become absolute master of the Reich and that its leadership rested in the hands of its best men. (New York Times, 1934)

Peace for our time. (Neville Chamberlain 1938)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. (Thomas Watson, Chairman and CEO of IBM, 1943)

Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years time. (Alex Lewyt, 1955)

New York and Washington DC will be under water by the year 2000. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan in memo to Richard Nixon, 1969.)

For a compendium of bad predictions made on the first Earth Day in 1970, see this article in AEI and for a list of 50 bad predictions about the climate see this article in the New York Post.

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. (Ken Olsen, the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)

640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit in 1981)

Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t! (Michael Fish, a few hours before the Great Storm of 1987 broke)

“Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.” (Guardian, 2005)

We will never return to the old boom and bust. (Gordon Brown, 2007)

It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now. Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now. (Senator John Kerry, 2009)

We’ve just 96 months to save the world. (King Charles, 2009)