Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century

For centuries people have been making predictions about the future. Most of these are not only wrong, they are really, really wrong. "Your Flying Car Awaits" looks at the scientists, novelists, and social commentators who throughout the 20th century used their 'expertise' to make a host of terrible, inaccurate, overzealous predictions about what the future would bring. From underwater cities to talking dolphins to 200-year life spans, "Your Flying Car Awaits" covers them all. Examining the most outrageous predictions from the last 100 years in entertaining, bite-sized descriptions, "Your Flying Car Awaits" is organised by type (transportation, the human body). Its individual entries detail the technologies and philosophies of the times that led some great (and not so great) minds think the ridiculous was achievable. Sample Bad Predictions include: Space tourism will be ubiquitous by the year 2000; nuclear explosives will be used for commercial demolition; engineered and man-made oceans will cover the planet; and, weather will be controllable like a train schedule.