We have audio books, submarines, helicopters, remote controlled farm equipment, and robot vacuums.
The only thing we are missing is the underwater croquet.
opitypang on
Amazingly accurate.
Cour4ge on
The whale bus remind me of Minecraft
Long_TimeRunning on
SufficientFunny5215 on
Yes. Everything free on electricity. Like how it used to be. #aether
SufficientFunny5215 on
And lighthouses were for airships!!!
MiDKnighT_DoaE on
The last pic is basically a Roomba
rulingthewake243 on
I like how most things were kinda reasonable, but they thought future us would just lash a box of people to the underside of a whale.
SewerBushido on
They even got “bad submarine design” right
MerciiJ on
The fact that 120 years ago peoples wildest dreams of the future looks so primitive in retrospect really shows just how much technology has evolved in such a short period of time!
They even labelled the network wires LAN. Amazing. /s
Cockfosters28 on
Hilarious that helicopters and harnessing the power of whales was more imaginable than a world where women wear pants.
-MantisToboggan- on
Fuck man what did the whales do back then to deserve that kind of servitude to us
Upper_Luck1348 on
like a Wes Anderson fever dream
hallerz87 on
Interesting focus on the deep sea/ocean. Something we’ve still barely touched as a species.
Beanu5NE on
Yo…where the hell is the whale-bus stop at? Anybody know what time it picks up?
Consistent_Chair_829 on
Nailed it
SpecialFX99 on
Replace the headphones with cellphones and the books with memes and they pretty much nailed it for the first pic!
jiggscaseyNJ on
They totally nailed the underwater croquet.
returntomonkeyyy on
Spot on with the robot stuff
wrenbell on
predicting the advent of the Roomba >>>>
314159265358979326 on
I love the mix of ambitious and not nearly ambitious enough.
Grinding books to put them directly in students’ heads, but no wireless communication (with these drawn well after the advent of the radio!)
A roomba that you have to pull manually.
A whale pulling you underwater instead of a nuclear-powered electric motor.
__XOXO__ on
First thing I thought of was **Fantastic Planet**.
Loganismymaster on
They were right.
FrankSonata on
Something that often goes unnoticed today is the lack of horses in these pictures, especially in situations that would usually have them (transport and farm work).
Back in the day, horses were one of the best choices for these things. Cities had thousands of horses in place of modern cars. Fresh produce, goods, and other large deliveries were done by horse. Farms had many more horses than today in place of modern equipment. Horses were just much more common. But they also stank up the place like you wouldn’t believe.
Paris in 1899 had a population of about 2.7 millions. An enormous amount of food needed to be moved into the city every single day to be bought and eaten by the locals. Trains existed, of course, but they’re good for coarse transport, between two faraway points. You can bring stuff to a depot or something in a city, but not much more. A train can’t deliver wheat flour to all the little bakeries down all those little streets. For fine-level deliveries to the exact destinations, you need a horse. People work, too, but they are so much less efficient than a horse that it’s impossible to run any worthwhile business using only people delivering on foot. For delivering goods within a city to their final destinations with any kind of efficiency, you need horses.
An average adult horse weighs about 400kg and produces around 20kg of shit *daily*. That’s twice your body weight in shit per week. And that’s just one horse. Paris had close to one hundred thousand horses in it in 1900. London had something like three hundred thousand. In places like London, the issue of the millions of kilos of horse shit being produced every day was something of a crisis. Removing the waste and carting it out of the city required more horses, which added to the problem. And it was *constantly* being produced all over the city, and quickly trampled into the ground or smeared over coach wheels or otherwise spread. There’s a reason why city air was considered bad for you at the time: it was. People in the countryside had measurably longer lifespans than those in the shit-filled cities, when you control for socio-economic status. (It wasn’t just horses–factory smoke and coal sucked, too).
When you read any writings of the time imagining a better future, they always make a point of explaining how people will have found a way to do away with horses. Flying bicycles or hand-cranked pulley systems or pneumatic tubes, anything but horses. Collections of pictures will pretty much always feature scenes in which horses were used at the time, but which, in their idyllic visions, had something else that didn’t defecate mountains of crap. How the hell they could find a way to not have to use all those stinky, shitty horses was at the forefront of people’s minds. They hated the horsecrap everywhere and were desperate for fucking *anything* else.
Today, London, Paris, etc. are much cleaner than back when they used horses. There isn’t a fine layer of horse crap on everything. They don’t stink all the time. We have cars and vans and other things that are so unobtrusive that, unless you’re looking right at one or a street is nearby and able to hear the engines, you can easily forget they exist as you focus on your conversation or something. Unlike horses, which made their presence known by the filth and odours that filled every crevice of every square inch of the city. People dreamt of a shit-free future. It’s a luxury we don’t even notice.
wandraway on
The time after 20,000 leagues under the sea. Lots of interest in creating an underwater utopia.
Flying_FLIcker on
We basically have all these already except for underwater croquet. We have the tech, l want this in the Olympics.
Jester-252 on
I love this sort of stuff. People get the core concept but build on the tech at the time
Like AT&T talking about sending a fax on the beach 1993 because it was only in 1995 that the final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended.
Carlspoony on
Vecna’s mind? Lol
JohnCalvinSmith on
This is actually frighteningly true.
Grind up knowledge and then pour crap directly into the ears and eyes without filters or context.
32 Comments
We have audio books, submarines, helicopters, remote controlled farm equipment, and robot vacuums.
The only thing we are missing is the underwater croquet.
Amazingly accurate.
The whale bus remind me of Minecraft
Yes. Everything free on electricity. Like how it used to be. #aether
And lighthouses were for airships!!!
The last pic is basically a Roomba
I like how most things were kinda reasonable, but they thought future us would just lash a box of people to the underside of a whale.
They even got “bad submarine design” right
The fact that 120 years ago peoples wildest dreams of the future looks so primitive in retrospect really shows just how much technology has evolved in such a short period of time!
[Conan](https://youtube.com/shorts/y5yGuz26od0?si=CdilxtXZNJbbLQsT) comes to mind when I see the year 2000
Man the French loved whales long before Gojira
They even labelled the network wires LAN. Amazing. /s
Hilarious that helicopters and harnessing the power of whales was more imaginable than a world where women wear pants.
Fuck man what did the whales do back then to deserve that kind of servitude to us
like a Wes Anderson fever dream
Interesting focus on the deep sea/ocean. Something we’ve still barely touched as a species.
Yo…where the hell is the whale-bus stop at? Anybody know what time it picks up?
Nailed it
Replace the headphones with cellphones and the books with memes and they pretty much nailed it for the first pic!
They totally nailed the underwater croquet.
Spot on with the robot stuff
predicting the advent of the Roomba >>>>
I love the mix of ambitious and not nearly ambitious enough.
Grinding books to put them directly in students’ heads, but no wireless communication (with these drawn well after the advent of the radio!)
A roomba that you have to pull manually.
A whale pulling you underwater instead of a nuclear-powered electric motor.
First thing I thought of was **Fantastic Planet**.
They were right.
Something that often goes unnoticed today is the lack of horses in these pictures, especially in situations that would usually have them (transport and farm work).
Back in the day, horses were one of the best choices for these things. Cities had thousands of horses in place of modern cars. Fresh produce, goods, and other large deliveries were done by horse. Farms had many more horses than today in place of modern equipment. Horses were just much more common. But they also stank up the place like you wouldn’t believe.
Paris in 1899 had a population of about 2.7 millions. An enormous amount of food needed to be moved into the city every single day to be bought and eaten by the locals. Trains existed, of course, but they’re good for coarse transport, between two faraway points. You can bring stuff to a depot or something in a city, but not much more. A train can’t deliver wheat flour to all the little bakeries down all those little streets. For fine-level deliveries to the exact destinations, you need a horse. People work, too, but they are so much less efficient than a horse that it’s impossible to run any worthwhile business using only people delivering on foot. For delivering goods within a city to their final destinations with any kind of efficiency, you need horses.
An average adult horse weighs about 400kg and produces around 20kg of shit *daily*. That’s twice your body weight in shit per week. And that’s just one horse. Paris had close to one hundred thousand horses in it in 1900. London had something like three hundred thousand. In places like London, the issue of the millions of kilos of horse shit being produced every day was something of a crisis. Removing the waste and carting it out of the city required more horses, which added to the problem. And it was *constantly* being produced all over the city, and quickly trampled into the ground or smeared over coach wheels or otherwise spread. There’s a reason why city air was considered bad for you at the time: it was. People in the countryside had measurably longer lifespans than those in the shit-filled cities, when you control for socio-economic status. (It wasn’t just horses–factory smoke and coal sucked, too).
When you read any writings of the time imagining a better future, they always make a point of explaining how people will have found a way to do away with horses. Flying bicycles or hand-cranked pulley systems or pneumatic tubes, anything but horses. Collections of pictures will pretty much always feature scenes in which horses were used at the time, but which, in their idyllic visions, had something else that didn’t defecate mountains of crap. How the hell they could find a way to not have to use all those stinky, shitty horses was at the forefront of people’s minds. They hated the horsecrap everywhere and were desperate for fucking *anything* else.
Today, London, Paris, etc. are much cleaner than back when they used horses. There isn’t a fine layer of horse crap on everything. They don’t stink all the time. We have cars and vans and other things that are so unobtrusive that, unless you’re looking right at one or a street is nearby and able to hear the engines, you can easily forget they exist as you focus on your conversation or something. Unlike horses, which made their presence known by the filth and odours that filled every crevice of every square inch of the city. People dreamt of a shit-free future. It’s a luxury we don’t even notice.
The time after 20,000 leagues under the sea. Lots of interest in creating an underwater utopia.
We basically have all these already except for underwater croquet. We have the tech, l want this in the Olympics.
I love this sort of stuff. People get the core concept but build on the tech at the time
Like AT&T talking about sending a fax on the beach 1993 because it was only in 1995 that the final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended.
Vecna’s mind? Lol
This is actually frighteningly true.
Grind up knowledge and then pour crap directly into the ears and eyes without filters or context.