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Garage sale in Tulsa taught me to always check the publication date
Last Saturday I picked up a book at a garage sale in Tulsa called "The Coming Ice Age" by some geologist from 1970. The cover had this beautiful painting of glaciers rolling over a city, so I grabbed it for a dollar. When I got home and started reading, I found out it was predicting another ice age by 1990. It made me realize I never check the publication date on old science books before buying them, because now I have a shelf full of outdated predictions. Has anyone else picked up a vintage science book that turned out to be hilariously wrong?
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hayden7203mo ago
Dude that is exactly the kind of thing I'd do. I grabbed a book from 1955 about "Man's Future in Space" at a thrift store once and it seriously had predictions about us mining asteroids by the 1980s and building space hotels by the year 2000. The best part was the chapter about how moon colonists would wear special suits that somehow turned CO2 into oxygen using magic crystals or whatever. Its wild how confident they were about stuff that never happened. Makes me wonder what people in 2070 will think about our predictions now.
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reed.ray2mo ago
Magic crystals" is right, man. I once told my girlfriend I'd build us a robot butler by 2020 and now I can barely get the Roomba to avoid the dog bowl. Future me will probably be laughing at the way I think we'll all have flying cars by 2040, but honestly we can't even keep the damn internet working half the time.
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betty1443mo ago
Honestly, "magic crystals" for turning CO2 into oxygen sounds like they were just making stuff up and hoping nobody would fact check them until we got there. Did you ever look up who the author was, like were they a legit scientist or just some guy with wild ideas?
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