Humans can be impatient sometimes. We just can't wait to see what will happen in the future, so we're constantly trying to predict it. Wouldn't you like to know what the world will be like in the year 2100? Will technology have changed people's lives for the better or worse? Who knows?
But it's fun to imagine .... We're going to look at three people from history who did just that, visionaries whose imaginations were far ahead of their time and whose predictions, although not always accurate, were certainly always interesting. Leonardo Da Vinci is most famous for works of art such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. However, Da Vinci wasn't just a painter, he was also an engineer, a musician, a biologist, a writer, a mathematician and an inventor. Despite living in the sixteenth century, Da Vinci was able to predict some of the twentieth century's major inventions, even though it would have been impossible, at the time, to have built them.
By studying the flight of birds, Da Vinci designed rudimentary 'flying machines'' which, in the twentieth century, would become airplanes, hang gliders and helicopters. In his efforts to help defend the cities in which he lived, he came up with the idea of a tank, a machine gun and a cannon. Four hundred years later, as the Industrial Revolution completely changed the face of the western world. HG Wells had only to look around him to think of the possible implications for the future. Regarded as the Father of Science Fiction, Wells became famous for his futuristic stories, such as The War of the Worlds, in which Martians attack London, or The Time Machine, about a man who time travels to the year AD 802701..
It was in his 1901 book Anticipations, however, that HG Wells made his more realistic, and accurate, predictions about the future. He wrote, for example, that in the future every country in the world would have huge highways on which thousands of cars and trucks drove back and forth. This prediction has certainly come true. Another writer who predicted the impact technology would have on the world was Philip K. Dick.
Since his death in 1982,, Dick has become famous due to many of his stories being made into science fiction movies. In the film Bladerunner, for example, robots who look just like humans, begin to learn human emotions and try to find out about the origin of their life. In Total Recall, travel companies give you an adventure holiday by implanting synthetic memories into your brain. And, in A Scanner Darkly, the government uses state of the art surveillance equipment to monitor the lives of its people. It seems unlikely that we'll see UFO's invade the earth, a time machine, or robots that look exactly the same as humans - at least in our lifetime - but as the drawings of Da Vinci prove, given enough time, and the right technology, even the most fantastic of ideas can come true.