The future is now, but more so

The future is now, but more so

If you have some time to kill, the Paleo-Future weblog is really awesome. It shows what people thought the future was going to be like (often around the year 2000) from the 1870s through every decade of the 20th century. As usual with this sort of thing it tells you more about the salient aspects of a given time period, as people have a tendency of projecting contemporary fashions, technologies, and trends, rather than being able to anticipate innovation and changes of kind. Here’s a depiction of flying machines which dates to between 1900 and 1910:

circa 1900 harry grant dart crop paleo-future

Razib Khan