9 Historical Figures Who May Have Predicted Our Future

We like to think that many of our antic dreams of the time to come — from quad colonization to artificial intelligence and human sweetening — are evenhandedly recent invention . But nothing could be further from the truth . Futurist illusionist have been hypothesise about these possibilities for centuries . And now , as we head into an era of accelerating change , some of these longstanding anticipation may actually come true . Here are nine futurist of the past 400 years whose predictions were ahead of their meter .

Image of distance elevator by Kenn Brown ofMondolithic Studios .

1 . Robert Boyle ( 1627 - 1691 ): Life extension , nanotechnology , synthetic life , and designer drugs

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Best get it on for developing Boyle ’s Law ( which describe the conduct of flatulency ) , Robert Boyle possessed one of the most originative and insightful brain of the seventeenth one C . After his dying in 1691 , the Royal Society discovered ahandwritten listin which he predicted such things as “ the extension of life ” , the “ art of flying ” and “ perpetual light . ” He also speculated about the possibility for sleeping pad , unreal stimulant drug , antidepressants , and drug to “ exalt imagination . ” Boyle also predicted that we ’d eventually speed up the “ production of things out of ejaculate ” and be able-bodied to “ transmutate ” minerals , animals , and vegetables — all predecessor to what today we call nanotechnology , synthetic biology , and genetic engine room . And lastly , he portend that we ’d eventually be able to “ cure … diseases at a space or at least by transplantation . ” Not bad for a pre - Enlightenment thinker palisade by magical and superstitious opinion .

2 . Denis Diderot ( 1713 - 1784 ): Human sweetening , artificial intelligence , repair the dead , and animal uplift

Denis Diderot is probably the most noteworthy futurist of the European Enlightenment . He is probably well know for being the chief editor and contributor to the Encyclopedie , the world ’s first comprehensive and publicly approachable encyclopaedia . But his legacy carry much further than that . Writing in Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient and other work , he argued that organisms were the products of self - genesis that changed over fourth dimension — a precursor to the theory of natural natural selection . In the same essay — one that landed him in the dungeon of the Vincennes fortress on account of its anti - religious partial — he betoken that humanity might eventually be able-bodied to redesign itself into a great variety of types “ whose future and final organic social structure it ’s impossible to predict . ” And reproducible with his materialism , Diderot also argued that cognisance was a ware of brain issue ( what he called “ thinking subject ” ) . Consequently , he believed that the conscious head could be deconstruct and put back together . He felt that science would eventually discover a way to bring the dead back to life-time , and redesign animals and simple machine into well-informed creatures ( in other lyric , animal uplifting and artificially level-headed robots ) . At the same metre , however , he rejected the idea of progress , saying that the aim of progressing through engineering was destine to flunk — include his prediction that we could terminate up in a Borg - similar remainder - state . Wow .

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3 . Marquis de Condorcet ( 1744 - 1794 ): Perpetual advancement , radical life reference , and brain sweetening

4 . Benjamin Franklin ( 1706 - 1790 ): Eradication of disease , forcible immortality , and bodily preservation after death

Benjamin Franklin , in accession to being a political theorist , activist , scientist , inventor , and a bajillion other thing , was also a damn fine fantast in his own right . Reflecting on the grotesque possibilites that may be introduced through the software of “ true science , ” he wrote to his Unitarian scientist booster Joseph Priestly in 1780 :

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The speedy advance true scientific discipline now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was bear too presently . It is impossible to suppose the altitude to which may be carried , in a thousand years , the power of man over matter . We may , perhaps , deprive heavy passel of their gravity , and give them absolute levity , for the interest of soft transport . Agriculture Department may diminish its task and double its green groceries : all disease may by sure means be prevented or cure ( not except even that of old age , ) and our life lengthened at joy , even beyond the archaic monetary standard . Oh that moral science were in as honest a agency of improvement , that men would cease to be wolves to one another , and that human beings would at duration discover what they now improperly call humanity .

Earlier , in 1773 , he suggested that it might be potential to uphold a human life in a suspend state for century until such prison term that the soul could be revive — a kind of precursor to cryonics and chemopreservation . Instead of cold repositing , however , Franklin hop that he ’d bepreserved in a value-added tax of madeira wineuntil scientific discipline could impart him back to life .

5 . Konstantin Tsiolkovsky ( 1857 - 1935 ): place lift , human space flight , self - sustaining blank space habitat , and interstellar colonisation

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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is probably the greatest scientific seer to ever fall out of Russia . Tsiolkovsky was a seminal soma in the Russian cosmism movement ( a herald to transhumanism ) and was heavily shape by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov ( 1827 - 1903 ) who advocate for radical life-time extension , Christ’s Resurrection of the dead , and ocean settlement . In 1895 , inspired by the fresh - constructed Eiffel Tower in Paris , he was the first to come up with the idea of the space lift ( though his model described a freestanding tower reach from the surface of Earth to the meridian of geostationary celestial orbit , as opposed to the more modern visual modality in which tensile durability would keep it together ) . And while earlier mathematician such as Isaac Newton , Leonhard Euler and Joseph Louis Lagrange may have described the strong-arm kinetics of objects go through space , it was the Jules Verne - exalt Tsiolkovsky who first suggested that man could actually be send into space ( he developed the now - famous Eruca vesicaria sativa equation describing rocket - establish propulsion ) , jaunt from satellite to major planet , and for good live there . In accession , he thought that space colonization would take to the ne plus ultra of man , along with virtual immortality and a slaphappy existence . And in his 1928 book , The Will of the Universe . The Unknown Intelligence , he predicted that humanity would finally colonise the entire milklike Way galaxy .

6 . Vladimir Vernadsky ( 1863 - 1945 ): The ball-shaped mind

Another Russian cosmist , Vladimir Vernadsky was a mineralogist and geochemist who posited the theme of the noosphere , what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would later describe as the “ area of human thought . ” In his original possibility , Vernadsky suggested that the noosphere would be the third phase of biography on solid ground , after the “ geosphere ” ( inanimate issue ) and “ biosphere ” ( biological sprightliness ) . The locomotive driving the noosphere , however , would be human noesis . Vernadsky think that intelligence ( or cognisance ) would finally converge and constitute a monumental web of collaborating individuals . Today , its modern eq include the World Wide Web , the orbicular brain hypothesis , and some interpretations of the Technological Singularity .

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7 . Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( 1881 - 1955 ): The Technological Singularity

Writing in his posthumously published book , The Phenomenon of Man , the French Jesuit priest and fossilist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin speculate that humanity was on an evolutionary trajectory that would result in one concluding translation . exact Vernadsky ’s idea of the noosphere to its ( ostensibly ) ordered conclusion , he suspect that humankind would eventually achieve an “ Omega Point , ” or what some futurists today might call the Technological Singularity . Chardin argue that the evolution of well-informed life was goal drive ( Lamarckianism ) , and that it would eventually reach a microscope stage of ultimate complexness and conscious awareness . He posited the Law of Complexity / Consciousness , in which he argue that the macrocosm is constantly evolve towards increasing levels of textile complexness and consciousness . finally , he thought , an Omega Point would be achieve in which conscious life would become transcendent and self-governing of the strong-arm world . Chardin ’s ideas would go on to inspire such creative thinker as Ray Kurzweil , including the development of his Law of Accelerating Returns .

8 . J.B.S. Haldane ( 1892 - 1944 ): Artificial wombs , human cloning , and human genetic applied science

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It was the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane whose shocking predictions inspired his admirer Aldous Huxley to write his dystopian masterpiece , Brave New World . write in his myopic employment , Daedalus ; or , science and the future , Haldane suggested that human beings would soon use genetics for ego - improvement and engage in the exercise of cloning . He also predicted “ ectogenesis ” ( unreal womb ) , the use of gene ( what today we would call factor therapy and RNA interference ) , and fertilization outside the human body ( in vitro fertilization ) . Haldane is famous for once say , “ I have no dubiousness that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine . Now my own suspiciousness is that the Universe is not only funny than we opine , but queerer than we can say . ”

9 . John Desmond Bernal ( 1901 - 1971 ): contemporaries ships , bionic man , and brain upload

In 1929 , the Irish physicist J.D. Bernal print The World , The Flesh and the Devil — a piece of work that Arthur C. Clarke would later call “ the most magnificent endeavor at scientific anticipation ever made . ” In the record book , Bernal speculated that humans would eventually construct a type of space habitat for lasting hall , what has since been dubbed theBernal sphere . He also predicted that humans might someday select to go about cybernetic nidation , write that , “ Normal homo is an evolutionary utter end ; mechanical human race , obviously a break in organic evolution , is more in the truthful custom of a further development . ” And in fact , his vision of cyborgs was more radical than most ; he thought that we might eventually be capable to transmigrate our mind into a “ forgetful piston chamber ” where our nerve cellular telephone would be kept mobilise at a consistent temperature — a definite precursor to the idea of mind upload . This “ mental capacity cylinder ” could be wirelessly tie in to powerful external devices that would serve as raw sensation organs . The psyche itself would be subject to continual refinement and redesign , including “ genial advance . ” Keep in mind that this was in 1929 !

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