Click on the link here for Audio Player: The Year 2000 – March 6, 1966
In 1966, the year 2000 was far enough off so predictions could seem fantastic without actually waiting for the future to arrive and prove most of it wrong.
In this program, part of the Second Sunday series from NBC Radio, Chet Huntley set out to ask various pundits what they thought the world would be like in that far off time.
Some of the predictions were well off the mark – but some, which seemed at the time insane, proved to be quite true. Nobody considered microwave cooking as something commonly accepted by now. Computers were just too strange to consider, and even though they’ve been commonplace for well over 30 years – they never achieved the nightmare connotations the future-gazers had predicted in 1966.
A lot of the predictions were within reason, maybe because in retrospect 1966 and 2000 weren’t really that far off as making say, a prediction of life in 2000 from the year 1940. Those predictions have been truly odd.
As for the year 2000, Poverty is the same, maybe worse – living conditions are far from utopian, much more crowding. Food is genetically modified (as was predicted in 1966), but the consequences hadn’t yet been considered.
The saying that as much as things change is as much as they stay the same pretty much holds true, as far as the human race is concerned.
But it’s interesting to hear how much they got wrong, and how much they got right when they were asked about life in 2000 on March 6, 1966.
I guess we’re just not that complicated after all.