This documentary examines the emergence of professional futurists and the discipline of futurology. From H.G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke - by way of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Alvin Toffler - the film explores how futurology developed and what made the modern futurists of today. Archive footage from AudioBlocks, BBC, Pathe, Prelinger Archive, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense and VideoBlocks.

Comments

1. This was an interesting introduction. I'd like to suggest that there are a host of other futurists and proto-futurists who should be mentioned, particularly emerging from the social sciences. As I've been working toward a PhD in Sociology, I've learned about Auguste Comte, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, just to name a few. And although largely overlooked by the futurist community, Pitirim Sorokin deserves mention for projecting cycles of socio-cultural change that shape -- and are shaped by -- economic and scientific/technical developments. I wish these people had been mentioned in my Introduction to Futures Studies course during my Master's work -- I would have gotten into sociology a lot sooner!
2. As a futurist, what businesses would you invest in if you were 20 years old right now? Great video by the way.
3. OMG this is so awesome - ridiculous to only have 659 views...
4. One of inventions not understood yet. Antimatter propulsion for large mass in space (speed 1), near light speed propulsion (Speed 2), and finally soliton propulsion for faster than light speeds ( speed 3). All designs for the creation of, design off, and implementation have been completed. As a technologist, nothing I read or seen comes close to this futurist space propulsion.
5. You know Ray, sadly, I think the future will be full of ignorant idiots. Have you seen the movie "Idiocracy"? That's how I envision it. There is a part of the world that is educated and into development and all that, but the much bigger portion of the global population is only interested in their immediate surroundings and have no interest in what's going on in the world. Part of the fall of the Roman Empire was "bread and circus". And that's what we have today, except it's junk food and social media.
   
   I imagine the world in the 22nd and 23rd centuries where everybody has the perfect body they want. All knowledge is completely accessible through the online world. We won't have any hand-held devices or computers. They will be integrated into our bodies and brains. We'll be sort of like cyborgs, so to speak. Nanotechnology is just now in its infancy. Give it 100-200 years and humans will be quasi "superhumans".
   
   Education won't be about memorizing or spelling, because we'll have access to all information within our minds. Education will be about innovation and ideas and invention.
   
   We'll have levitating drones instead of driving cars. But we won't operate them. We'll tell it a destination and it will fly us there. They will be like pods in our garages that are controlled by local govt towers in every district or city. Kind of like a flight control tower.
   
   I tell you, some company or some team someday will make the breakthrough between the human mind and the cyber world where we will be able to go online to the internet in our minds and talk to anybody anywhere. Laptops, smartphones, computers, will be looked at as archaic primitive toys.
   
   Space travel in the 22nd or 23rd centuries might be like the movie Avatar. Instead of getting in a spaceship and traveling long distance. We will simply project our consciousness into android/cyborg bodies on other worlds. Somehow we'll have to get the robots to other planets. But say there are robots on Mars that are colonizing it. Let's call them "cyborgs" instead of robots because I imagine them looking like perfected versions of humans (like in the movie "Surrogate"). Those cyborgs will build other cyborgs to travel even further into space.
   
   Cyborgs will have the AI to grow superhumans using 22nd or 23rd century nanotechgenetics or something similar to that idea.
   
   You'll have that side of humanity.
   The other bigger portion of humanity will be ignorant as hell. I mean, worse than it is today. The majority of humans in the future will be apathetic. They won't care what the government is doing, or even who is in charge. They won't care what is going on in space. They won't care about anything that isn't directly related to their immediate lives because they'll be so entertained and brainwashed with "bread and circus", or "junk food and social media" that nothing else will even matter.
   
   This is all assuming we don't wipe out our species from war, though.
   
   What are your thoughts on humanity in the next couple centuries, granted we're still around?