Worried about the future? History proves it’s hard to predict

In 1974, 20 of the world’s leading intellectuals tried to imagine life in 2024. They got a lot wrong.

In 1974, the worthy Saturday Review, then in its 50th year, published several anniversary issues that took stock of how the century led to a grim present of Watergate scandals, impending thermonuclear war, a population boom that would soon outrun the planet’s food and tappable energy, and other world-threatening fumbles. To wrap up, however, the Review offered an atypically fantastical issue full of imaginative, sometimes loopy predictions and proposals for the world a half century into the future.