Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, November 26, 2012 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Gregory Benford
"The Wonderful Future that Never Was"
ABSTRACT -- Between 1903 and 1969, scientists and other experts made hundreds of predictions in Popular Mechanics magazine about what the future would hold. Their forecasts ranged from ruefully funny to eerily prescient and optimistically utopian. Benford will discuss the very best of them, culled from hundreds of articles, complete with the original, visually stunning retro art. They captured the imagination of futurists in the same way Jules Verne's writing did a century earlier
- Skyscrapers so tall they'll have their own climate
- Underground pneumatic tubes to replace garbage trucks
- Rooftop lakes that serve as air conditioning systems
- Clothes made from asbestos and aluminum
- Mail sorted by robots and delivered by parachutes
- Weapons that could make large scale war implausible
SPEAKER -- Gregory Benford is astrophysics professor at UC Irvine, a science-fiction author (Timescape, the Galactic Center series), and former NASA advisor
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Barbara Scott
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov