Read about 2063 as imagined in 1963

April 14, 2008 9:24 PM

In 1963, General Dynamics Astronautics asked politicians, scientists, and military commanders to speculate on the potential state of the world in 2063, recording all these speculations in a book, and sealing it in a time capsule that was lost during the demolition of the General Dynamics Astronautics building. Thankfully, the entirety of the book is available as a download thanks to the fine folks at Paleo-Future. Found Via.
posted by jonson (10 comments total)

Fascinating. From a brief perusal, I like that Edward Teller thought that nuclear explosives and ballistic missiles would be in common use for both space travel and general transportation. Also, Congressman James B. Utt? Seriously?
posted by jedicus at 9:33 PM on April 14, 2008

jedicus - Project Orion.
posted by tellurian at 11:16 PM on April 14, 2008

sealing it in a time capsule that was lost during the demolition of the General Dynamics Astronautics building

Probably says more about the potential future state of the world than the time capsule would have done.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:55 AM on April 15, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I'm actually a little more interested in the story of how this time capsule got destroyed. Perhaps they just forgot about it, but I find it ironic that a company that had such visions of the future had its creation destroyed by the future incarnation of that company.
posted by crapmatic at 4:52 AM on April 15, 2008

And what ikkyu2 said!
posted by crapmatic at 4:52 AM on April 15, 2008

I doubt they predicted their book was going to be freely available and widely ignored on ARPANET.
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 6:57 AM on April 15, 2008

Hmm. Wonder who the three anonymous contributers were... and why they wanted to remain anonymous.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 12:18 PM on April 15, 2008

Why does the print version of a free book by General Dynamics cost $21.88 as "authored" (ie scanned in) by Matt Novak?
posted by humannaire at 5:36 PM on April 15, 2008

....especially since it is only 50 pages? Via lulu, such a book(let) can retail for less than $10 even with a couple bucks profit.
posted by humannaire at 5:38 PM on April 15, 2008

....oh jeez, I figured out why: The booklet was scanned into full-color documents before being turned into a pdf to upload as source copy at lulu.

The idea must have been to capture the sepia tone pages and spot-color (red) page titles.

Personally, I just needed the aesthetics of the tone of the writing.
posted by humannaire at 5:53 PM on April 15, 2008