How good are our predictions of the next 30 years ?

[bananas]

http://www.theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/65308

How good are our predictions of the next 30 years ?

by Big Gav on 05/11/2010

The Long Now Blog has a great graphic showing how poor predictions in the 1970's of future energy use in the US were - How good are our predictions of the next 30 years ?. The modellers obviously underestimated how successful energy efficiency programs would be - and perhaps also how much US manufacturing would disappear offshore.

[unpossibles]

1. Not too surprising when you look at other predictions of the time

hell, look at how most people saw supercomputers of the future as taking up even larger rooms before miniaturization happened.

[Warpy]

2. The only predictions that had a good track record were on Star Trek

although even their computers were big and clunky and the flip phones didn't anticipate the Bluetooth Borg earpiece.

The transporter idea was just plain silly, though.

[bananas]

3. Buckminster Fuller used the term "ephemeralization"

[diane in sf]

5. thank you--we use less material and more information in every generation of mfg

goods and machinery to make mfg goods. Information is virtually weightless and massless. Giant motors used to run a whole factory, now tiny motors are in many things around the house. A computer used to cost $2M and need a whole refrigerated room only 30 years ago. Now my laptop is infinitely more powerful and there are tiny computers in everything from vacuums to phones, chips in your pets, to whatever you can imagine.

Every generation of mechanical device can also be run with less energy. It is easy to imagine a typical household being able to run on about 10% of the energy we use now, with better services, in the next 20 years, with the technology we have at our disposal right now.

[customerserviceguy]

4. That's simple

In the early 1970's, energy was cheap. Even with the onset of the 1973 oil embargo, it was easy to see this as a temporary political problem because of war between Egypt and Israel that surely would not last forever.

Projections made based on the assumptions of that era were bound to run into some serious reality.