Readers reply: what have been the most prescient or accurate predictions of the future?

‘Fingertip shopping will be one of the many homemakers’ conveniences. This video console will be channelled into the store of her choice …” I’ve always been fascinated by this 1967 video (not 1969, as the label says) which accurately foresaw the advent of online shopping, CCTV, fax/email and electronic banking. (It was a little less prescient in its assumption of gender roles – wife shops, husband pays – but we’ll let that slide.) The video, entitled 1999AD, was made by the Philco-Ford company, an American electronics firm that started off in radios and moved into appliances and TVs. I’ve often wished the writer of this short film could see the world as it is in 2026. What are some other predictions that have come spookily close to the truth? Ann, Devon

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Readers reply

I have a copy of a primary school reading book from the early 1990s that not only predicted online shopping, but that we would also be emailing the local library for research on our homework. The library staff would even be able to fax a reply! AnneTifa

How about Prof James Ephraim Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis? ANZAC69

Kingdom Come by JG Ballard without a doubt. Never read it? Have a look. bricklayersoption

It wasn’t exactly a prediction, but in Star Trek during my childhood they were using their handheld communicators for the “Beam me up, Scotty” message. These days, everyone has devices like Kirk’s and Spock’s. Nerdvanian

It was certainly prescient. Design team members at Apple have actually cited Star Trek’s communicator and Spock’s tricorder when talking about their desire to create a device like the iPhone and iPad. Adults realising their childhood fantasies … FrankieandDexy

When US shares were going crazy before the 1929 crash, a journalist asked Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father): “What will happen to the stock market in the future?” Kennedy replied, “It will fluctuate.” Can’t say that he was wrong there. PeteTheBeat

My West Country father-in-law has a similar response to queries about the weather: “It’ll clear up and rain.” SpoilheapSurfer

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. LiveInWonder

Yes, in part, although I think there’s much more Huxley about in our time. Be quiet and take the “soma” (smartphones, social media), the shallow obsessions with appearance, shiny acquisitions and entertainment, etc. bricklayersoption

Reckon Aldous Huxley, with control through entertainment and hedonism as opposed to Orwell’s more directly oppressive alternative, turned out to be pretty close to the mark. SalfordGeoff

The NWRA (The North Will Rise Again) is a track on the album Grotesque (After the Gramme) released by the Fall in 1980. The lyrics by renegade genius Mark E Smith outline the events of a fictional violent uprising by the north of Britain against the south. Two of these events seemed spookily prescient on 15 June 1996. In the morning, an IRA bomb badly damaged the Arndale Centre in Manchester; in the afternoon, Scotland fans gathered in London’s Soho and Trafalgar Square after the match against England at Wembley in Euro 96, and skirmishes with England fans ensued. In the song, Smith had described both the razing of the Arndale Centre, and the streets of Soho which “reverberated with drunken Highland men” (he omitted to mention the drunken English men who also turned up). Matt, Amsterdam

While it was never intended to depict an imagined future more than a few years ahead of its time, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here can’t fail but be read during Trump’s second presidency as a sustained act of clairvoyance – if inevitably uneven, it is on the whole remarkably on the money. It isn’t only that Buzz Windrip’s moral character and the strategies he and his supporters deploy in taking and attempting to consolidate power strike repeated resonances – although the parallels here are startling enough. It’s also his prescience (as signalled in the book’s title) about the extent of his more liberal-minded characters’ lack of prescience that makes Sinclair’s novel a truly spooky – as well as salutary – read. fainthope

The Simpsons predicting Trump’s presidency has to be right up there with the best. Thirdhandluke

Not really a prediction, but I used to have a long commute by train – about 100 minutes each way. I used to think that it would be great if you could watch last night’s TV while you travelled. It only took 20 years or so for that to be a reality. PeteTheBeat

Private James Frazer of Dad’s Army. We’re doomed. StanEthel

The exposing of Hitler and his socialist veil was enacted by many but, in particular, Otto Strasser. He predicted the rise of fascism, the banning of the left and much else that followed. slojdare

The return of Halley’s comet in 1758. English astronomer Edmond Halley used Newton’s laws of gravity and planetary motions to predict the return of a comet he had observed in 1682. It will return in 2061 on its regular 76-year journey around the sun. Sagarmatha1953

In 1912, the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov published a short dialogue titled Teacher and Student: A Conversation. In it, he proposed a fantastic mathematical philosophy of history, one of whose rules was that states and empires collapse every 365 (+/-48) years. Hence, Khlebnikov asks in 1912, “In the year 554, the kingdom of the Vandals was subjugated. Should we not expect the fall of the state in 1917?”

A few years later, in 1915, Khlebnikov’s partner in Russian futurism, Vladimir Mayakovsky, published his long poem A Cloud in Trousers, one of whose stanzas goes as follows:

Where men’s sight falls short,
Wearing the revolutions’ thorny crown,
Leading at the head of the hungry horde,
The year 1916 is coming around.

Mayakovsky was one year off; Khlebnikov was spot-on. Roman Vater, Cambridgeshire

Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. I’m just waiting for the scribbles to appear on the London tube. Porthos

I think the writing team of Frederik Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth had some outstanding ones (strangely, I’ve never liked the work of either author working alone so much). The Space Merchants, its sequel The Merchants’ War and the less well-known Gladiator-at-Law all score some really blistering satirical hits – or at least, they were meant to be satirical in an “If this goes on …” kind of way. However, I still think the crown has to go to EM Forster for The Machine Stops, bearing in mind that it was published in 1909 when most of us in the UK were still lighting our streets with gas. SpoilheapSurfer

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson was a pretty accurate prediction of the evolution of the internet, particularly virtual worlds. It’s also a cracking read that stands up today. Stumpysheep

Amy Hunt predicting she would win four European Athletics golds: 100m, 200m, 4x100m mixed relay, 4x100m relay. Steve4000

Generally, only very near-term predictions (less than 50 years) are feasible – often compounded by things like the “Star Trek effect”, where things are less prediction and more inspiration for children to create within their own lifetime the fictional technology they saw. So truly deep historical predictions are incredibly rare, or only very general, and take some generous interpretation by the beholder.

The only exception I can think of is Svante August Arrhenius, who in 1896 observed: “If the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.” By using infrared observations of the moon, he then calculated how much of infrared is captured by CO₂ and water (H₂O) vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, leading him to be the first person to correctly conclude that human-caused CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels are large enough to swamp the cooling by orbital variations that precipitate ice ages and so cause long-term global warming. Ironically, he was trying to prove the opposite – that CO₂ could only explain the temperature rises of inter-glacial periods.

He further tried to inform the public in 1906 with his book Världarnas Utveckling (Worlds in the Making), describing his “hot-house” theory of the atmosphere, aimed at a popular audience.

Even though Arrhenius’s estimates were very broad and lacked the details of modern techniques, with their many competing heating and cooling drivers, broadly they cancel out and agree surprisingly well with his original estimate that increases of 2.5-3 times of CO₂ will cause a temperature rise of 8–9C in the Arctic.

Maybe mention that next time a troll tries to tell you global warming was “made up” in the last decade or so by the Chinese or some such nonsense. HaveYouFedTheFish