YESTERDAY'S FUTURE

If any of you actually look at the "history snippets" part of my 
Gopher hole (I'll admit I got a little slack with updates lately), 
then you'll probably have noticed that I find the era of the 
1940-1960s particularly interesting. Actually it seems to me that 
everyone should be facinated by the period that I think made the 
last big practical shift in the course of global civilisation up to 
today, but they probably aren't. Indeed today the technological, 
environmental, and social aspects of the time might commonly be 
looked back upon by some with a degree of superiority, seeing the 
approaches as naive and destructive. The question of how far we've 
come is very subjective, personally I tend not to consider social 
aspects all that deeply because I hardly know people anyway. The 
attitudes to technology and the environment are facinating though.

In the fifties, as the technological and industrial might that had 
been built up in America during WWII was applied ever more 
effectively to mass-market consumer applications, a new degree of 
faith built up around that technology. There was a popular sense 
that amidst all of the rapid new developments in pretty much every 
field of science, which established so many of today's fundamental 
tools for modern life, every problem they might cause inevitably 
had a solution around the corner. The scientists and engineers knew 
this because they saw the wide variety of paths that opened up for 
development. Electronics magazines were awash with new alternatives 
to the electron valve for building amplifiers to suit applications 
that were rapidly expanding beyond radio, which dominated pre-war 
electronics market. Even while transistors were establishing 
themselves, forgotten technologies such as the Ferristor, magnetic 
amplifiers, and even applications of new higher-precision 
thermistors, were offered as other potential paths. The internal 
combustion engine seemed it might soon be replaced by more 
efficient gas turbine engines in cars, or even electric cars, which 
experienced one of their many short spikes of development in Japan 
during the late 40s as a result of petrol shortages after the war. 
A hydrogen fuel cell powered tractor was even demonstrated in 1959. 
Electricity production was of course expected to move from fossil 
fuels to nuclear power, with fusion reactors expected to replace 
fission in a decade or two. Experiments to build nuclear powered 
aeroplanes were undertaken in both America and the Soviet Union in 
the late 50s, to follow the invention of the jet engine at the end 
of WWII. Oh and of course where's my flying car?

http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/jnc-earth-day-1947-tama-e4s-47-1-electric-car/
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_687671
(sorry, too lazy to find references for all of that last paragraph)

The path a lot of that technology did end up taking from the 60s up 
to today seems quite narrow and conservative compared to the 
options that appeared open then. There must be a wide range of 
reasons for that, not least how the volume of production increased 
so much that the momentum to change a fundamental technology such 
as the type of engine in a car would be much more significant than 
it might have seemed before. I think that's how the general public 
mindset about technology has changed since those times. We no 
longer assume that it will naturally advance to avoid larger 
problems such as pollution and waste, we sense we have to pursue 
alternatives ourselves as consumers, or even abstain from using 
certain technologies altogether. What's gone is the faith in 
technology (and naturally by that I mean the business decisions 
that determine how it is developed and applied) to solve such 
fundamental problems that its creators know themselves. Basically 
that it will fix its own mistakes.

Here is an interesting example of an environmental film made in, 
I'm guessing, the late 40s or 50s (I watch tons of these sort of 
old archive films, by the way) and currently sitting, with a 
whopping 26 views, at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/51124-conservation-of-natural-resourses-vwr

The start is familiar, shocking scenes and statistics of 
environmental damage, surprisingly similar to the sort of 
environmental documentaries made today. But it goes on to describe 
how technology is solving the problems: the Hoover Dam is presented 
as an aid to preventing soil errosion resulting from the clearing 
of land for growing crops, the limited resources of timber and oil 
are processed in less wasteful ways, new sewage plants will prevent 
the pollution of waterways. These are reasonable advances for sure, 
if now in some cases visible as rather short-term. But it's not the 
validity of the solutions themselves that is of note, but the way 
they are presented. The path is certain, and largely 
uncompromising. To save oil it doesn't ask you to drive your car 
less, or to sustainably source your timber in order to save 
America's remaining forrests, that's not the mindset of an America 
that's embracing the consumption of new goods and technologies. 
It's saying that these issues are already in hand, that technology 
is working to solve these problems and it only needs to be applied 
in those related sectors of industry to keep the whole machine of 
the economy serving you as you are.

That is the faith that we've lost now. Today environmental 
documentaries call us to individual action, no longer trusting in 
technology to evolve its own way to utopia as we blindly use it. We 
only trust ourselves, but actually we rarely live up to our own 
ideals. Still consuming much like before, and lazy enough to be 
easily swayed by dishonest marketing. The technological future we 
believed in back then is failing us, and the only solution that 
many still believe in is to try to avoid what parts we can of the 
world it has lead us into.

 - The Free Thinker