Life Today Should Be Like This

What life was supposed to be like today, as predicted in a 1961 issue of Weekend Magazine.

• You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a holiday in outer space.

• Your house will probably have air walls, and a floating roof, adjustable to the angle of the sun.

• Doors will open automatically.

• Clothing will be put away by remote control.

• You’ll have a home control room — an electronics center, where messages will be recorded when you’re away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

• You’ll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

• The status symbol will be home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

• Food won’t be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes — instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders, and synthetic tea and cocoa.

• Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

• There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will “talk” to each other.

• It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways.

• The family car will be soundless. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.

• In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1,000 MPH at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour.

• Five percent of the world’s population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond.

• Children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.

• Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100.