and live in underwater cities made of lollipops and children’s dreams. And we will tour the ocean depths with Undersea Tourist Boats! O what a glorious future we will have when the year 2000 comes!
PZ turned me on to the Paleo-Future blog, a wonderful site where the future of yesteryear is relived. The above image is the only one to come true from a series of postcards produced by Hildebrands (a leading German chocolate company of the time). Paleo-Future also has a some more posts on future human inhabitation of the world’s oceans.
If not undersea, why not sea level cities?
I have a friend who thinks sea cities are a silly idea. Whenever I mention it in a conversation he says “haven’t I uprooted this idea from your mind yet?” :-/
Those German pictures were amusing but the article linked below actually got quite a few predictions quite close (although it missed out completely on the airplane, of course)
Here
I can see why underwater cities might not be a smashing idea, but certainly more underwater installations are in order. There’s a lot of technological barriers, but I think its definitely going to be one of our more important resources if not during the later half of this century, then certainly sometime in the next.