Back in 1975, life expectancy in the U.S. was just 63.6 years for men and 72.3 for women, according to government statistics. The country has made significant progress since then, with the latest figures showing men can now expect to live to 75.8 and women 81.1 years. That’s lower than other wealthy nations, but it is much higher than it was 50 years ago.

What will the future look like in the year 2025? It was a question about the distant future for those of us who were alive to remember the 20th century. But now that we’re a few weeks into that year, we know exactly what it looks like. And it’s a bit depressing, I’m not going to lie.

Back in 2014, I gave a talk at UCLA about the future of money that’s funny to think about now. Well, technically it was about the paleo-future of money. But the topic was particularly relevant in the early 2010s, given the fact that bitcoin was starting to enter the public consciousness after being invented in late 2008 and released into the world the next year. So with bitcoin recently hitting $100,000, it feels like a good time to look back at how people talked about cryptocurrency in the early years.

The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other times we imagine the future as utopian—joyful and wondrous with all of the things we could ever want at our fingertips any hour of the day. But every once in a while our predictions take a weird turn into the absurd. And there was a musical instrument from the 1910s that spoke to this absurdity quite well. It was called the Follyphone.

There are so many things I take for granted here on the verge of 2025. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I flip the light switch, there’s illumination. And when I press one of countless buttons during the day, the thing that corresponds to that button generally happens.

Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help re-elect Donald Trump as president this year, making him one of the most powerful oligarchs the U.S. has ever seen. Trump is a fascist and Musk unabashedly supports his fascist agenda. Musk even tweeted in support of Germany’s AfD political party this past week, which has ties to neo-Nazis.

On the morning of July 18, 1889, Professor Edward D. Hogan went up in what can only be described for the time as a futuristic piece of airship technology, launching from Brooklyn, New York. Hogan had spent the past twenty years working with flying machines and told people he’d done hundreds of ascensions in that time. But that day was the last that anyone would ever see him.

The U.S. and Canada both have long histories of forced sterilizations for people deemed “undesirable.” Roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized in the 20th century, according to official figures, with black people being disproportionately affected by the racist program. And while this dark chapter in history is often regarded as something that was perhaps done by people who were abusing their power, there’s a harder truth to consider: Forced sterilization was incredibly popular among the public. And that popularity has lessons for us today.

Old futures are filled with ridiculous contraptions for getting around. You’ve got the automobile-powered yacht, the enormous four-legged mech-pedicab, and the gyroscopic rocket car, just to name a few of my favorites from decades gone by. But at least all of those absurd ideas had something that made sense. Other ideas are so weird it’s hard to imagine how they’d work in the real world.

Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be thrilling, with unique items just waiting to be uncovered.

We often think of the internet as a piece of infrastructure that cannot be changed. But people built the internet and all the devices we use to connect ourselves to it. People made conscious choices about the way we interact with our devices and the way that the internet is structured. And with that in mind, we have a short list of old ideas that may be worth reconsidering as we move forward into the future of our interconnected life.

More than half of Americans in 2024 say they have a side hustle to earn extra money in addition to their main job, according to a recent report from Marketwatch. A whopping 54% of Americans are doing jobs on the side, something that in the late 20th century used to be known in some form as moonlighting, a reference to doing a job at night under the light of the moon.

I’m nervous. The U.S. presidential election is Tuesday and it’s all I can think about. Because if Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris, some extremely dark forces are going to be unleashed in a country where society is held together by little more than chewing gum and off-brand sticky tape. But aside from Trump, there’s one name I really hope I never hear again after November 5: Allan Lichtman.

If you asked kids of the 20th century what inventions they’d like to see in the future, there are always a range of creative answers, from robot servants to bubble-top cars. But there’s one idea that you see pop up perhaps more than any other. It’s the homework machine.

The year 2006 wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things. But when you look back at the predictions of that time, it’s an interesting year, if only because it was just before the mainstream explosion of two things we take for granted today: smartphones and social media.

U.S. senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was asked on the radio program “Who Said That?” in 1949 what she’d do if she woke up in the White House one day. The senator replied: “Well, I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.”

When I look back at the The Jetsons, a show that debuted in 1962 and lasted just one season during its first run, it’s easy to see how it inspired so many visions of the future that would occur in the 1960s, 70s and beyond. But what inspired The Jetsons?

Last week OpenAI rolled out its new virtual assistant, dubbed Advanced Voice Mode, that allows users to have a conversation with an AI bot. There’s some controversy about the technology, not least because actress Scarlet Johansson threatened a lawsuit when the tech was first demonstrated earlier this year. The early demo voice sounded an awful lot like the actress, whose character in the 2013 film Her was a disembodied voice that people fell in love with.

When the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles featured a new “coffee robot” in October 1967, the newspapers covering it sounded both excited and terrified.

The astronauts who are currently stuck in space thanks to Boeing's little mishaps will soon be voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election between vice president Kamala Harris and convicted felon Donald Trump. They were supposed to come back to Earth after just eight days and given the latest schedule to get them home, it’s probably going to be about eight months meaning they won’t be back until February 2025. And that means they won’t be on Earth in November and they’ll need to cast their vote from the International Space Station.

When companies rolled out their latest technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2010, the most exciting new product on offer was the 3D-TV. Sony showed off the 3D-TV like it was the inevitable future of American homes, where the entire family would gather and put on their 3D glasses to experience the most revolutionary entertainment the world had to offer. It seemed like such a safe bet at the time.

The state of Illinois’ mobile crime lab was a 16-ton law enforcement vehicle that traveled the state in the 1940s, showing off the latest technology to police that was supposedly going to help them do their jobs. The vehicle advertised itself as having everything from a lie detector test to a fingerprint lab. And while not everyone was happy with the experiment, today we have a surviving film from 1943 that provides a fascinating snapshot of what was sold as the future of crime-fighting during World War II.

The world of organ transplants has come so far since the year 1954 when a kidney was transplanted between twins. But if you take a look at the predictions of the late 20th century, we’re not nearly as far along as we imagined we could be.

Back in 1995, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote a book called Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, about rational thinking and his fears for the future of the U.S. and the world. One of Sagan’s predictions from the book seems to go viral every couple of years. And with good reason.

It can be easy to forget just how popular the monorail was as an idea long before the 1950s and 60s. The second half of the 19th century saw plenty of experiments with single-track mass transportation, including the monorail at the 1876 United States Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. But by the 1930s, people were dreaming bigger. Like this Soviet design for a “ball-wheel train” that graced the pages of colorful tech magazines in the U.S. during the worst of the Great Depression.

From the perspective of the 2020s, it’s easy to believe the internet was the most revolutionary technology ever invented. But I’d argue that the tech being developed 100 years ago was just as exciting, given how much it changed the world. Case in point: Radio radically changed the way people consumed media in the 1920s and 30s. And there was nobody more interested in the future of radio than sci-fi legend Hugo Gernsback.

It’s a weird feeling to suddenly have hope. And given the incredible vibe shift in American politics during the past week, it’s helping me better understand visions of the future. Hope is a strange force.

It was a chilly winter’s day on January 14, 2004 when President George W. Bush gave a speech at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC to lay out his administration’s latest goals for the future of space exploration. Bush declared NASA would have a “new focus” and laid out how the space agency would accomplish those ambitious plans, which included everything from completion of the International Space Station by 2010 to humans flying trips to Mars. Bush also promised that Americans would soon be returning to the moon.

Humans have loved their dogs ever since they were first domesticated roughly 18,000 years ago. But that incredibly long journey through time has given us a wide variety of dog breeds, from enormous Great Danes to tiny Chihuahuas. And an interesting article from 1935 gives us a look at what people were predicting for the future of dogs in the middle of the Great Depression.

What will the legal system of the future look like? That was the question tackled in a 1950s article about the future. And while they didn’t predict just how extreme America’s legal landscape would become in 2024, they did make some interesting guesses about what was just over the horizon.