What they predicted about 2025

Article content

As the world enters 2025, we’re entering a year that has long served as a nice round benchmark for “the future.” As such, prior decades have seen a number of predictions about what the world would look like by now. Below, a quick survey of what they got wrong, what they got right, and what they got really, crazily wrong.

Article content

Article content

This was the year that Canada’s doomed Mirabel Airport was supposed to enter “full use”

Article content

The last couple of years in Canada have seen government pour unprecedented quantities of taxpayer money into EV factories on the premise that it will all pay off in a few decades or so. So it’s perhaps a good time to note one of the other times that Ottawa promised that a wildly expensive megaproject would pay off for future generations — and were dead wrong.

In a 1975 Toronto Star profile on the under-construction Mirabel Airport, builders estimated that the facility would not enter full use until “sometime around the year 2025, some 50 years from now.”

Mirabel was an airport outside Montreal so big that its boundaries rivalled the size of Montreal itself. It was the most expensive single Canadian infrastructure project up to that point, and the idea was that it would ultimately become Canada’s primary air hub; a futuristic jetport serving 50 million passengers per year.

None of that happened, and Mirabel’s abandoned terminals and runways are now a byword for boondoggle. In 1975, the Toronto Star noted the irony of a project whose purported benefits would not be felt “until virtually everyone ultimately responsible is long gone.”

Article content

Article content

NASA was planning to have a gravity-capable space station

One of NASA’s jobs is to draw up elaborate plans that probably won’t get built, but there is a report in NASA’s archives where 2025 is pegged as the year that they would complete construction of history’s first gravity-capable space station.

The report was written in 1988, when planning for the eventual International Space Station was already underway. The “Rotating Advanced-Technology Space Station” was supposed to be its replacement. Once the ISS was phased out, U.S. astronauts would instead take up residence in a permanent space station complete with artificial gravity.

The ISS is indeed at the end of its lifespan (it’s scheduled to be dropped into the ocean in 2031), but NASA’s main thing these days is lunar and martian exploration. The year 2025 will instead feature the final preparations for the Artemis II mission, an April 2026 manned orbit of the moon that will be joined by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The U.K. was supposed to have a black prime minister

In 1998, the Sunday Telegraph commissioned a poll of U.K. citizens asking them to imagine their world in 2025. At the time, much of the Western World was seized with late-1990s optimism that they were entering a new millennium that would be defined by peace, prosperity and mutual understanding.

Article content

Not the pessimistic Brits. More than 80 per cent of them thought it would be “harder” to hold down a good job in 2025. About 60 per cent thought their society’s moral code would be “weaker.” And a clear majority thought that crime was going to be worse.

But where the poll went objectively wrong was with the prediction that by 2025 Britain would have elected a black prime minister, something that nearly 60 per cent of respondents figured would happen. They got two more women prime ministers and Rishi Sunak — a man of Indian descent — but nobody of African heritage.

Projections on human health actually underestimated the gains

In 1998, the World Health Organization released a relatively optimistic projection of what human health would look like in 2025. In an introduction, WHO director Hiroshi Nakajima wrote “humanity has not merely survived, it has thrived.”

And even then, the WHO underestimated how good it would actually be. The report said that Canada in 2025 would have a life expectancy of 81, and that this would represent the world’s second-highest lifespan. They got the life expectancy right, but 81 is not even enough to put Canada in the top 10; everyone from Iceland to Singapore to the UAE is now 83 or higher.

Article content

Mutant animals working as slaves

The most outlandish prediction for 2025 comes courtesy of Sylvia Porter, a columnist for the Massachusetts-based Berkshire Eagle. In 1967, Porter celebrated news of the world’s first heart transplant by laying out a series of predictions for what other innovations humanity could expect by 2025.

Here’s a sample:

• A life expectancy of about 125, all thanks to “chemical control of aging.”
• “Use of specially bred animals for low-grade labor.”
• Extra limbs on demand, due to “biochemical stimulation.”
• The abolition of the education system, as all information would be encoded “directly on the brain.”

Predictions about world population were shockingly accurate

When it comes to predictions about economics or politics or technology, most forecasts about 2025 were way off. But population projections are shockingly accurate.

In 1981, a United Nations report forecast that the world’s population would be 8.3 billion in 2025. This represented a massive increase from what it was at the time; the estimated global population was about 4.4 billion at the time of the report. The UN forecasters also had no idea of what the next 44 years would bring: This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union or the economic liberalization of China.

Nevertheless, they nailed the population figure perfectly: As of press time, the global population is about 8.1 billion, and is on track to hit 8.3 billion just before Christmas, 2025.

Article content