Who knew?

The Jetsons warned us of this: These 11 writers predicted the future

Image: Michael Dziedzic

Do modern inventions ever remind you of things you’ve read in old books? Do you ever find yourself pointing and saying, "Just like The Jetsons!" or "The Simpsons predicted this!"? Sometimes, real life ends up imitating art, even centuries later. Let’s explore 11 cases where writers anticipated the future, ranging from logical to downright eerie.

Image: K. Mitch Hodge

Did you know that a novel from 1898 predicted the Titanic disaster with an eerie degree of precision? Fourteen years before the real event, there was... the Titan.

Morgan Robertson published Futility, later retitled The Wreck of the Titan. It told the story of a massive British ocean liner called the Titan, described as unsinkable. The ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, carried too few lifeboats, and sank in April, all details that mirror the Titanic tragedy.

Image: Arthur Lambillotte

Isaac Asimov imagined the iPad, more or less, back in 1964. In an essay for The New York Times, the sci-fi legend described what life might look like in 2014. Among his predictions was that people would use a "compact screen" to read books, watch videos, and communicate with others, all without ever leaving their homes.

Asimov essentially foresaw smart electronic tablets and even hinted at remote work and distance learning decades before they became reality.

Image: Steve DiMatteo

In a 1998 episode of The Simpsons ("When You Dish Upon a Star"), Homer crashes into a Hollywood meeting and we briefly see a sign that reads: "20th Century Fox — a division of Walt Disney Co."

At the time, this was a playful nod to Disney’s ever-growing empire. But in 2019, it became real: Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion.

Image: SpaceX

In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne got more than one detail right, including which U.S. state would one day launch spaceships.

Verne imagined a three-man crew in a projectile fired from Florida (near modern-day Cape Canaveral) that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Yes, just like Apollo 11, more than a hundred years later. That’s a remarkably accurate prediction for a piece of fiction written during the Civil War era!

Image: Gabriel Benois

Do you remember seeing people communicate through large flat screens in The Jetsons and laughing at it as an exaggerated gag about the future? Well, who’s laughing now?

In Hanna-Barbera’s 1962 show, the characters used "televiewers" to chat across long distances, surprisingly similar to how we use Zoom or FaceTime today. Other works, like E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), had predicted remote video communication even earlier, but The Jetsons cemented the concept visually in pop culture.

Image: bady abbas

IVF was predicted as far back as 1924, 54 years before the first "test-tube baby" was born.

British biologist J.B.S. Haldane imagined a world of artificial reproduction. In his essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, he coined the term "ectogenesis" to describe babies being grown outside the womb.

Image: Emiliano Vittoriosi

In Steel Beach (1992), sci-fi author John Varley envisioned a future where artificial intelligence provided therapy. In his story, the Central Computer actively counsels people, offers psychological evaluations, and responds to emotional needs.

At a time when AI was still seen as a cold, mechanical concept, Varley’s story offered a surprisingly human twist. Today, studies show that many people using AI chatbots turn to them for emotional support and counseling.

Image: Possessed Photography

The word "robot" entered the English language in 1920 through a Czech play titled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. These "robots" weren’t mechanical machines but biological workers created to serve humans. The name came from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." A century later, the term has clearly stuck.

Image: Mateo Avila Chinchilla

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Arthur C. Clarke introduced HAL 9000, an AI so advanced it could carry out conversations, read lips, and make decisions. But Clarke’s futuristic vision also included video calls, flat-screen tablets, and casual digital multitasking, all decades before such technology existed.

HAL’s breakdown was fiction, but Clarke accurately foresaw how machines would gradually take over our attention.

Image: Olivier Amyot

In 1880, Mary E. Bradley published her book Mizora: A Prophecy. Maybe not all of the details in her all-female utopia were prophetic, but she did get one thing right: artificially grown meat. In her world, food wasn’t farmed but created through chemical processes in laboratories.

It sounded outlandish at the time, but today some food companies are doing exactly that. Bradley’s vision came long before environmentalism or animal rights were mainstream. Somehow, in a story about feminism and science, she also imagined what we might now call the vegan burger.

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Credit cards might seem like a very modern invention, but they were anticipated in an 1888 novel. Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, imagined a future in the year 2000 where everyone received a card loaded with "credit" from the government. People used this card to access goods from massive communal warehouses—similar to what we today would call department stores.

Go beyond red, green, and blue

Learn the names of 12 rarely-used but beautiful colors

Image: Adrien Converse

In this day and age, when you can ask for anything online as long as you can express it in words, it is important to be specific about what you are looking for. Colors are no exception. Take a look at the following 12: Did you know that any of these existed?

Image: Simona Sergi

The first entry on our list goes to this mustard-like yellow or yellow-orange color named after a gum resin of similar tone, extracted from a Cambodian tree. The word Gamboge itself comes from the Modern Latin cambogium, which is the Latin version of the place name Cambodia.

Image: Sindy Süßengut

The name itself is very evocative of its nature, as it makes us think of the deep blue seas. But the ultramarine color’s name comes from the Medieval Latin word that means "beyond the sea" because the pigment employed to make this dye, called lapis lazuli, was imported to Europe from Asia.

Image: Taylor Friehl

If you are looking for a purplish-red tone, the Tyrian purple might be just what you need. This particular color was highly valued during the Byzantine Empire, in part because of how difficult it was to obtain. The base to create this shade of purple was in the secretions of a predatory sea snail. Definitely not an easy task if you need a lot of pigment.

Image: Nilendrajyoti Halder

The second unusual blue tone in our list, cerulean, can also be called a "deep blue", but you’ll find it if you look up, as it is described as "sky blue." The word "cerulean" comes from the Latin caeruleus, meaning "dark blue."

Image: irmingham Museums Trust

The word brings to mind a mixture of beige and grey, and that is no mistake. The color is much older than one would expect, with references to it in the English language going back as far as 1925.

Image: Elena Kloppenburg

While citric fruits include other colors, like orange, the word citreous refers specifically to a "greenish-yellow" color associated with lemons and limes.

Image: Sincerely Media

Which word would you use to describe the color of a sunset? Orange? Red? There is a word for such a color, and it is ponceau. It is described as "a vivid reddish-orange color."

Image: Erik Karits

The word puce means "flea" in French. And, yes, the puce color is a dark or brownish purple, not unlike the color of a flea. Perhaps not the most enticing or flattering color name but still, a unique color nonetheless.

Image: Heather Wilde

Another color name that comes from Latin, atrovirens is also the name of a coniferous tree. It refers to a dark green or a deep teal, not unlike the one found in these types of pyramid-shaped trees.

Image: Katelyn Greer

Most people are used to saying "flesh color" when it comes to describing a color that is similar to a pale skin tone, but there is a more accurate word for it: sarcoline.

Image: Daniele Levis Pelusi

A word that is seldom used these days but that describes a much-used color, even if it's named differently. Eburnean is something that is ivory in color. This off-white color is created by adding a touch of yellow to white.

Image: Ronaldo de Oliveira

A color that everybody thought already existed until they saw it, Vantablack is one of the closest colors to black… without being solid black. Vantablack pigment is the darkest man-made substance in the world because it absorbs almost all visible light.