Who knew?

Was the sinking of the Titanic foretold? Writers who 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.

This is not pig Latin

Et tu, English? 12 Latin phrases we use regularly

Image: Patrick Schneider

English might be a Germanic language, but it is greatly influenced by Latin—not only in the huge number of words derived from Latin roots, but also in the many Latin phrases English speakers use on a daily basis. Here are some of the most commonly used ones!

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Literal translation: and all the rest/other things.

This is one of the most commonly used Latin phrases, but the abbreviation etc. is so widespread that people often fail to realize its Latin origins. We also write it as one word, etcetera, but the original phrase has two words: et (and) and cetera (the rest, other things that are similar).

Image: Jorgen Hendriksen

Literal translation: for the good.

The original phrase was pro bono publico ("for the public good"), dating back to ancient Rome, where wealthy and respected men provided legal advice for free—‘for the public good.’ The phrase was shortened, but its meaning remains unchanged.

Image: Nika Benedictova

Literal translation: the state in which

Here we have another case of a longer phrase that was shortened. The original was in statu quo res erant ante bellum ("in the state in which things were before the war"), a phrase commonly used in treaties. Nowadays, its use has shifted to mean "the current state of things."

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Literal translation: word for word.

Verbatim ac litteratim means "word for word and letter for letter." This Latin expression comes from verbum (word) and can be used both as an adverb ("he said it verbatim") and as an adjective ("a verbatim report").

Image: Nika Benedictova

Literal translation: with the positions turned.

The meaning and use have remained consistent over time: vice versa is used to express that something is true when the order is reversed.

Image: Mia Mackenzie

Literal translation: to the point of nausea/sickness.

Have you ever had to listen to a discussion so long that you felt nauseated by it? If so, you know exactly what ad nauseam means. The nausea is most often a figure of speech, but there have certainly been cases of real sickness.

Image: Christoph Schmid

Literal translation: elsewhere.

Alibi was originally used as an adverb of place. Its current legal meaning—someone’s claim to have been "elsewhere" when a crime was committed—was first recorded in the 17th century. Nowadays, it’s a key term not only for lawyers and police officers but also for all true crime aficionados.

Image: Aleksander Stypczynski

Literal translation: generous mother.

What do generous mothers have to do with colleges and universities? We have to think figuratively. Alma means generous or kind, but combined with mater, it takes on the sense of a mother who nourishes her children. The first medieval university, the University of Bologna, adopted this idea as a motto: Alma Mater Studiorum, or "nourishing mother of studies."

Image: Federico Scarionati

Literal translation: prize, reward, profit.

In Latin, praemium was always used to refer to something gained. The added meaning of premium as "top quality" is of much later origin, as is the meaning of premium as "an extra fee or payment."

Image: Luismi Sánchez

Literal translation: in good faith.

We mostly associate this phrase with its legal meaning—that is, the absence of deceit or fraud. While its original use was similar, it was not necessarily limited to legal contexts and could be applied to a multitude of situations. Bona fide is generally used as an adjective, but it also has a noun form: bona fides.

Image: Jonathan Skule

Literal translation: agreement.

This word comes from the Latin consentire, meaning "to be in agreement" or "to join in feeling." From the verb, the word shifted into the noun consensus (agreement), which became the standard term for a unanimous or general agreement.

Image: Tamara Malaniy

Literal translation: to one’s pleasure.

This is a shortened version of the original Latin phrase ad libitum, which originally meant "to one’s pleasure" or "as much as one likes." The shortened version comes from music, where ad lib indicated that the musician could interpret the piece according to their taste. From there, ad lib evolved to its current meaning: to improvise or deliver spontaneously.