7 Incredible Predictions that Did Come True

Most of the time when people make incredible or outrageous predictions about the future, when the time comes around, we all end up laughing at how ridiculous they were. Flying cars by 2005? And what about that millennium bug that everyone got so hepped up about? There are some predictions, however, that turned out to be completely on the money. Some of these are scarily accurate…

Robert Heinlein predicted The Cold War

, Heinbein wrote a short story entitled ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’ which stated that the United States would develop a nuclear weapon before the rest of the world creating an arms race against the rest of the world.

2013: The Resignation of Pope Benedict

, 14 days before Pope Benedict resigned and Pope Francis replaced him, a woman tweeted that her boyfriend had had a dream that those exact circumstances would occur.

1863: Russian chemist predicted the missing 40+ elements on the Periodic Table

, Though in 1863 there were only approximately 60 elements on the Periodic Table, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the modern day table nearly perfectly. He did this by organising the elements’ atomic weight and properties and saw patterns emerging.

1968: Arthur. C. Clarke predicted the iPad

, When science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick collaborated for the novel and film versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, they wrote the screenplay and novel simultaneously collaborating on the content for both. Bizarrely, one of the scenes that features in both the novel and the film, shows two astronauts reading a newspaper on what they called a ‘NewsPad’.

1865: Jules Verne predicted the Apollo 11 moon landing

, Despite the fact that Verne would have had no way of knowing that gravity is different on the moon, he predicted that people who went into space would experience a feeling of weightlessness. He also predicted that humankind’s first trip to the moon would depart from Florida and how many astronauts would be aboard. Amazing, he was correct with all his predictions.

1898: Morgan Robertson predicted the sinking of the Titanic

, Robertson wrote a novella called ‘Futility, Or The Wreck of the Titan’ which specified that the largest ship ever built would sink after crashing into an iceberg.

1987: Roger Ebert predicted modern television and movie streaming

, Speaking to Omni magazine, Elbert said “We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You’ll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology . . . With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see.