From immortality to ugly people: 100-year-old predictions about 2025

From immortality to ugly people: 100-year-old predictions about 2025
Akron Beacon Journal; by Mark J. Price; 12/30/24
Nearly 100 years ago, a group of deep thinkers dared to imagine what life would be like in 2025. Some of their prophecies were completely off target, while others proved to be weirdly accurate. [Including:]

• The future looked ugly to Albert E. Wiggam, an American psychologist. According to his calculations, homely, dull people were having more children than beautiful, intelligent people. “If we keep progressing in the wrong direction, as we have been doing, American beauty is bound to decline and there won’t be a good-looking girl to be found 100 years from now,” he told an audience in Brooklyn, New York. Looking around the auditorium, he added: “However, this lack is not apparent yet, especially here in Brooklyn.”
• Thanks to science, people would live to be 150 years old... The advances of medicine and surgery will have been such that most of the ailments and limitations of old age will have been eliminated. Life will be prolonged at its maximum of efficiency until death comes like sunset, and is met without pain and without reluctance. There will be no death from disease, and almost any sort of injury will be curable.
• In a hundred years, there will not be numerous nations, but only three great masses of people — the United States of America, the United States of Europe and China.
• The earth will be under one government, and one language will be written and understood, or even spoken, all over the globe.
• People would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room.
• Horse-drawn vehicles are fast disappearing from our streets, but jackass-driven automobiles will still be with us 100 years from now.

Publisher's note: An interesting and entertaining article about predictions. The article includes many more predictions - enjoy!