We made our predictions for 2024, but other people have been making predictions too. In addition, there are a few things ahead of us in the coming year that we know will happen.
Things That Are Actually Planned for 2024
NASA is planning a manned flight to the moon in November. Not a landing but an orbit of the moon, followed by a return to Earth. The 10-day flight with four crew members will be the first time humans have ventured to the moon since 1972, over 50 years ago.
Not only the United States but half the world will be voting. As it happens, 2024 will be a “mega-election year,” with some 4.2 billion people–over half the world’s population–able to vote in over 70 countries. That’s a lot of democracy!
The world peace prediction comes from the pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith. It isn’t just about peace, it’s about the way we will achieve world peace:
“In the year 2024, the most important single thing which the cinema will have helped in a large way to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilized world all armed conflict,” Griffith predicted. “Pictures will be the most powerful factor in bringing about this condition. With the use of the universal language of motion pictures, the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the earth.”
One of Griffith’s own contributions to bringing about “the brotherhood of man” was his movie Birth of a Nation, celebrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Taking a different position, Professor Leo H. Baekeland, president of the American Chemical Society, predicted that future weapons technology could devastate civilian populations:
“The largest and best protected cities, irrespective of their size or distance, will be continuously exposed to destruction and mutilation,” he said. “Death and torture of the inhabitants will occur whether they are slumbering in their beds at night or whether they are reading their newspapers in their comfortable clubs, or saying their prayers in church. There will be no way of safeguarding women or children, the old or the infirm.”
Archibald M. Low, a British scientist, writing about the new “wireless” technology, seemed to predict how it would develop into the internet and working from home:
“Doubtless in the future we shall be able to sign our checks by the rapid transmission of motion; we shall be able to trace criminals, send out their fingerprints, and carry on very many classes of business which, at present, require our bodily attention,” Low wrote.
Illustration by Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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