*What do you think the world will look like in 2025 TALKIE-1930*
According to a forecast by an eminent statistician, the world will, in 2025, support a population of 6,600,000,000. All Europe will be one vast network of railways, and travellers will be able to go from London to Constantinople in forty hours, and from London to Peking in a week. The globe will be girdled with telegraph wires, and messages will be sent from New York to Calcutta in a few minutes. The Atlantic will be crossed in four days, and the voyage to Australia will be accomplished in a month. In 2025, mankind will be united by spoken language, and one uniform currency will be adopted by all nations. In that era, also, universal peace may be expected, for standing armies will have become obsolete, and the art of war will be forgotten. The earth will yield nourishment to its inhabitants in abundance, for waste lands will have been reclaimed, and the deserts will be made fertile. The bowels of the earth will have been completely explored, and coal and metals will no longer be dug from the quarry. The great coal fields will have become exhausted, and an universal scarcity of fuel will compel men to turn their attention to other sources of heat. For a time, chemical agency will be tried, but in the end, recourse will be had to the sun's rays, and the power of waterfalls will be made available for all purposes of life. The earth will have been thoroughly drained, and malarious diseases will be unknown. The art of healing will have been simplified, and diseases will be cured speedily and surely. Ignorance will no longer be suffered to exist, and elementary knowledge will be imparted to all. Then, too, will commence an era of good taste. Architecture will be freed from ugliness, sculpture will be disentangled from barbarism, and painting will cease to be hideous. Music will no longer be discord, and poetry will be something better than..
> The Atlantic will be crossed in four days, and the voyage to Australia will be accomplished in a month.
Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in under 16 hours in 1919.
Keith and Ross Smith flew from London to Darwin in 136 hrs flying time, also in 1919.
It's like nobody believed flying would ever become a common means of travel.
> and travellers will be able to go from London to Constantinople in forty hours
By the 1930s, Constantinople been a long time gone. It had been Istanbul not Constantinople for centuries by that point.
Many nations/languages did not respect that rename until Turkey became an ally in the 20th century.
Yeah - listen to the narrator in the opening on the classic Orson Welles film The Third Man (1949) - he says he never cared much for Vienna before the War, preferring the scene in Constantinople instead.
The American cut of the movie has an intro narrated by Joseph Cotton, who played Holly Martins. The wording might differ (since the movie is clearly Holly's first time in Vienna)
Yeah, I'm talking about the version (which is even on my US DVD) where the narrator is some black marketeer neither Martins nor Lime. "I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough - mmm - had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs but you know they can't stay the course like a professional."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlO39kCQ-8&list=RD0XlO39kCQ...
They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (Official Music Video)
The formal Ottoman name was Kostantiniyye=Constantinople until the empire's fall in 1922. The official shift happened in 1930, with the Turkish Postal Services Law changing the name to Istanbul.
That's nobody's business but the Turks. Why did Turkey become Türkiye but Japan didn't become Nippon (or vice-versa!)? It's all very confusing to me.
Why did Turkey become Türkiye? I think mostly because they asked. I’m guessing that Japan/Nippon is enjoying the fact that English speakers use the Chinese name for Japan and the Sanskrit¹ name for China. It’s much like the Czech Republic became Czechia, although part of that was Czech speakers wanting to stop referring to their country as an adjective² (the Czech phrase for Czech Republic was often shortened to just Czech).
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1. As a kid, my dad had told me that China was the Japanese name for the country, but according to Wikipedia, the name is actually derived from Sanskrit.
2. Which reminds me of the fun challenge of Czech (and many other Slavic languages) is that unlike other Indo-European languages³, the declensions of adjectives follow a different pattern than the declensions of their corresponding nouns,
3. Or at least the Indo-European languages that I have familiarity with.
Czech Republic didn't become Czechia, it's still called Czech Republic. Czechia is just the official English short name.
Turks did not really want it to become Türkiye in English, it was a government push. Most of us prefer having the name of our country be pronounceable and writable by anyone talking about it, and no one will even notice if you call it Turkey.
People just liked it better that way.
The answer is as simple as “they asked nicely”
> The answer is as simple as “they asked nicely”
Well that's a cute explanation, but strictly speaking the UN adopted the new spelling in 2022 and the ISO swiftly followed with a revision to ISO 3166.
If your "they asked nicely" was true then by that argument the people of Taiwan who constantly "ask nicely" regarding the removal of "(Province of China)" from their ISO 3166 entry would have had their wishes granted by now ... ;)
Why did Constantinople get the works?
It was the official name of Istanbul up until 1930 (in Turkish, Kostantiniyye).
Very beautiful, and very sad.
My glass half-full reading is that this shows things aren't so bad right now.
LLM aside, it tracks that with a civilization in truly dire straits, portrayal of the future would trend increasingly more towards being positive and fanciful: because at some point things would be so bad, that imagining the future will be even worse becomes a deadly thing for the modicum of hope required to even stay alive, let alone push forward.
I personally always think we have a lot of fat to trim before we get there. Our descendents can have a wonderful quality of life even if a lot of institutions and supply chains regress. The era of summoning food from a handheld computer might go away and we'll still be pretty well off (if not strictly better off)
I want to live in that world.
Perhaps my reading is coloured by optimism but by my count, apart from peace, language, currency and (debatably) universal good taste, all of which seem a bit utopian (so maybe I’m a cynical optimist) we do—or are well on our way.
>cynical optimist
Never heard that one before!
That is quite beautiful. I do think, though, that all these futuristic visions from maybe the 1920s and 1950s do kind of implicitly reject this dialectic, or oscillating toward something instead in favor of this exponential growth of the optimal solution (like alternative energy) immediately taking over. But we'll get there one day.
This is beautiful.
> Ignorance will no longer be suffered to exist, and elementary knowledge will be imparted to all.
Oh good, for a moment I didn't think reeducation camps were in our future.
> Architecture will be freed from ugliness
Uh, friend, I have some bad news...