What Will Come Of The 21st Century? Nikola Tesla’s Predictions On Smart Tech, War, Coffee, & More

Nikola Tesla, an inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist, made some incredible predictions on what the 21st century would look like, and it’s actually pretty on point. The inventor was born back in 1856 and died in 1943, so it’s interesting to see his take on smart technology from way back when (when the idea of a simple iPhone was probably groundbreaking).

OpenCulture.com suggests that some of the predictions may be too far off as they were made in the 1930s, so some of them may look “outlandish” to us now… in addition to some of these years not having happened quite yet. Tesla’s predictions are introduced with the disclaimer, that “forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future.”

Nikola Tesla delivers his predictions for the 21st century

Let’s take a look at some of Tesla’s interesting and thought-provoking predictions…

• “Buddhism and Christianity… will be the religion of the human race in the twenty-first century.”
• “The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established.” Tesla went on to comment, “no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.”
• “Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2025 than the Secretary of War.”
• “I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life.”
• “There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India.”
• “Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power.” Tesla also foresaw that “the struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.”

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He also goes on to predict the elimination of war, which in today’s world, seems a bit far out (and a bit too optimistic). He says the elimination of war will come “by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself,” and then having war chests diverted to funding education and research.

In terms of women and feminism, he predicted that men will have met their match in women by the 21st century, but warned that “the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee.”

Certainly an interesting thought…

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