History’s Worst Predictions

Why are we still here, given that the End of the World has been predicted over 200 times? If guitar music was ‘on its way out’ in 1962, why is it still so popular four decades later? History’s Worst Predictions exposes the absurdity of humankind’s great prophecies, revealing how the forecasters and prophets of old, who used scientific and economic forecasting, claimed divine inspiration, or simply exercised their fertile imaginations, have almost always got things spectacularly wrong.
Ranging in time from Antiquity to the modern era and beyond, this light-hearted look at fifty of the world’s grandest predictions spans the fields of art, politics, science, nature, religion, economics and war. It includes farfetched and inaccurate predictions about the inevitable failure of automobiles, capitalism and the personal computer; the certain success of the Facist Reich and the household robot; and the imminence of apocalypse, predicted for 1833 by William Miller, who claimed to be in direct contact with God, for 1997 by Nostradamus, king of the poor prediction, and for 2000, as a result of the electronic y2k bug. It also issues a crucial warning: watch out in 2012, 2100 and 2400, because the end will definitely be nigh … probably.