German Public Television 1972 Projections For 2000

This is how ZDF German Public television envisioned how life in the year 2000 could appear back in 1972. Hat-tip Michael Miersch here.

Part 1 (Youtube video): Living and going to work (

The first part shows a man named Mr B living in a futuristic, electronic apartment. In the year 2000 people have to work only 25 hours per week, and can live with artificial hearts. Breakfast is prepared automatically and that all food is free of poisons because it is organically produced, free of pesticides and chemicals.

There are no printed newspapers – people get their news from a “printer” twice a day. Everyone lives in huge high rise apartment buildings with 2000 units, each equipped with international satellite TV that can be watched 24 hours per day. Shopping is done by radio-teleshopping; purchases are booked direct from his bank account.

Mr B communicates with friends using a “TV telephones” (smoking is still politically correct).

People don’t visit each other anymore – they converse via TV screen. Sociologists warn of the isolation of man by technology.

Mr B. does not use a conveying sidewalk to go the short distance to the train station when he goes to work, he walks. The air is now clean again because pollution was banned in 1990. Some even called for the death penalty for polluters. He works in another city 80 km away. No problem though, the jet-engine powered 500 km/hr commuter monorail train needs only 15 minutes. At the station he rents an electric city-car, which are readily available at all transportation hubs.

Part 2: At work in the year 2000, and the environmental hell of 1972.

The electric cars are automatically navigated. At work a massive network of people-conveyors take him through the huge maze of buildings. He works at a databank center that sells data to customers. All data is stored at a massive data storage centers and systems. For example, the databanks deliver critical data to politicians almost instantly so that they can always make the right decisions.

Everything is automated, and so Mr B has lots of time on his hands at work – no stress. That’s the way it is for millions of highly skilled workers like him, who only need to sit around and monitor the automated systems. As he sits around, he thinks about what he’ll do when he retires at the age of 50.

Retirement in the year 2000 is a problem too, as people have yet to figure out how spend all that free time on their hands. This is how ZDF imagined life could be in the year 2000 back in 1972.

At the 6 min mark, the show returns back to the reality of 1972. Here ZDF bemoans that 14 million cars jam the streets of West Germany. They pollute the air and threaten to choke the citizens in a sea of metal, exhust and noise. Cars are a symbol of freedom, but in reality they condemn the people to being stuck in traffic jams. The car – it kills 17,000 and injures 500,000 every year. Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and lead are blown yearly into the atmosphere.

Air pollution in urban areas is already at the allowable limits. The SST pollutes the entire stratosphere and creates extreme noise – all to save 3 hrs of flight time. ZDF says we’ve poisoned the biosphere and food chain with our pesticides. Industry has polluted the water so much that clean water will be a luxury product in just a few years. Germany’s Lake Constanz will soon look like Lake Erie. It will take 50 to 100 years before Lake Erie returns to a natural condition.

Part 3: Man is destroying the planet – we have precious little time to save it

Part 3 looks at life and the environment as it was in 1972. The film starts with:

Industrialization brought prosperity to many, but a threat to all. Industrialization favors the concentration of capital and assets in the hands of a few.

The clip then describes the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Up to 800,000people (from 60 million) live in poverty. The film says that by1980, half a million students will jam into the universities, where only half will be able find housing, and classroom will be overfilled, leading to riots and civil unrest.

ZDF complained that the field of medicine is outdated, and Germany is falling behind. 30% of all hospital beds were made in the 1920s.

ZDF then asks a series of pessimistic questions. Will the political system be able to quickly enough make the decisions necessary to bring the country forward to meet the challenges of the year 2000?  How will the family survive? How will the workplace change? Automation threatens to turn workers into mere monitors.

For millions there isn’t going to be any work.”

Another problem is that the economy produces more food then what is needed. Europe destroys the surplus of food while people starve in other places on the globe. ZDF then juxtaposes this with military spending, which amounts to 600 billion German Marks annually. “For the first time in history, man is capable of destroying the planet.

The only choice is either we live together, or die together.”

ZDF then complains that technology is advancing too quickly; we can’t keep up and that we don’t really know what we’re getting ourselves into. Since WWII, millions of tons of concrete have been transformed into living units. Now everywhere the landscape is littered with high rise apartment buildings. No one thought about the impact on man and society. No research is being done to see where all this is taking us. The ZDF clip ends with a quote:

‘The capability of man to thoughtlessly destroy the environment is practically without limits,’ says an American scientist. Poiliticans face the challenge of stopping the destruction before it becomes too late. For that we have very little time.”

End

———————————————————————————-

Today we see that life is much better and different than what ZDF predicted in 1972. Lake Erie is also clean again. Sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide have long since been replaced by life-giving CO2 as the big threat to humanity and nature. The dire prophesies never came true – even though there was a consensus among the “experts”.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

22 responses to “German Public Television 1972 Projections For 2000”

  1. R. de Haan

    The only red threat throughout the story is the people behind it.
    They are exactly the same people like Ehrlich and Holdren.
    These scary people pose the real threat to humanity.

    And today they are in a position of great political power and have access to all the tools to create their world of horrors.

  2. Edward.

    “And today they are in a position of great political power and have access to all the tools to create their world of horrors.”

    Indeed, well said! That is the truly frightening nightmare, how can these nutters be stopped? Will it take a peoples’ revolution, because these power mad nutters will not be turned back by the ballot box. R.

    On that cheerful note, it’s new years eve!! May I say that, I hope some [all] politicians come to their senses, realise that the wind of change is abroad and make political capital by being realistic – dropping the AGW guff and thus halting this slide into collective ‘chicken little’ …..AGW means, CO2 is poison?….”save the world lunacy”.

    Fat chance, will bears ever stop going to the woods for ‘bodily evacuations’?

    It is us, who need saving from them (politicians)!

    Happy new year!

  3. Quixote

    The biggest threat to these “nutters” is that the world’s population is becoming “politically engaged” for probably the first time in many decades. When people start to ask: “Why has this mess happened?” and the answer is: “Because nobody has researched who the hell is doing this to us”!, then computers fire up, search engines get pounded with key words like “NWO, Elitists, Agenda 21, U.N., Banksters….and on and on………….obviously the MSM has all but shut down any true reporting so in essence the internet has filled that void with millions of true stories and for the first time in history real people with real stories are transferring reports instantaneously…..there is a New World coming fast and it ain’t the New World Order…………..it’s called humanity!

    Happy New Year….Adios Greed Merchants!

  4. DirkH

    Happy New Year!

    A new order is indeed coming, at least for Europe. It won’t be the one the politicians planned. The prediction by James Robbins here sounds reasonable to me.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12020793

  5. DirkH

    And i gotta share this one:
    http://xkcd.com/673/

  6. grayman

    Well the have a few predictions right and a few wrong but all and all a load of B.S.

  7. Casper

    The fear belongs to human motivation 😉
    Happy new year to everybody!

  8. dave ward

    “The air is now clean again because pollution was banned in 1990.”

    “No problem though, the jet-engine powered 500 km/hr commuter monorail train needs only 15 minutes.”

    Er….. How does that work, then???

    Happy New Year all.

  9. R. de Haan

    Happy New Year to all.

    Science expected in 2011…..!
    http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/12/science-expected-in-2011.html

  10. Ed Caryl

    Happy New Year, guys.

  11. DirkH

    Attention.
    Scientists are flabbergasted. Earth turns faster than expected.
    “sagt Wolfgang Dick vom Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie (BKG) in Frankfurt am Main. “Wir staunen selbst etwas über die momentane Rotationsgeschwindigkeit der Erde”, gesteht der Astronom, “denn in der Tendenz verliert unser Planet an Tempo beim Drehen.” ”

    says Wolfgang Dick from the Federal Office For Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt On The Main. “We are somewhat surprised about the current rotational velocity of the Earth”, says the astronome, “because there is a general downward trend of the rotational velocity”.

    The article goes on to explain that the LOD (length of day) is not exactly predetermined due to tide forces and movements in the atmosphere BUT fails to admit the enormous influence of the thermal expansion or contraction of the oceans. My thought: Well, as that is the biggest variable influence, it looks like sea level rise again fails to do what it’s supposed to do. And that is not good for the warmists. And it lets me suspect that the OHC (Ocean Heat Content) has dropped or at least not risen. It will be interesting to see what ARGO says. We have seen no processed data from ARGO for half a year now.

    http://nachrichten.t-online.de/astronomie-erde-dreht-sich-genau-im-takt/id_43861522/index

  12. Mindert Eiting

    Happy New Year! For 2011 I expect at least one new Gate, probably ten.

  13. R. de Haan
  14. R. de Haan
  15. ArndB

    Happy New Year, Pierre, and to all!
    The recent developments in the AGW debate had not been bad, but a lot of matters are ahead, and presumably the winter 2010/11 is still good for further surprises, take for example a look at the current sea-ice-conditions in Northern Europe, which are quite advanced, see here: http://www.2007seatraining.de/
    as per 30 December 2010.
    Best regards Arnd Bernaerts

  16. R. de Haan
  17. R. de Haan

    Forget the media
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/time-magazine-and-global-warming/

    150 years of Global Warming/cooling fears from NYT:
    http://newsbusters.org/node/11640
    100 years of global warming & cooling fears
    http://old.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
    “Another Ice Age? – Time 1974”
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
    1895-2008 warming and cooling fears
    http://www.almanac.com/sites/new.almanac.com/files/1895_cvr1_0.png
    NASA’s Rasool warns of impending ice age – 1971
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/sep/19/inside-the-beltway-69748548/
    Ice age articles from the 1970s
    http://anotherviewonclimate.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/time-announces-approaching-ice-age/
    Global warming and cooling from 1300 to the present
    http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndHistory.htm
    The CIA’s ‘global cooling’ files
    http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/5592803/the-cias-global-cooling-files.thtml

    here are some papers providing evidence of an ice-free Arctic ocean over the past ~11,000 years.
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.08.016
    http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F
    http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/227

    Thanks for the links to Jimbo WUWT
    January 1, 2011 at 2:08 am

  18. R. de Haan

    Man is destroying the planet?
    Winter 2009-2010
    Snow in Brazil
    Hundreds of penguins dead of cold in Brazil
    Snow in Florida
    Snow blankets city in SW Saudi Arabia
    Snow and cold in Algeria
    Snow in Ain Draham, Tunisia
    6 million tropical fish dead due to cold in Bolivia
    Argentina’s beaches whitened by snow
    Blizzards hit the French Mediterranean
    Thailand province is a cold-stricken area
    Record cold in Cacun, Mexico
    6 million head of cattle dead in brutal Mongolian winter
    and sadly
    25,000 excess winter deaths in UK last winter – 2009 / 2010

    The winter of 2010-2011 has just started

  19. R. de Haan

    That listing was posted by Jimbo too at WUWT.

  20. DirkH

    These people at the ZDF really can’t think their way out of a cardboard box. Witness this, at 01:30:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9nPpgelvLU&feature=related

    About the year 2057: Mankind has a space elevator.
    Now wait a minute. What’s on top of the space elevator – right; a bigger version of the ISS where scientist research for 5 years to find a better solar cell. But as the research stagnates, the station is about to be closed.

    Now how stupid is that. A space elevator has one, and only one crucial advantage: It makes it dirt cheap to transport huge amounts of materials into space. That’s the entire reason you’d want one. And once you have that, you’re set to build cities and REAL spaceships in space. Factories. Space tourism. Asteroid mining.

    Man. Didn’t they read about this before squandering my licence payer money on their silly little production.

  21. R. de Haan

    Ice Age will start within five years.
    I’ve posted this link earlier at this blog with the article about the scientists expecting cooler times but now Steven Goddard published it.
    Thanks to Mark Moreno from Climate Depot of course
    http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/ice-age-to-start-in-five-years/

    1. DirkH

      That would mean a real crash in property prices. Good. I’m not invested.

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