Back in 1966, a high school Junior Historian published some predictions for the year 2016 in her local paper. Let's see what Margaret Louise Thorne envisioned for us today...and see if she was right.

• "Someone must find ways to captivate the sun's radiation and make it work for us. The sun will need to be our major fuel in the years to come." That's a hit. Solar energy is a Big Thing these days. 
• "Our water supply will need to be taken from the seas as our lands get drier and drier." Another hit. Water desalinization is a growing industry all over the world. 
• "People will take a pill for breakfast that will supply them with needed nourishment." Sounds like a good Thing, but that's a miss. 
• "The only land untouched by suburbia will be the national and state parks and forests...and a few farms of enormous size in the midwest." I'll give her half a hit for this, but her prediction falls a bit short of the total suburban sprawl she predicted.
• What will people do to earn a living? ...The vast majority of the people will be seated in front of man's ingenious invention, the computer." That's a dead-on bullseye. Almost everyone has to be a computer "geek" these days!

She didn't anticipate everyThing — smart phones, video games, information "clouds" — but she did predict that we'd be able to solve every one of our problems from food to energy to water with human ingenuity. We're not quite there in 2016, but I'd say that's a hit, too. Because we are working on all the Things she talked about!

See you next week,
Bobby