Like everyone else on Earth, I have, for my entire life, admired Neil Armstrong — Ohio native, Korean War veteran, test pilot, NASA astronaut, teacher, family man — unreservedly. Kids in the 1970s learned that George Washington was the father of our country, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. I never imagined my reverence for this quintessentially American hero, the greatest explorer in human history, leader of an exemplary life, would be dampened, if only slightly, by an eBay purchase.

Five years ago, I bought a taped-together ex–library edition of Saturday Review/World, a long-defunct offshoot of the long-defunct Saturday Review. Both magazines were edited by Norman Cousins, a liberal antinuclear activist whose championing of “peace” and occasional forays into diplomacy earned him, among other laurels, the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism: globalist when it was still chic. After 40 years of polemical warfare, William F. Buckley Jr. eulogized Cousins, who resembled midlife Joe Biden and died in 1990, as “the ultimate idealist”: “I mourn his passing, while, at this juncture, only discreetly pleased that his [nuclear doomsday] prophecies were not fulfilled, and that we continue to live in a world that does not report in to a single capital.”

As the summer of 1974 approached, Cousins resolved to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Saturday Review, which he had edited since 1942, with a pair of back-to-back special issues. The first hit newsstands — remember those? — on August 10, two days after the resignation of President Nixon, and sported the banner headline “1924–1974.” Beneath that, the all-font, no-images cover — the instant mark of a serious magazine, like the old Foreign Affairs or Reader’s Digest — presented the names of great writers whose work had appeared in the magazine’s pages across that span: Alistair Cooke, Henry Steele Commager, Irving Howe… Legends, all, back then, their names all but unknown today.

The second of the anniversary issues, published August 24, bore the cover line “2024 a.d.” That was a thing in post-war literature, “a.d.” — as though its use conferred Instant Solemnity on the topic at hand by flashing the user’s supremely erudite attentiveness to the past and what lay ahead. Beneath that line was a smaller one — “A probe into the future by” — and then another façade of font. These were the contributors: Eminent Minds of the era, 19 men and one woman, drawing on their respective disciplines to predict what America and the world would look like 50 years, or 2,600 Saturdays, in the future: namely, now.

It would be inter-generationally arrogant, an act of bad faith, to revisit old predictions simply to mock their authors; such an exercise would neither appreciate the prognosticators on their own terms, key to any historical inquiry, nor demonstrate the requisite humility in recognition that one’s own fortune-telling, 50 years on, will invariably prove susceptible to ridicule. The twofold truth, with equal measures of importance, is that Cousins convened an extraordinary assembly of geniuses, some of whom accurately saw the future while others, assuredly, did not.

But no one flopped more spectacularly than Neil Armstrong.

“Our civilization has not yet matured to the point of being able to select its long-range goals,” he wrote. “Once we have decided whether our ultimate purpose is to preserve our species; to evolve to a higher form; or like the majority of the other animate species before us — the dinosaur, the mammoth, and the passenger pigeon — to disappear from the face of the earth, we will be much better able to know whether our fascination with the universe around us is a principal ingredient of our destiny.”

All this was valid enough. But Armstrong’s predictive capsule strayed irretrievably off course when he envisioned that man by now would have colonized the moon beneath its surface: massive subterranean lunar cities, “underground apartments and workrooms… connected by tunnels,” powered by “giant solar generators” and “large flywheels [spinning] at incredibly high speed.” An accompanying charcoal illustration resembled the pencil roughs for set and ship designs found in The Art of Star Wars.

Armstrong also foresaw human colonists inhabiting “other planets and planetoids.” Galactic lebensraum was sought not with the aim of “solving our population problems” — concern about “overpopulation” was huge in the early ’70s — but to advance mining and manufacturing interests and to “prevent the extinction of the race” in the event of a worldwide catastrophe, natural or “man-made.”

A professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati when his essay appeared, Armstrong predicted that we would “probably” have achieved manned flight to Mars “and a few carefully selected asteroids.” Unmanned missions were to have been completed to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, each producing voluminous transmissions of data. NASA at this point was supposed to be planning a manned mission to Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, 750 million miles from Earth.

The delusion of it!

By 1974, two years had passed since the United States had placed its last astronaut on the moon; the 1972 landing of Gene Cernan remains the last in history. Far from seeing the future — the rise and fall of the Space Shuttle, U.S. astronauts hitching rides aboard Russian spacecraft — poor Neil Armstrong, True Believer, thought NASA appropriations would grow in perpetuity. But Americans, satisfied to have beaten the Soviets to the moon, had already soured on the space program.

The earnestness borders on pitiable — enough to warrant some modest reconsideration of the vision of one of America’s greatest visionaries.

***

“Is there any prospect,” Cousins asked in his introduction, “that the world’s population can be brought into balance with the food supply, that a workable peace can be organized, that the dangers represented by the spread of nuclear weapons can be turned back, that the world’s water supply and its atmosphere can be safeguarded, that the world’s resources can be used for the common good?”

If today’s answers — in Donbas, Gaza, Xinjiang — invalidate the optimism that Cousins credited his contributors with exhibiting, today’s geopolitics also expose the limitations of the international organizations that Cousins and his contributors regarded as the best vehicle, and in which they reposed the bulk of their faith, to achieve nobler outcomes.

The most uncanny predictors — on the same subject, then barely discerned, now central — were two scientists: Andrei Sakharov, the dissident Soviet physicist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, and Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi engineer brought to the U.S. to develop post-war rocket and space programs.

Sakharov said a “unique role” in future progress would be played by “communications and information,” with an early stage of this progress defined by the creation of a “global telephone and videophone system.” Only on timing was the physicist, in his calculations, slightly off:

Far in the future, more than fifty years from now, I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central-control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines.
Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike television, the major source for information for many of our contemporaries, the UIS will give each person the maximum freedom of choice and will require individual activity.

For his part, von Braun dismissed the prospect of Western societies’ descent into Orwellian total surveillance: “Man has accomplished some pretty remarkable things on a global basis without putting us in a straitjacket. Take the control of epidemics.”

More prescient was von Braun’s vision of satellites unleashing a “revolution… a global telephone network interconnecting nearly 100 nations,… handling millions of television channels simultaneously and billions of telephone conversations,” able to “provide direct ties between computers in support of such operations as banking or ticket reservations.”

Controlled by an orbital switchboard, laser beam connections could be established (and withdrawn after use) that provide direct links between any two points on Earth. The abundance of available channels would soon lead to worldwide video-telephone service. And, as communications improve, commuting for work would go out of style. It would become more convenient to let electrons, rather than people, do the traveling.
The average American household of 2024 will be equipped with an appliance that combines the features of a television set with those of a desk computer and a Xerox machine. In addition to serving as a TV set and a print-out device for news, the push-button-controlled console will permit its owner to receive facsimile-radioed letters, review the shelves of a nearby grocery store, order food and dry goods, pay bills, balance books, and provide color-video-telephone service to any point on Earth.

Who could have guessed such an accurate depiction of American life a quarter century into the new millennium would come from a former S.S. Untersturmführer who four times shook the hand of Adolf Hitler?

***

Milovan Djilas, a former leader of the Yugoslav parliament whose rejection of communism brought six years of imprisonment, knew he stood on the side of the angels:

The most significant change in the next fifty years will be the disintegration of the Soviet empire…. The crucial factors will be the domestic ferment and the pressure from China…. [and possibly] uprisings in Eastern Europe…. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Eastern European countries now under Soviet hegemony will become independent and will join the European community. Germany will be reunited, without a civil war.

Conversely, in the next essay, Emmet John Hughes, a former Time Life correspondent and speechwriter for President Eisenhower, confessed: “I do not view with much optimism the aggregate power of the Western democracies…. I scan the long-term prospects of the Soviet Union — from mineral resources to political possibilities — with a kind of anxious concern.”

In an essay titled “The 21st-Century Woman — Free at Last?” Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright, congresswoman, and ambassador, lamented that women had made scant progress since 1924 in “overthrowing male supremacy… and achieving equality of the sexes.” Exceptions were made for the advent of the pill, greater access to higher education, and a pioneering cadre of legal activists then exploiting the legislation and court rulings of the civil-rights movement to advance women’s liberation.

Beyond that, however, Luce extrapolated from the previous 50 years an admittedly “gloomy” picture of the average American woman in 2024: “I see her playing many more roles that were once considered masculine. I see her making a little more money than she is making now. But I see her still trying to make her way up — in a man’s world — and not having much more success than she is having now.”

***

Space does not permit a full airing of all the predictions, worthy and wild, that filled the 136 pages (!) of the August 24, 1974, edition of Saturday Review/World. Again, we are obliged to marvel as much at the roster of contributors as at their accuracy. You can almost hear the 1970s-style TV announcer calling out the names: Jacques Cousteau! Isaac Asimov! McGeorge Bundy! Kurt Waldheim! It’s difficult to imagine anyone convening a panel of “influencers” like this today.

On December 14, 1974, the magazine followed up with a “special double year-end issue” devoted, as the banner declared, to “THE RESTORATION OF CONFIDENCE.” The contributors — their names set, this time, against a photo backdrop of a gleaming sunrise — included Indira Gandhi! Robert McNamara! Coretta Scott King! David Rockefeller! Pierre Trudeau! and many others, all gone now.

The implication, to anyone paying attention back then, was that we needed a new Assembly of Geniuses to conjure the future for us because the results of the last one, in the August 24 issue, had brought forward many things but not, evidently, a restoration of confidence.