The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Predictions" by Philip K. Dick Included in The Book of Predictions (1981)

1983

*The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against that country impossible. At the same time the USSR will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The United States will turn, then, to nerve gas.

1984

*The United States will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel source, eliminating the need for oil.

1985

*By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the USSR or in the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants.

1986

*Such satellites as HEA0-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high-energy phenomena in the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit.

1989

*The United States and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information coming into existence.

1993

*An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the USSR, thus reducing our interest in locating life forms on other planets.

1995

*Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.

1997

*The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and on Mars. Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments.

1998

'The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.

2000

* An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.

2010

*Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.