Atoms on the Ground

The Black Mirror on the Wall

Mara: Twenty eleven. Peter Thiel's investment company, Founders Fund, publishes a manifesto, and it opens with a question: “What happened to the future?” Its argument is that innovation is slowing. Thiel boils it down to one line: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Grand machines on one side, social-media startups on the other. And the complaint wasn't new to him. He said 2011 was the first time he wrote about it. He'd been talking about it for three or four years before that.

Eli: Which is the doorway to the listener's question. Black Mirror paints a grim future. So of the predictions made fifty years ago, what came true, and what was incredibly off? Today's angle is why the 1970s nailed our screens but missed flying cars.

Mara: We'll follow Thiel as he keeps asking where that future went, from a manifesto to a Washington podium to a podcast, and lay his complaint over what people in the mid-1970s actually forecast. The flying cars are on that list. What stays open for a while is why one kind of future showed up and the other never did.

Eli: The show's title points at the kind that showed up. Its creator wrote that the black mirror is the one on every wall, every desk, in every palm: “the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.” That's the shift in what scares people. Not a machine that crushes anyone. A screen that watches, sorts and keeps score.

Mara: So the dread moved from being destroyed to being watched and ranked, through glass people chose to carry.

Eli: And ranked by each other. The episode “Nosedive” runs on a rating that decides who gets in where, and real systems echo it, from Uber ratings to China's social credit system. A Guardian writer reviewing it argued ratings can deepen old inequalities, with some people “downrated just because their ratings are already low.”

Mara: Whether the forecasters of fifty years ago simply missed the screens, or lost the flying cars to something else entirely, is where this starts.

The Flying Cars That Never Arrived

Eli: Thiel's flying car is the oldest promise on the list. Predictions that commercial flying cars were about to arrive showed up in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and over and over through the 2010s. It still hasn't happened. The holdup is physical engineering hurdles, the stubborn stuff of materials, cost and safety: a personal aircraft has to be safe, quiet, cheap and practical all at once, and so far it can't manage all four.

Mara: The 1970s wanted to go down, too. One futurist of the era predicted artificial cities beneath the oceans.

Eli: Kids bought it. A student writing in 1976 guessed that by 2000 people “might be living under the ocean.” Then hedged hard the other way: “Maybe they have horses instead of cars, trucks and airplanes.”

Mara: Covering both bets. That same futurist also had human cloning arriving by the mid-1980s.

Eli: Another 1976 student went all the way: “We will have a robot teacher, a robot maid, and all workers will be robots, too.” Every one of those is a body doing physical work. That's the kind of future that kept slipping.

Mara: The biggest blueprints went up, not down. In the mid-1970s, a Princeton physicist laid out plans for self-sufficient habitats in orbit. His table of stages put the first community at ten thousand people. Its earliest estimated date was 1988. Roughly two decades from drawing board to a small town in space. Next to that, an undersea city sounds modest.

Eli: 1988 passed without a town in orbit, or one under the sea. Why that kind of future stalls is where Thiel goes next, Mara.

The Wall of Atoms and Rules

Mara: October 31st, 2016. The National Press Club in Washington. Thiel, who usually prefers working behind the scenes, steps up to explain his support for Donald Trump. He describes a nation in steep decline and deep debt. Then the line: “For a long time, our elites have been in the habit of denying difficult realities. That's how bubbles form.”

Eli: Here his target is denial at the top.

Mara: And in conversations from around then, his tally is lopsided. Computers, he says, have seen a lot of progress. Biotechnology made some, then seemed to decelerate. Space travel and transportation, the same. The big dreams of the 1950s and 60s, reforesting deserts, underwater cities, fusion, new kinds of nuclear power, all have, in his words, a “retro future feel.”

Eli: So the undersea cities aren't late. They're vintage.

Mara: His explanation is bits versus atoms. Bits are information, code that lives on a chip and travels down a wire. Atoms are anything that has to be built, flown or swallowed. In 2014 he put it bluntly: bits are “quite unregulated,” atoms “very heavily regulated.” His example is Microsoft in 1975. Nobody from government checked that code for how safe or dangerous it was. A biotech company, he said, faces “massive regulatory barriers all the way through.”

Eli: Rules are only one wall, though. Physical technology also has to deal with materials, safety, infrastructure, economics and real-world edge cases. Any of those can make development much slower, regulator or no regulator.

Mara: On Thiel's account, code slipped through while hardware hit every wall at once. Whether anyone in the 1970s saw that digital world coming, rather than just stumbling into it, is a separate question.

Silicon’s Two-Year Miracle

Eli: Some of them saw it in detail. In 1976, Arthur C. Clarke described a home device: a high-definition TV screen with a typewriter keyboard. Messages from friends waiting in the morning. People seeing each other, swapping pictures, data, books. Two years earlier, an essay imagining the world of 2024 pictured “a single global telephone and videophone system,” reached through “individual miniature-computer terminals.” Forecasts of that era had home screens doing the banking, the shopping, the reservations.

Mara: That's messaging, video calls and online shopping, sketched out in the mid-1970s.

Eli: And there was a clock behind it. Moore's Law: Gordon Moore's forecast for how fast chips would pack in more parts. In 1965 he projected a doubling every year. In 1975, with new data, he revised it to every two years. That pace held for decades. One picture of where it led: in 1975, the fastest supercomputer cost five million dollars. Today a four-hundred-dollar iPhone could do as well.

Mara: Which changes Thiel's 2011 line. The 140 characters weren't a failure of forecasting. They were the forecast, arriving on schedule, on code nobody was checking.

Eli: While the forecasts made of steel and water waited on money, materials and rules.

Mara: Clarke went further than the desk. Speaking in 1976, he said a wristwatch telephone would be technologically feasible very soon. The telephone would be “completely mobile.” And he expected it to save thousands of lives every year.

Eli: He even gave Dick Tracy credit for the wristwatch radio.

Mara: Then came the catch. Anyone could reach anyone, any time. Switch off the call signal, he said, and there might be some explaining to do later. He expected these devices to change social life as much as the automobile and the telephone had, “in many ways negatively.” The cold screen in every palm, called in 1976.

Eli: Why is still open, Mara, and Thiel has a theory.

Trapped Inside the Screen

Mara: July 11th, 2025. Thiel sits down for a podcast interview, and his old claim comes up again: technological stagnation. Stagnation here means the physical world, energy, transportation, manufacturing, medicine, has barely moved, while software, data and networks raced ahead. He isn't alone. The economist Robert Gordon makes a version of the same argument, with the slowdown starting around 1970.

Eli: Bits and atoms again, now with a start date. Elsewhere he listed what's missing: supersonic travel, space travel, new energy, new medicine.

Mara: And his explanation reaches past regulation. He points to “something in the culture that's changed that makes us less ambitious, more risk-averse, more scared to try to do things.” He reads the jokes as a symptom: people “throwing virtual cats at each other on the Internet.” The humor, he's said, hides “how trivial it is, how small it is.” He's “far more worried about the lack of good technologies than the danger of evil.”

Eli: That's his link to the dread. On his reading, the trouble with the screens isn't that they're too powerful. It's that all that computing went into small things.

Mara: That's one reading of the record, the one Thiel and Robert Gordon hold: forecasters oversold energy, aerospace and physical automation, and underrated how fast networked computing would spread.

Eli: The other reading runs through Arthur C. Clarke and Gordon Moore, the two whose forecasts just came true on our list. On digital networks, microprocessors and even remote work, the 1970s got it right. Computing was the era's strongest suit.

Mara: Underneath sits an older fight, about limits. One camp of critics reads the 1970s warnings that oil, food and minerals would soon run out as debunked, beaten by substitution, innovation and efficiency. The other camp includes Dennis Meadows, who says that when The Limits to Growth came out in the 1970s, he was naïve to think scientific data alone would change how people acted. He and a later researcher who checked that model against fifty years of data read the deeper warnings, about overshoot, climate and planetary boundaries, as sound and playing out now. Whether physical progress returns before those limits bite is still argued.

The Verdict of Fifty Years

Eli: So, the scorecard, starting with the heavy stuff. Supersonic passenger travel was supposed to become normal. Concorde never got cheap enough for the middle class, and its service ended in 2003. As of September 2026, commercial supersonic service still hasn't come back.

Mara: Same with the Moon. A Washington Post science reporter who covered Apollo died in 2003 without seeing anyone go back. No one has, since 1972.

Eli: Fusion is the long one. In 2026 it still isn't a normal source of grid electricity. The Department of Energy's roadmap from June 2026 aims for a fusion pilot plant, a first plant built to show fusion can actually make power, in the mid-2030s.

Mara: And even the hits came with delays of their own.

Eli: Take the office. In 1975, Xerox PARC's research director told Business Week, “There is absolutely no question that there will be a revolution in the office over the next 20 years.” A terminal and keyboard on his desk. Files on the screen. “I can get my mail or any messages.” The screen part came true. The paperless part took far longer. Office paper use actually climbed through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, and only dropped off sharply by the 2020s.

Mara: The phone started heavy, too. The first handheld mobile call was made in 1973, on a two-pound brick. It gave thirty minutes of talk. Charging took ten hours.

Eli: To the listener's question, then. What came true: networked home screens, messages and video between friends, shopping and banking at a distance, a phone in nearly every pocket. What was incredibly off: flying cars, cities under the sea, towns in orbit, cheap supersonic flights, fusion on the grid, robots doing every job. The forecasts that rode the chip arrived, because computing power doubled every two years. The ones made of metal, fuel and bodies ran into stubborn walls of cost, rules and physics.

Mara: Which turns Thiel's 2011 line inside out. The flying cars were the miss. The 140 characters were the hit, sketched in the mid-1970s. What's left to watch is whether fusion, geothermal or robotics finally breaks the stall in the physical world. And whether pushback from people and regulators on lifelogging, smart glasses and neural interfaces shows a society that refuses to be recorded by its own screens.

Eli: Look into bits versus atoms.

Mara: Follow technology with us as we track whether physical innovation catches up.

Eli: I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Thanks for listening to Angle. Until next time.