9 Seriously Bizarre "Future Predictions" From The 1900s

8. Prevent Natural Disasters... With Manmade Disasters

In the wake of increasingly unpredictable weather, we could do with a technology to control the potentially damaging storms that Mother Nature keeps flinging our way.

Writers for Popular Mechanics in the 1950s had a novel idea for storm control:

It is easy enough to spot a budding hurricane in the doldrums off the coast of Africa. Before it has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain.

As much as this sounds as though it was lifted straight from BP's book of "101 Reasons Why Oil Spills Are Actually Super Good", scientists at MIT actually had a similar idea in 2002. As in 1950, their idea involved covering the ocean in a layer of oil.

The MIT crowd didn't quite take the extra step of setting the ocean on fire (wimps),but hoped that the oily layer would prevent water droplet formation.

Aside from the fact that disrupting key parts of the water cycle was bound to have pretty colossal consequences, it was argued that hurricane strength winds would simply blow the oil away anyway.

Who knows, perhaps the idea will come back around again in another 50 years or so.