"Report from the XXI century": a forecast of the future from Soviet scientists

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1957, the USSR published the book "Report from the XXI century", in which Russian scientists shared their forecasts for the future. 5 years later, an addition to the book appeared. Further, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the vision of our time by Soviet scientists employed in various industries more than 50 years ago.

Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Alexander Vasilievich Topchiev:

The thermonuclear power plant will become a reality until 2000. 20–40 years of effort is not a big price to pay for the ocean of energy that we get.

And I think: what mind-blowing successes radio electronics will achieve by the XXI century! We are now launching 50 new automated factories one by one. This is still an experiment. But 10–20 years will pass, and hundreds and thousands of automatic factories will operate. The path of automation is just beginning.

By the 21st century, oil and its associated gases will be used exclusively as concentrated chemical raw materials. As the world's oil reserves decrease and new energy sources appear, its combustion will decrease. Heavy oil fractions will be used more and more fully.

Plasma flow from a jet nozzle, which allows direct conversion of thermal energy into electrical energy, will apparently replace heavy steam and gas turbines in the coming decades.

The technology of the future has another feature: it is more and more implementation of automation.

There is no doubt that in the next two decades the overwhelming majority of industrial enterprises in our country will be automatic and automated. First of all, those industries will become automatic where mass production is required or where human labor is extremely hard.

It seems to me that standard automatic factories will appear, producing bread, candy, fabrics, shoes, clothing, from industrial products - bearings, gears, whole gearboxes, etc. Of course, underground work of miners will be fully automated. A person will only occasionally go down the face to repair the mechanisms.

Automata - including cybernetic automata - will enter people's everyday life. "Home" machine, first specialized, and then more and more universal, to which you, leaving for work, give orders to wipe the dust in the apartment, wipe the glass, cook dinner. In the evening, such an automaton will read aloud to you a newspaper or a book, and, perhaps, select literature on the subject of your interest. I think the first such machines will appear not even in the 21st, but in our century.

Submachine guns will be the first in further space exploration. They will "land" on the moon, on Mars, on Venus before humans. They will be the first to overcome the asteroid belt and break through to the large planets of our solar system. They will fly so close to the Sun as a man can never approach.

There are planets, such as, for example, Jupiter or Saturn, on which, perhaps, a person's foot will not even set foot in the direct, and not in the figurative sense of the word. Their research can only be carried out by automata. Powered by nuclear energy, extremely reliable automatic exploration beacons for centuries and millennia will transmit by radio information about what is happening on the shaky bottom of the methane atmospheres of these planets. But after the automata, wherever possible, a person will come.

Academician Ivan Pavlovich Bardin:

The blast furnace of tomorrow will be fully automatic. Its work will be controlled by an electronic computer, which has received an appropriate "action program" for all possible cases of deviation of the process from the calculated one.

In the coming years, the metal production process will become continuous. Pig iron will be continuously supplied from the blast furnace. Oxygen will be blown through the hot stream of newly smelted cast iron - a hot flame will rise over the bathtub in which this process will take place. The flame will carry away excess carbon, sulfur, phosphorus - all those impurities that degrade the quality of the metal. It is no longer a stream of cast iron, but steel that will pour into the chill molds of a continuous casting machine. And after leaving the chill molds, steel ingots will immediately go to the rolls of rolling mills and turn into products. Such a continuous technological process is easier to automate than today's intermittent one.

A person will "design" with the help of radioactive influence alloyed steels of the required composition, without introducing rare and expensive alloying additives into them, but creating them directly in a ladle of molten steel from atoms of iron, carbon, maybe sulfur and phosphorus, maybe from atoms a common element specially added to the melt for this purpose.

You can imagine it like this. A bucket filled to the brim with splashing steel moves. For several tens of seconds, he stops near a car similar to those used in medicine for the treatment of malignant tumors with X-rays. A lead pear with a source of radioactive radiation of the required composition hidden in it bends over the ladle, and in the bowels of the melt, under the influence of the beam of rays, the most complex nuclear transformations take place.

After a few minutes, the steel is poured into molds, but its composition is no longer the same as it was quite recently. And for a few more days - already in solidified steel - this composition will change, the chemical composition of the metal will change under the influence of its own radioactivity caused by irradiation. Probably, in the same way - by changing the structure of atomic nuclei, by artificial transformation of elements - it will be possible to obtain ores of rare and scattered elements. Perhaps a whole branch of industry will appear - radiation metallurgy, which will be engaged in the manufacture of rare chemical elements from more common ones.

Director of the Podzemgaz Research Institute Ivan Semenovich Garkusha and his deputy for scientific affairs Nikolai Ananievich Fedorov:

In mines from coal, we will receive only gas from underground gasification. Energy-technological complexes of underground gasification, in which the most economical complex use of gas is carried out, will be especially widespread.

Academician Stepan Ilyich Mironov and Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Matvey Alkunovich Kapelyushnikov:

There is already a well with a depth of 6-7 thousand meters. These wells produce oil, which means that it can be at a greater depth. Whether in search of oil or in pursuit of other fossil resources, we can confidently say that in the 21st century, the depth of wells will reach 20 kilometers. In all likelihood, wells of such a depth will be able to penetrate either turbo and electric drills or drills operating on completely new principles - with the help of high frequency current, ultrasound, directed explosions.

The drilling rigs will be fully automated. Dozens of them, standing over the oil field, can be controlled by one operator on duty. In front of him, on clear diagrams, not only a horizontal field plan will appear, but also a vertical section of the earth's strata, the operator will see what depth and through which strata the drill bit passes in each well. If necessary, he will give a command, and in front of him on the diagram, the well, straight like an arrow, will begin to bend, rushing to the very heart of the underground treasury.

But here the seam was opened. No, giant torches of burning petroleum gas - the most precious raw material and fuel - do not blaze in the wind. It is captured to the last drop by special devices. Some of the gas is burned to produce soot, a product that is extremely important for a number of industries. The heat released during combustion also does not disappear: with the help of semiconductor thermoelements, it is converted into electric current used for the internal needs of the oil field.

Valery Ivanovich Popkov, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences:

By the beginning of the XXI century, we will already generate about 20 thousand billion kilowatt-hours per year.

In the total energy balance, the share of thermal power plants will decrease from 85% in our time to about 50%. Not only hydroelectric power plants will squeeze the heat power industry - in my opinion, they, together with the new possibilities of "permanent" or renewable energy sources, will not be able to provide more than 10-15% of the country's energy production. Nuclear power plants will become much more serious competitors. By 2007, they will generate at least 40% of all electricity.

Academician Nikolai Vasilievich Tsitsin:

New wheat hybrids will emerge that will solve the food problem forever.

When we crossed wheat and wheatgrass, we had to preserve grain with the beneficial taste of wheat, raised over millennia by countless generations of farmers. And from the wheatgrass it was necessary to take the ability for a long-term lifestyle and fruiting.

When this idea was first proclaimed, many scientists were very skeptical about it. But there were also people who supported me.

Today we already have dozens of perennial wheat-wheatgrass hybrids that give yields of good, good, high-quality grain.

- Here, - said the academician, showing us the ears. “This is not wheat or wheatgrass. These are completely new types of cultivated plants. It is - you see - nothing like skinny, fine-grained wheatgrass. However, it is not dense wheat: its grain is better than that of wheat. See for yourself.

Wheat ripens from the bottom up. First, the stem begins to turn yellow, then the ear also ripens. Perennial wheat ripens from top to bottom. The ear ripens first, while the stem and leaves are still green.

Imagine that millions of hectares have been sown with such wheat. In autumn, the harvesters will remove the dry, ripe ear and then separately remove the rest of the mass, still green. Here you will already get not straw, but much more valuable as a fodder for livestock - hay.

Wheat is highly susceptible to many diseases. Perennial wheat almost never gets sick. The grain of common wheat contains 14-15% protein, while perennial wheat contains 20-25%.

Today we have hybrids from crossing elimus (another wild cereal from the semi-desert zone) with rye, barley, and wheat. Now we have set the task of obtaining new varieties of cultivated plants - rye, wheat, barley, in an ear of which there would be not 20-30 grains, as now, but at least 200-300 grains and more. And then, I am convinced, varieties will be obtained with an even higher content of grains per ear - up to 700-800.

Academician Sergei Alekseevich Lebedev:

Libraries will be invented - the transmission of any literary, historical, scientific information - is carried out on individual orders using television devices. A person will not be able to burden his memory with a mass of unnecessary technical information. He will be helped by the "memory" of the so-called information electronic machines. At the first request, the machine will find the desired cell and set in motion a tape recorder, on which not only sound, but also an image is recorded.

A huge amount of information will be stored in the archives - film libraries of the library center, and electronic machines will "remember" each piece of millions of magnetic tapes, each microfilm.