futurism

Here at PopSci, we spend our fair share of time marveling at fantastic visions of the future. So as a result, we know better than anyone how fun it can be looking back a few decades at the visions that flew a bit too close to the sun. And that's what this new series, The Future Then Video (inspired by our magazine's back page), is all about--taking a look back at retro visions of the future and seeing how their predictions panned out.

In our first episode, we're looking at an amazing promotional film that Braniff International made in 1975 to get customers excited about supersonic air travel.

Science geeks, Trekkers, and action-movie fans have now had a few days to digest the newest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise. PopSci set out to answer some of the movie's most puzzling questions (aside from what Winona Ryder was doing on Vulcan): Can we time-travel through black holes? Can we seed said black holes using something called "red matter"? How about teleportation -- will someone named Scotty (or Chekov) ever beam someone up?