Yes, these are actually face masks and nasal masks that people wear on the street.

When was the scene shot, 1973?

What is that supposed to be, the future of 2022?

Richard Fleischer's feature film “Soylent Green” paints a bad morning: New York has forty million inhabitants (it's actually eight and a half at the moment), you pay one hundred and fifty dollars for a glass of fruit mash (instead of eight dollars for a bottle of water, as here and there in the current one USA), and people are starving (instead of just a few artificial fertilizer supply shortages...).

Some food is supposedly made from algae, but in reality the oceans have already turned biotically, and dead people are processed into food (spoiler warning).

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the features section.

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The film exaggerates conditions from 1973 according to the pattern “if things continue like this” and therefore belongs to the realm of false prognoses, among other things because reality does not advance on lines without self-crossing, but in loops and loops, which is why it has been in the last few years of Up until the latest inflation news, “Fridays for Future” was a short repetition of the seventies - at the beginning of the decade in which “Soylent Green” was filmed, “there was a lot of talk about the limits of growth”, wrote Wolfgang Pohrt in a decade balance sheet, “ nature is gradually becoming limp. Soon the limits of growth were reached, but it was the economy, not nature, that sagged, and the energy crisis was a Middle East crisis. "

Even the greatest love of science and visionary art must acknowledge that what is to come does not always depend on what one knows. What you can do when things turn out differently than you might have known, then depends exactly on what you know. In 1973 the leading science of technical future management was energetics, there was a dispute over oil prices and nuclear power plants. Then the future marshal's staff went to computer science, which, incidentally, is itself the result of a false prognosis: Three hundred years ago, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prophesied that one day one would have a logical symbolic language, the

characteristica universalis

, which represents the whole of the world in relationships and the creation and testing of Truth claims can purely formally make, without recourse to experience.

Mathematics and metamathematics of modernity have recognized the project as impracticable; no such system of signs can be both complete and free of contradictions at the same time.

However, the computer emerged as a by-product of the need to clarify the notions of predictability on the way to the destruction of the hope that Leibniz had made for mankind.

Wrong prognoses are sometimes wrong reports

As soon as they existed, false predictions were made about them again; the most famous is the alleged assertion by IBM boss Thomas Watson in 1943 that there was a market in the world for at most five such things. This statement is often compared to an even more stupid one that Charles Duell, patent administrator in the USA, is said to have made around a hundred and twenty years ago: Everything that could be invented has already been invented. However, a serious archive check cannot prove that Duell said something like that, and neither can another prophet mistake who haunted the networks: Dr. William H. Stewart, US Secretary of Health from 1965 to 1969, is reported to have said the war on infectious diseases had been won, a sentence that is currently less well-refuted.