Word: notionally
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...World War I that scientific advances had also produced better engines of death and destruction turned speculation about the future excessively sour. Bellamy's radiant city became the high-tech slave societies of Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis. Aldous Huxley perfected the notion of dystopia in 1932 with Brave New World, and George Orwell weighed in with his haunting classic...
...starters, rockets will go the way of the dinosaurs. Future spacefarers will look back on the notion of sending people (or anything precious) aloft on huge, lumbering towers of flame and smoke as primitive, brutal and notoriously unreliable. Before the next millennium is very far along, humans will get their lift from space planes that take off and land like conventional jets but are powered by "scramjets" that, once aloft, will enable them to swoop into orbit or go halfway around the world in two hours. Cargo will be shot into orbit by electromagnetic rail guns that ramp...
Such questions implicitly challenge the notion of progress, which is usually taken to mean there is no such thing as enough. The prospect of a world in which people voluntarily agree to set limits on their acquisitive appetite bears little resemblance to what is conventionally understood as progress. But then neither does the prospect of a world in which unparalleled affluence coexists with frightful depths of misery and squalor...
...been guided unerringly up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, ordained by natural...
...received a new name: World War I. The roaring 1920s and the Depression years of the 1930s proved to be merely a lull in the fighting, a prelude to World War II. Largely hidden during that war was an awful truth that called into question progress and the notion of human nature itself. Even now, the Holocaust -- an industry set up for the purpose of slaughtering human beings -- remains incomprehensible...