15 Hilarious Predictions About the Year 2020 Made Long Ago

We’ll finally make it to Mars.

We’ve been dreaming of putting humans on Mars for as long as we’ve known the red planet existed. However, it’s only recently that the venture has started to feel even remotely realistic.

And yet, in 1997, Wired magazine’s Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden picked the date 2020 as the year when “humans arrive on Mars.”

They also had some specific ideas about how it would go down exactly: “The four astronauts touch down and beam their images back to the 11 billion people sharing at the moment. The expedition is a joint effort supported by virtually all nations on the planet, the culmination of a decade and a half of intense focus on a common goal.”

Ah, sounds nice, doesn’t it? (Except for the “11 billion people” part—we have enough trouble with our current 7.7 billion.)

In the go-go ’90s, we had every reason to believe them. But we’re not so optimistic now that Mars tourism is in our immediate future.

Even NASA projects that the earliest we could get a human on the surface of Mars is 2030, and that’s only if we’re really, really lucky.