General Motors' "Futurama II" (1964)
At the 1964-1965 World's Fair in New York, General Motors made a second attempt at predicting the future, even though its previous attempt 21 years earlier had already been proven by time to be well off the mark. "Futurama II" covered its bets by claiming to depict life in a vague "near future," rather than a specific year. One portion of the exhibit depicted an undersea city (with structures that looked a bit like a larger version of "Monsanto’s House of the Future"), existing on the ocean floor 10,000 feet down. Another section displayed a roulette wheel-shaped lunar base and a six-wheeled, flexible vehicle that astronauts could use to navigate the crater-filled surface, while yet another showed a 15-lane superhighway traveled by computer-controlled cars. But the most fantastic part of Futurama II was a 900-foot-long, five-story-high atomic-powered road-building machine, which would use a laser beam and chemical defoliants to clear a mile-long swath each hour through the Amazon jungle. Fortunately for that region’s endangered rain forests, such a technological marvel has yet to come to pass.
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