When you hear about the concept of missile defense in space, your first thought might be Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly called Star Wars. But ideas for an invisible missile shield in the sky are much older than the 1980s. As just one example, we have this Sunday comic strip from 1959,…

Robotic lawnmowers are fairly mainstream these days, even if they don’t have much market share yet. But they’ve been a long time coming. We’ve been promised solar-powered semi-autonomous lawnmowers for decades. This Sunday comic strip from 1959 predicted the rise of these machines, but also pointed at the problem with…

It’s no secret that my favorite comic strip of all time is Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh. The strip is largely forgotten today, but it featured the very best of flying cars and jetpacks from the Golden Age of futurism. The pulpy time capsule ran in over 200 newspapers from 1958 until 1963, and ever since I…

According to futurists of the 1950s, people of the 21st century were all supposed to be zipping around in solar-powered cars, watching wall-sized TVs, and enjoying vacations on the moon. We were even supposed to all have our own yachts. Well, half a yacht at least.

The internet is a big place. There’s so much to read and watch and listen to that it can be overwhelming. We all have those stories that we start, get distracted for one reason or another, and promise ourselves we’ll finish later. Well, if any of those stories were on Paleofuture, here’s your second chance!

On January 12, 1958, an important weapon of the Cold War was introduced. It wasn’t a missile or a spy satellite, but rather a colorful Sunday comic strip that showed Americans what the future was going to look like. It was called Closer Than We Think.

Earlier this week astronauts aboard the International Space Station ate fresh food grown in space for the first time. It’s an exciting accomplishment and will be crucial for the survival of the first crewed missions to Mars. But it’s been a long time coming, as we can see from this 1959 comic strip depicting the…

These ads made for the Detroit-based Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation were largely dreamed up by legendary illustrator Arthur Radebaugh during the 1940s. Radebaugh's utopian visions and Bohn's desire to appear as a forward-looking company combine for a slick retrofuturistic view of transportation.

It's 2015. But sometimes it feels like our futuristic dreams are stuck in the 1950s and 60s. And there's actually a good reason for that.

The January 10, 1960 edition of Arthur Radebaugh's Sunday comic "Closer Than We Think" includes a curious invention that was supposed to literally catapult us into the Jet Age: The circular runway.

The technology of the future was going to provide all kinds of new possibilities for the classroom of tomorrow — including eliminating the classroom entirely. Interestingly enough, it would seem we're still chasing that dream.

Glow-in-the-dark roads are finally a reality; at least in the Netherlands. But we've been waiting on this particular vision of the future for quite a while now — for over 50 years, in fact.

There are few things more anxiety-inducing than seeing a cop car's flashing lights in your rearview mirror. But that terror probably would've been about a thousand times worse had this police car of the future from 1958 ever become a reality.

Worried that Earth may soon suffer from overpopulation and irreversible environmental damage? Worry not, my fellow passengers of Spaceship Earth! In the future, we'll just hop on our space-faring Mayflowers to go find habitable planets. At least that was the promise of this Sunday comic strip from 1959.

Imagine being able to send a Christmas card electronically. Sounds crazy futuristic, right? Well that's what this Sunday newspaper comic promised to the good people of 1960. Though it was a bit more complicated than the e-cards and emails we send today.

Palm trees and lower heating bills in Chicago? Bikinis and orange blossoms in Duluth? Back in 1958 these miracles were the promise of tomorrow, thanks to the hot new science of weather control. And once we learned to harness these forces that were once thought beyond humankind's reach, there was only one question…