The University of Calgary dug through newspaper archives to find out what people in 1923 thought the year 2023 would bring. Some are both inaccurate and strangely outlandish. Our ancestors looked forward to a four-hour work day - they were thinking about machines doing the work, but notabout how people could make a living wage working fewer hours.
Some predictions were sort of accurate. The US has 331 million people now, although we are having problems getting adequate household water to arid lands, much less irrigation. Another prediction was that newspapers would go out of business because of radio. It’s actually because of the internet.
And someone predicted war would be fought from a distance, which conjures up visions of our long-range missiles and drones. Other predictions were that cancer would be cured, Canada would have a population of 100 million, and there would be no ugly people left.
Who has killed the most people ever? This question is often answered with various leaders of nations or armies, like Hitler, Stalin, or Genghis Khan. While they might deserve the title, they only ordered those killings, which were carried out by many people.
The one person who murdered more people by his own hand than any other in history is Vasili Blokhin. He killed plenty of people in World War I, then for the Soviet Secret Police, then in World War II he both gave orders for mass killings and killed a horrendous number of people himself. In the worst episode, part of an operation to liquidate 20,000 Polish POWs, he personally shot more than 7,000 of them himself, one by one, over a 28-day period.
