As Seen in the Omaha World-Herald: What Will 2126 say About Us? / Name the Bad Actors
What Will 2126 Say About Us?
In 1926 a homemade rocket flew 41 feet and landed in a cabbage patch. Forty-three years later,
men walked on the Moon. What are we shrugging at today that our great-grandchildren will
take for granted?
“The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.” — Mark Twain, Following the Equator
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ne hundred years ago this autumn, Charles
Lindbergh had not yet flown across the
Atlantic. That flight was still six months
away, and the experts were not sure it could be done.
In most American kitchens the “refrigerator” was an
icebox, and the iceman still made his rounds. The
electric refrigerator was a luxury few families had
ever seen.
The miracle of the age was the radio — a wooden
cabinet that pulled voices and music out of thin air.
This very month, November 1926, a new outfit
called the National Broadcasting Company signed
on, stitching local stations into a national network.
Families gathered around the set the way we now
gather around our phones: mesmerized.
THE WORLD WITHOUT
A baby born in America that year could expect to
live to about 57. There was no penicillin; Alexander
Fleming would not notice the mold on his petri dish
until 1928. A scratched knee could turn into a
funeral. Polio emptied the swimming pools every
summer. Insulin was only four years old. Nobody
had heard of DNA.
THE ROCKET IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
That March, on his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn,
Massachusetts, a physics professor named Robert
Goddard lit the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. It
flew for two and a half seconds, climbed 41 feet, and
came down in a cabbage patch.
Six years earlier, the New York Times had
ridiculed Goddard in an editorial, suggesting he did
not understand high-school physics. The paper got
around to correcting itself on July 17, 1969 — the
day after Apollo 11 left for the Moon. Forty-three
years from cabbage patch to Tranquility Base.
“The dream of yesterday is the hope of
today and the reality of tomorrow.”
— ROBERT H. GODDARD
And the story is not over. This past April, Artemis
II carried four astronauts around the Moon and
farther from Earth than any human beings have ever
traveled.
WHAT ONE CENTURY BOUGHT US
According to the CDC’s final figures, an American
baby born in 2024 can expect to live 79 years — the
highest in our history. That is more than twenty extra
years of life, handed to us by vaccines, antibiotics,
clean water, and people whose names most of us
never learned. Smallpox is gone from the face of the
earth. Gene therapies now rewrite the faulty DNA
behind sickle-cell disease. The phone in your pocket
holds more computing power than the machines that
guided Apollo.
T H E L E D G E R : 1 9 2 6 → 2 0 2 6
1926 2026
Life expectancy About 57 years 79 years (record)
Atlantic crossing No solo nonstop
flight yet
About 7 hours, with a
movie
Highest rocket 41 feet 252,000+ miles out
(Artemis II)
Infection No antibiotics Routine cure
Keeping food
cold
The iceman A fridge in nearly
every home
“High tech” The radio Artificial intelligence
Here is the lesson worth sitting with: almost
nobody in 1926 predicted any of this. When the
experts were wrong, they were usually wrong by
guessing too small.
THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS
So let us dare to guess — knowing we will probably
err on the timid side.
Health. Many cancers treated like infections, with
vaccines built for one patient’s tumor. Organs
grown in a lab instead of waited for on a list.
Alzheimer’s stopped before it steals a single
memory. A child born this year in Des Moines
may well be here to read about 2126.
Space. A permanent base on the Moon. Footprints
on Mars. Metals mined from asteroids instead of
mountainsides.
Energy and the farm. Iowa fields that grow food,
fuel and power at once. Perhaps fusion — the
energy of the sun — on the grid.
Machines. Artificial intelligence is our
generation’s radio: thrilling, a little frightening,
and not yet understood.
THE PART THAT NEVER CHANGES
Now the harder thought. The same radio that brought
symphonies into farmhouses also carried
demagogues into them. The rocket that took us to the
Moon descended from the one that fell on London.
Every great invention is an amplifier. It makes louder
whatever we bring to it — our wisdom or our worst
instincts.
The gadgets of 2126 are beyond our imagining.
Whether they serve the people will depend on things
that have not changed since 1926, or 1776: honest
institutions, a free press, the rule of law, and citizens
who can tell truth from noise. Technology answers
the question “Can we?” Only character answers
“Should we?” — and “For whom?”
A QUESTION TO TAKE HOME
We look back at 1926 and wince at the bloodletting,
the iceboxes, the children lost to an infected scratch.
What will our great-grandchildren wince at when
they look back at us? Who is today’s Goddard,
laughed at in the papers? And what are we building
now that they will thank us for?
THE DREAM OF YESTERDAY IS THE HOPE
OF TODAY.
BUILD THE TOMORROW YOUR GREATGRANDCHILDREN
WILL THANK YOU FOR.
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Sources: CDC/NCHS Data Brief No. 548, “Mortality in the United States,
2024” (Jan. 2026); NASA and Clark University archives on Goddard’s March
16, 1926 launch; NASA Artemis II mission reports (April 2026).
Honesty Reporting · Brent Lambi, Publisher & Editor · honestyreporting@outlook.com · 402-619-7074
All opinions and articles herein are solely those of Honesty Reporting LLC.