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You have probably never heard of John “Bud” Benson Wilbur, but he is a low-key civil engineering legend. In the mid-20th century, he was chair of the civil and sanitary engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He built some major bridges in Massachusetts and helped prototype the first wind power systems in Vermont. But I first encountered his work in a silly-but-serious essay called “Whither civil engineering?”, published in the March 1952 issue of The . In it, Wilbur claimed he and his colleagues had invented a crystal ball for seeing the future called the Paynterscope.

The Paynterscope, Wilbur wrote, revealed the distant-future world of 1977. Africa had become a Wakanda-like paradise full of farms, clean rivers and high-tech systems for weather control and water management. The US was criss-crossed with conveyor belts for rapidly transporting freight, while roads were surfaced with a sustainable, durable version of rubber, making the infrastructure more resilient. A transit tunnel whisked cars below the English Channel (yes – he predicted the Chunnel). There were dozens of other gee-whiz inventions, but most of them were like these: improvements to old, bog-standard tech to help humans stay comfortable and healthy.

At one point in his essay, Wilbur described his co-authors using the Paynterscope to peer into the future waterways of the US. They exclaimed happily: “Don’t those streams and lakes look fine? No more pollution!” By the 1970s, they imagined that engineers would have figured out how to treat sewage quickly and cheaply.

Wilbur’s humble, self-satirising style of futurism is a stark contrast with our current era, where cutting-edge engineering projects are generally pitched as ways to maximise profit for corporations and optimise or eliminate human labour. Wilbur’s vision shows us science serving the public good.

He spent most of the 1950s working with a colleague at MIT, Robert Hansen, on that could withstand the blast of an atomic weapon. Wilbur made joking reference to this in his article, describing looking through the Paynterscope to see how many of their buildings survived into the 1970s. To his surprise, he discovered that few were in existence and that it “appeared atomic warfare was no longer a major consideration”.

Wilbur concluded that this, too, could be credited to good civil engineers: by the 70s, he imagined that advances in civil engineering would have increased sustainable energy and food supplies, improved the environment and created resilient public transport to distribute resources globally. “All of these activities had contributed directly to a higher standard of living throughout the world, and thus had helped to remove one of the major causes of war,” he wrote. Living in the aftermath of war, Wilbur wanted to build a better world – literally – using resource abundance to steer people away from violent conflict.

Interestingly, Hansen wrote his for The Technology Review, years later in 1967, where he suggested a different solution to resource scarcity: using genetic engineering to create “small man”, tiny people who used less food and energy. This idea, in , became notorious as an example of odious futurism, focused on controlling people’s bodies instead of making it easier for them to thrive in the bodies they have.

Unfortunately, a lot of futurism today sounds more like Hansen’s “small man” essay than Wilbur’s fanciful musings. Venture capitalists, who are essentially economic futurists, are hyping artificial intelligence with the promise of shrinking human creators down to nothing. Silicon Valley’s billionaire leaders are investing in separatist, libertarian “” run on cryptocurrency, while neighbouring areas experience housing shortages and drought.

Wilbur’s long-forgotten essay offers us a different way of thinking about what comes next. The mind-blowing engineering achievements of tomorrow could involve cleaning up the environment and making healthcare, housing and transport work brilliantly for everyone.

In the 1960s, Wilbur retired to Woodstock, a village on the border of New Hampshire and Vermont. He lived there until his death in 1996 and stayed active by creating a summer programme for civil engineering students who wanted to try their hands at solving real-world problems in an actual town.

For Wilbur, good engineering offered the promise of a healthy life, without war, on a planet with clean water and plentiful food for the public. It isn’t glamorous, and it probably wouldn’t get the big venture capital money. But it might just help us build a better world.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, the tale of a badass warrior and her giant attack bird.

What I’m watching

I’m checking out @coyoteyipps, or Janet Kessler, who has been photographing urban coyotes in San Francisco for almost two decades.

What I’m working on

Some essays on the history and future of futurism.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com