It's amazing how the The Simpson have predicted the future, for example, about 19 years ago, the show predicted that Donald Trump would become U.S. President. And there are other times when the show has predicted the future.
After airing for nearly 30 years, “The Simpsons” have aired themes that have occurred in real-life events, and even more so, plotlines have eerily predicted events in the world.
One prediction was Homer discovering the Higgs boson to animators drawing The Shard in London nearly 20 years before being built.
And there are 18 more predictions in the show:
1990: Bart catches a three-eyed fish named Blinky in the river by the power plant, which makes local headlines. In real life about a decade later, a three-eyed fish was discovered in Argentina, that was fed by water from a nuclear water plant.
Another episode from 1990 called “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge” aired Springfieldians protesting against Michelangelo's statue of David exhibited in a local museum claiming the statue obscene due to its nudity. In July 2016, Russian campaigners voted to clothe a copy of the Renaissance statue that was set up in central St. Petersburg.
From 1991, the episode “The Simpsons” aired The Beatles' Ringo Starr answering fan mail written decades ago. In September 2013, two Beatles fans from Essex received a reply from Paul McCartney from a letter sent to the band more than 50 years ago. It was sent to a London theater the ban was supposed to play at but was found years later in a car boot sale by a historian. The BBC's “The One Show” reunited the pair with the letter along with McCartney's reply.
The 1993 episode “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying an Love Legalized Gambling), in which magicians are viciously mauled by a trained white tiger performing in a casino. In 2003, Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy was attacked during a live performance by Montecore, one of their white tigers. Horn survived but sustained severe injuries.
In a 1994 episode, Lunchlady Doris used “assorted horse parts” in the students lunch at Springfield Elementary. Nine years later, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland found horse DNA in one-third of beefburger samples from supermarkets and ready meals, and pig in 85% of them.
A 1994 episode had school bullies Kearny and Dolph taking a memo to “beat up Martin” on a Newton device. The memo is translated to “eat up Martha” – foreshadowing autocorrect frustrations. “The Simpsons” lampooned Apple's underwhelming Newton's iPhone's ancestor – just released, including shoddy handwriting recognition, according to Fast Company. Former director of engineering iOS applications at Apple, Nitin Ganatra, told Fast Company this episode gave inspiration to get the iPhone keyboard right.
“The Simpsons” aired an episode about a watch that could be used as a phone in 1995, about 20 years before the Apple Watch was released.
The episode titled “Lisa's Wedding” in 1995 had a few unexpected predictions, for example, Lisa's trip to London, showed a skyscraper behind Tower Bridge eerily similar to The Shard, and even more weird is it's in the right location. Construction on the building began in 2009.
“Lisa's Wedding” also showed librarians replaced by robots in a 'Simpsons' universe. 20 years later, robotics students at University of Aberystwyth built a prototype for a walking library robot, and scientists from Singapore tested their own robot librarians.
A 1998 episode titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” showed Homer Simpson as an inventor working a complicated equation on a blackboard. The author of “The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets,” Simon Singh, explained it as the mass of the Higgs boson particle, that was first predicted in 1964 by Professor Peter Higgs and five other physicists, but it wasn't until 2013 when scientists discovered proof of the Higgs boson in a ｣10.4 billion ($13 billion) experiment.
Yet another prediction was the 2014 outbreak of Ebola 17 years before. The episode “Lisa's Sax” has Bart reading a book with the title “Curious George and the Ebola Virus.” While the virus wasn't well-known in the 1990s, it would hit top news later when it was first discovered in 1976, the latest outbreak killed 254 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 and 224 in Uganda in 2000.
The 1998 Simpsons episode “When You Dish Upon a Star” aired Ron Howard and Brian Grazer producing a scripted pitched by Homer. Being produced at 20th Century Fox, a sign in front of the studio's headquarters showed it was “a division of Walt Disney Co.” And sure enough, on December 14, 2017, Disney purchased 21st Century Fox for an estimated $52.4 billion acquiring Fox's film studio (20th Century Fox), as well as a bulk of the television production assets. Disney also has access to popular entertainment properties like “X-Men,” “Avatar,” and “The Simpsons.”
The 1999 Simpsons episode aired Home using nuclear energy to create a hybrid tomato and tobacco plant, calling it the “tomacco.” Inspired by “Simpsons” fan Rob Baur who wanted to create his own plant, Baur grafted the tobacco root and tomato stem to make the “tomacco” in 2003. impressed by Baur, the show invited Baur and his family to the offices to eat the tomacco fruit.
“The Simpsons” aired the 2008 episode where Homer was voting for Barak Obama in the US general election and a faulty machine changed his vote. Yet four years later, a voting machine in Pennsylvania was removed after it was revealed to change people's votes for Barak Obama to ones for Republican rival Mitt Romney.
The 2018 Winter Olympics showed the U.S. Curling team winning the gold over Sweden. It was predicted in the 2010 episode of “The Simpsons,” “Boy Meets Curl,” where Marge and Homer Simpson compete at the Vancouver Olympics beating Sweden. In the real world, the U.S. Men's Olympic Curling Team did win the gold medal after defeating Sweden despite being behind. It played out the same way on “The Simpsons” episode with the victory being the second curling medal for the United States, but not including Marge and Homer's).
MIT professor Bengt Holmstrom wins the Nobel Prize in economics in 2016, six years after the show bet on the win of the Nobel Prize. Holmstrom's name appears on a betting scorecard when Martin, Lisa, Database, and Milhouse bet on Nobel Prize winners.
In 2012, in Springfield Lady Gaga performed a show hanging in midair. And five years later, she flew off the Houston NRG Stadium roof when she performed in the Super Bowl halftime show.
The episode of “Game of Thrones,” Daenerys Targaryen shocked fans when she and her dragon were laid to waste to the surrendered King's Landing, obliterating thousands of innocent people. In 2017, a season 29 episode titled “The Serfsons,” spoofed aspects of “Game of Thrones” where the Three-Eyed Raven and the Night King, Homer revives a dragon that decimates a village.
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