Picture a machine that could break through gravity's stronghold to send man flying towards the moon. Or, perhaps, mechanical satellites that orbit the planet, bouncing signals from one faraway point to the next. Stretch the notion even further: space stations that—don't laugh—play host to a people looking for an "untethered" vacation.

Esquire imagined that future in April 1950. Reporting on percolating government projects and hush-hush advancements, John C. Ross' "Building Stations in Space" prepared people for a wave of innovation. "The average man was inclined to shrug his shoulders at this fantasy," Ross wrote. "But let this skeptic beware: the United States has for several years been doing intensive research into artificial moons, and all three branches of the Armed Services are now involved in different aspects of the program!"

In the piece, Ross asks a noble question "Why do men want to build artificial moons circling endlessly about the Planet Earth?" The answer is implicit to his question: Because. We here at Esquire love a good because.

Explorer XVII Satellite, 1963 NASA

Man, at his best, dreams. He's built for it. When the brain encounters an immediate threat or kink in life's chain, it can conceive an innovative solution. But at rest, our imaginations conjure illusory hurdles that catapult us into the future to rescue uninvented, life-changing ideas. It's our never-ending Promethean quest, swapping fire for sustainable energy. We want to fly… because. We want to breathe underwater… because. We want to breathe consciousness into our household objects… because. Pragmatics come later.

The future is forged in kicking back with a stiff drink and wondering. The doing comes later—a traditionally unfashionable exercise. Really, Leonardo da Vinci looked like a kook scavenging for bird carcasses, slicing them open, and designing flying machines based on the skeletons within. By all written accounts, Benjamin Franklin was a regular Martin Prince, full of answers and relentlessly dishing them out. Worth suffering through for the the Franklin "stove," bifocals, and meteorologic understanding. And if Twitter had been around when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla first experimented with electricity, the outrage thinkpieces would have deafened. To this day, people are still upset about that whole Topsy the Elephant mess. Remember the positives, lamp users.

That da Vinci, Franklin, Edison, Tesla and so many others synthesized their wishful thinking into practical applications is a miracle. As the American patent archives prove, there's a Grand Canyon of thought dividing inventive minds and honest inventors. This didn't stop everyone; the likes of Jules Verne, Georges Méliès, and Isaac Asimov produced "science fiction" to incept their visions into the mainstream. Technology could catch up to their future—they weren't waiting. Like everything, there's a threshold for this wonder, when predictive instincts start looking like cartoons. Nothing kills the buzz of progress faster than cash-grab "Products of the Future." For every tungsten-filament lightbulb there's a Yodeling Meter, the 1925 device that measured the pitch of human yodeling, or the quickest way to make everyone nostalgic for simpler times.

Yodeling Meter Hulton Archive Getty Images

We're happy to admit that Esquire never settled for the present (we have the archives to prove it). After World War II, the magazine embraced the culture of speculation, optimism, and interrogating. Sci-fi and sci-fact blurred, and so did the pages of the magazine. We investigated space travel, cybernetics, and "the Home of Tomorrow," and employed short fiction literary soothsayers like Ray Bradbury, George P. Elliott and Gerald Kersh to jump ahead of the curve. That instinct trickled down to its most far-reaching subjects. We've kept a finger on style trends since our inception, but in mid-20th century, an "Esquire Predicts" column dressed up the coverage for antsy audiences ready for The Future. Prediction remains a part of the Esquire legacy; when NASA eyes a trip to Mars, a billionaire hypes up the "hyperloop," or a group of Silicon Valley geniuses stumble upon the talking-refrigerator-you-never-knew-you-needed, we're there, asking questions.

This week, Esquire.com will tap into its past to tell stories of the future with the reintroduction of Esquire Predicts. During this look at looking ahead, we'll will unearth Walt Disney's forgotten plans to build a utopian city, pick the brain of the 2016 Election's only "Transhumanist" Presidential candidate, see how Dippin' Dots asserted itself as the ice cream of the future, and watch '80s pop rockers construct their own musical dystopias. We'll trace a line through the history of flying cars, smart homes, and future fashion styles to see what the greatest predictors got right and where their visions went delightfully awry. And then we'll make a few predictions of our own—it's only fair.

In "Building Stations in Space," Ross couldn't provide Esquire readers with all the answers. He witnessed an inevitable future and felt compelled to share. Seven years later, the Russians shot Sputnik into the sky, the world waved a green flag on the space race, and America went into rah-rah mode for What Could Be. It's a pride that ebbs and flows. In 2015, we're ebbing. Politicians are at each other's throats, the world on a constant brink of war, and climate change threatening to decimate everything under the sun. In turn, man stews in The Now. We think it's time to look ahead—or even better: remember how our fathers and grandfathers broke through troubled times to imagine the future. This week, Esquire.com throws wood on the Franklin stove that is your naturally predictive mind.

Kick back, grab a drink, and dream.

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Matt Patches Senior Writer Patches is a Senior Writer at Esquire.com.

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