Yesterday's Tomorrows: 1968-1998

Books that got the future right--and wrong

From the December 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 9)

Kahn turned out to be right about the boom, but most of the intellectual class is still burdened with an anti-progress ideology which remains a significant drag on technological and policy innovation.

As for the future, Kahn's Hudson Institute colleague Max Singer is one of the surest guides. If you want to know what the next 50 years will look like, check out Singer's Passage to a Human World (Hudson Institute, 1987). He makes the often overlooked point that poor people in the developing world can see their futures by looking at our present. And because poor countries have a road map to development, they will be able to grow wealthier and healthier much faster than we did.

One of the important legacies of Kahn and Singer is the insight that a bright future depends on first believing that such a future is possible. Overcoming the pervasive pessimism of the intellectual class is a major piece of work left for us to do in the 21st century.

Contributing Editor Ronald Bailey is editing Earth Report 2000: The True State of the Planet Revisited, which will be published by McGraw-Hill next spring.

Gregory Benford

Surely the most infamous attempt to predict the economic future was the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (Universe Books). In 1972 the authors could foresee only dwindling resources, allowing for no substitutions or innovation. The oil shocks soon after lent their work credence, but markets have since erased their gloomy, narrow view of how dynamic economies respond to change. A famous bet over the prices of metals decisively refuted the central thesis of The Limits to Growth in 1990: The prices had fallen in real terms, contrary to the Club of Rome's predictions.

Rather than looking at the short run, and getting that wrong, consider peering over the heads of the mob to trace instead long-run ideas that do not necessarily parallel the present. An example of this is J.D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (long out of print but available online at physserv1.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/Bernal), which examined our prospects in terms that seemed bizarre in 1929 but resonate strongly today: engineered human reproduction, biotech, our extension into totally new environments such as the deep oceans and outer space. This slim book found its proper and continuing audience long after its first edition went out of print, and among hard-nosed futurologists it is still considered a neglected masterpiece.

To my mind, the best way to regard the future is to listen to scientists thinking aloud, making forays into territories seldom explored in our era of intense narrowness. Prediction is speculation, but it often arrives well-disguised. Sometimes it is a brief mention of a notion awaiting exploration, as when James Watson and Francis Crick alluded, in the last sentence of their paper reporting the discovery of DNA's double helix, to the implications for reproduction: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

In similarly laconic vein, consider a slim tome of stature comparable to Bernal's, Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1997). Dyson in his lofty view shares an advantage with science fiction writers. Both are good at lateral thinking--the sideways swerve into future scenarios justified not by detail but by their intuitive sweep. Refusing to tell us how we get to their visions, Dyson and others take in a wider range of possibility than the hampered futurologists. "Science is my territory," he writes, "but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams."

In five admirably concise essays, Dyson takes us from the near past to the far future. Science and technology must progress through trial and error, he observes, while politics seeks to mandate outcomes and thus brings disasters. Dirigibles lost out to airplanes partly because of political agendas imposed upon them. The British Comet jetliner failed because management forced fast engineering results. Technology, then, must evolve through its own Darwinnowing.

Necessarily Dyson favors small science ("Tolstoyan") over big projects ("Napoleonic"). In our era of dwindling budgets, this seems the winning view. Luckily, small science governs in the crucial fields of neurobiology and microbiology, which will shape the next century. Attempts to impose big agendas on biology should be resisted.

Cleanly written, elegant in insight, this reflection by one of the great scientist-writers of our time beckons us to the far horizons of the human experience. Such vistas are more interesting, more inspiring, and ever more useful than the short views of the Club of Rome.

Contributing Editor Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent novel is Cosm (Avon Eos).

K. Eric Drexler

It was a great surprise when I realized that Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (Doubleday, 1964) had actually made a sound argument. In the early 1970s I had heard of its thesis--that low temperatures could stabilize otherwise hopeless patients for later repair--but this looked like a technical impossibility. Cells often revive after freezing, but never whole mammals.