The Future is Then

Arthur C. Clarke never considered himself a prophet, but it’s still a little bit striking that the world we live in today bears so little resemblance to the world he envisioned in his futuristic novels. The year 2001 brought us a nasty and protracted conflict with international terrorists–not a space odyssey. And if 2010 is the year we make contact with anything more exotic than contaminated wheat gluten, we’ll be doing better than expected. But then Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t bring us George Orwell’s hellish vision of Oceania, either, so maybe we should count ourselves lucky.

In his review of Daniel H. Wilson’s Where’s My Jetpack?, Salon.com’s Simon Reynolds pines, along with the book’s author, for the utopian future that never came:

The obvious landmarks of tomorrow’s world never materialized: vacations to the moon, 900 miles per hour transatlantic trains hurtling through vacuum tunnels. But the absence is felt equally in the fabric of daily life, the way that the experience of cooking an egg or taking a shower hasn’t changed in our lifetime …Wilson’s talk of space elevators and other grandiose inventions like solar mirrors or the fully enclosed city indicates how our expectations of the “futuristic” have undergone an insidious scaling down in recent decades. Mostly, “the future” seems to infiltrate our lives in a low-key, subtle fashion. In their own way, the miniaturization of communications technology (cellphones, BlackBerrys, etc.) and the compression of information (iPods, MP3s, YouTube, downloadable movies, etc.) are just as mind-blowing as the space stations and robots once pictured as the everyday scenery of 21st century life. Macro simply looks way more impressive than micro.

But sometimes macro isn’t such a great thing, as MSNBC’s Michael Rogers explains in his review of Eric and Jonathan Dregni’s Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future. In the midst of Dregni’s discussion of 1950s-era advertisements for frightening products that were once on the horizon, such as radioactive suppositories that were to bombard every organ of the body with “its health-giving electric atoms,” is a warning for future futurologists:

By the end of Follies of Science, any modern technologist is bound to start wondering: Are our current predictions about the future any smarter than the endless parade of goofiness and gullibility that Follies of Science gleefully enumerates? Maybe those concerns about the health implications of nano-materials or genetically-engineered food aren’t quite as unwarranted as the manufacturers would have us think. And perhaps the grand expectations of how genetic technology will improve humankind and extend our lives by decades aren’t nearly as imminent — or likely — as popular books and articles predict.But of course we know far more about science than they did 50 years ago, don’t we? Yes — in just the same way that the hapless futurists in Follies of Science knew far more about science than did their counterparts at the turn of the last century.

Much of what you read on this blog will turn out to be every bit as implausible as nuclear-powered flying cars–but some of it will one day be as plausible as airplanes, as videophones, as robots, as space travel, as cures for polio, malaria, and tuberculosis. And we have absolutely no way of knowing, right know, which predictions will fall into which category. In many instances, our best guesses are wild guesses. Fortunately, those are also the most interesting guesses.

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