|
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Sir Winston Churchill
 In
1932, Winston Churchill, who had a lot of time on his hands, what with
being in the wilderness and all, had a go at predicting what life
would be like in fifty years. Published as "Fifty Years Hence"
in the American magazine Popular Mechanics, Churchill
laid out his views on the distant world of 1982. Of course, this
being Churchill, his prose is strikingly eloquent and we're treated to
such turns of phrase as,
(Science) is a proud ambitious army that
cares nothing for all the laws that men have made; nothing for
their time-honoured customs, or most deeply cherished beliefs, or
deepest instincts.
This is rather a refreshing change from most
prediction articles written by men whose backgrounds were more
journalistic than House of Commons. Also, Churchill was enough
of an historian to put his predictions into contexts going back to
ancient Egypt and enough of a writer to invoke Tennyson.
So what did Churchill foresee? First off, an
ever increasing pace of change with science doing the changing.
In fact, he felt it had better do a heck of a lot of changing because
the world's population was becoming dependent upon it for survival.
He also saw an increasing thirst for and generation
of energy; particularly nuclear energy about which he said.
There is no question among scientists that
this gigantic source of energy exists. What is lacking is the
match to set the bonfire alight, or it may be the detonator to
cause the dynamite to explode. The Scientists are looking for
this.
And he had no doubt about the scale of it either.
Churchill felt that if it were properly harnessed, man would have
power great enough to literally shift continents at will.
 But
nuclear power wouldn't just be used for rearranging real estate on a
global scale. It would also, along with microbes and hormones,
revolutionise farming. No longer would food production be
dependent on the Sun and weather. Farms could now be located in
vast underground cellars where corn could be grown under artificial
lights while on the surface fields would give way to parks and gardens
as cities spread out to provide their inhabitants with open air.
And as for meat, why be so inefficient as to raise
the whole animal when you can just grow the cuts of meat you want?
As for artificial food, Churchill said that it
would be there, but he took care to reassure us that the food pill
would not be the end product. Instead, artificial food would be
indistinguishable from the genuine article.
Another major advance would be the perfection of
television. According to Churchill, communications would
be so efficient that there would be no point in travelling to any but
the most intimate of friends. Indeed, there wouldn't much
difference even between living in the country or the city.
This sounds all very utopian until you get to the
last paragraph where Churchill adds the squeeze of the lemon.
Among the other things that would be conquered by 1982 would be life
itself. If you wanted to know what man himself would be like,
you had two images. The first was of healthy babies enjoying all
the benefits of medical science. The other is that it will be
possible to create life along the lines of
Rossum's Universal Robots. Science would be able to grow
human beings and modify them however the scientists saw fit.
Then, with specialised training, they could be reared to suit whatever
specialised career of thought or labour had been assigned to them like
so many inmates of Huxley's Brave
New World.
Spiffing. We reach the millennium eighteen
years early and it's Gattaca! |
