When the Daily Mail's Science Editor Michael Hanlon was growing up, comic books and TV shows of the time depicted the 1990s as being a time of flying cars, robot servants and people living on the Moon in great cities.
In the 2000s, still none of these things has come to pass. So when WILL the future start?
Tomorrow's World it ain't! The fantastic innovations we were promised never materialised... so when WILL the future arrive?
By Michael Hanlon
20th November 2008
Daily Mail
Like millions, I grew up with a future that never arrived. The films and TV shows of my childhood, like those comic book and magazine stories, depicted an exciting new world that lay just around the corner.
This was a shiny, yet strange, future in which, by the Nineties at the very latest, we were all supposed to be going on holiday in orbit and living on the moon.
Movies set in a 'future' that was often not far away usually featured robots capable of satisfying our every whim, park-like cities with no traffic in which the leisured classes would stroll around in shiny jumpsuits, getting their meals in the form of a pill.
Many of us grew up with a future that promised exciting innovations, such as flying cars
That was one future, an optimistic tomorrow that looked a bit like Milton Keynes. But there was another, darker one running parallel to this fantasy.
This was the chilling world of the apocalypse. Here, we had book, movie and TV fantasies of a world ruined by atomic war, nightmare dictatorships, genetic meddling and over-population.
Today, of course, we still fret about global warming and intercontinental plagues. And although the helpful robots, jetpacks and flying cars may never have materialised, our future is possibly even more pessimistic than the ones of my childhood.
In a new book, I address two big questions facing us today: first, is it the case, as everyone assumes, that The End is nigh, with climate chaos, disease and famine round the corner?
And, if not, then what is our future going to be like? Could we, contrary to all popular wisdom, be facing a future that is dizzyingly long?
But first, what happened to that old future, the one of flying cars and robot servants?
In so many ways, the reality has been a letdown. Someone or other in California has been promising a flying car for the past 30 years - but it never seems to materialise.
And the robots of reality turn out to consist of cute toys and automatic vacuum cleaners which almost, but not quite, work as promised.
Manned space exploration - the staple of so many future fantasies - has also ground to a halt. I cannot fly to the moon; they are not even sending professionals to the moon any more.
Ten years ago, you could fly to New York in three hours, but with Concorde grounded even this is no longer possible.
Fictional robot Wall.E: The helpful robot servants we were expecting have never materialised
And yet, on a more subtle level, our world is extremely 'futuristic'.
No flying cars, but the average British schoolchild has access to more computing power in his bedroom than was available to the whole of Nasa in the early Sixties - in many ways, a more impressive achievement.
The contraceptive Pill has changed more lives than a Moonbase ever would have done. And a black man as the U.S. President and openly gay Cabinet ministers would have seemed like science fiction in the decade they sent men to the moon.
That's today, then, but what of tomorrow? It has become received wisdom, of course, that there will be no tomorrow. I have lost count of the
endless doomsday scenarios: nuclear war, global plagues, pesticides, a new Ice Age, rampant over-population and now, of course, global warming.
Without resorting to unrealistic optimism, I think a note of caution is needed here.
Ten years ago, the world got in a tizzy about a new threat, that of the Millennium Bug. This computer glitch, a consequence of the date changing to a two and three zeroes, was supposed to cause planes to fall from the sky, power stations to shut down and even trigger World War III.
In fact, the world spent between a third of a trillion and a trillion dollars combating the bug - money which ended up mostly in the pockets of computer consultants.
There was, of course, no Millennium Bug, at least not one which could destroy civilisation. It was all a fantasy, fuelled by our suspicions of technologies we do not understand and our peculiar desire to imagine Armageddon around the corner.
The story of the bug illustrates that we should always question the assertions of those who insist the world is on the verge of destruction.
Take climate change. It looks as though a compelling case can be made that human activity is warming the world and, furthermore, that we should do something about it.
But will it be the end of the world? I doubt it. My guess is that climate change will turn out to be an expensive and sometimes deadly nuisance, one of many problems which will accompany a century of spiralling population (there will be an extra two to three billion people to be fed, watered and housed by the time I reach retirement age) and pressure on resources.
Say, just for argument, that I am right and we manage to survive global warming (as well as nuclear war, which is surely still the most plausible threat to our way of life and wellbeing); what then? Could we survive into countless millennia ahead, and what would this future really be like?
We are the first generation able to make conscious choices which could limit the choices available to generations to come.
Do we remove the Amazon rainforest, or not? Do we wave goodbye to myriad species, which once gone will be lost for ever? All these choices are in our gift and make the present a good time to start thinking about the long-term tomorrow.
I believe our future will be quite unlike those futures we imagined in the Seventies and, indeed, unlike the futures we imagine today.
One certainty is that, barring some truly catastrophic plague or war, our immediate future is going to be very crowded.
Chilling fantasy: The film 1984 depicted a darker future
The depressing possibility is that tomorrow will be a shabby, overcrowded version of today, with a few hyper-wealthy, high-tech enclaves surrounded by a growing sea of poverty, overpopulation, crime and squalor.
The most profound near-future changes will happen in the third world. Today, there are just less than a billion Africans; however, in a few decades, that number will double. Africa can barely feed itself now; with a billion or more extra mouths, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this continent faces a century of extreme misery.
As for those of us in the West, most of the houses our grandchildren will inhabit in the 2050s have been built already.
It is astonishing how durable much of the Victorian world remains, from the railway network and the London Underground to the sturdy redbrick of urban Britain. Much of the future will be reassuringly old-fashioned.
Equally, predictions about the death of the automobile have been exaggerated. Flying cars are absurdly impractical, as are many of the more down-to-earth alternatives to petrol and diesel that have been touted.
For most of the rest of this century, we will get around in much the same way we have been doing for decades. Hopefully, by the time oil runs out (or before it becomes too expensive to burn in car engines), we will have found an alternative, almost certainly electricity.
On the human front, most of the social revolutions that will happen will take place in those parts of the world where attitudes to women's and minority rights are stuck in the Middle Ages.
In the West, the life of leisure will, as ever, elude us (half a century ago it was widely predicted that we would all be working part-time by now). The truth is that we like work more than we care to think.
Guessing what precisely we will be doing to entertain ourselves a century or a millennium hence is pointless, but some things will never change; humans will remain the same gossipy apes we always have been. Wine, women and song will (figuratively) continue to drive social discourse until we go extinct.
The orangutan could become a treasure of the past
But some parts of our lives are ripe for revolution. Education, even in the rich world, is failing millions of children. Sooner or later this scandal will have to be addressed, and my guess is we will need to rethink the way we educate our children rather than simply throwing more money at the problem.
Similarly, our attitude to crime, too, is confused and ineffective.
Crime costs Britain about 5pc of its GDP; worldwide, the figure is much higher. It is likely that we will face more profound questions. For example, it is likely we will discover that certain people's brains are hard-wired to make them act violently or commit sexual crimes.
This could lead to grave legal and moral ramifications. On the one hand, it would remove culpability from some of the worst offenders. On the other, society may conclude that some people are simply too dangerous ever to be freed, even if it is not, philosophically, their 'fault'.
Of course, in all the discussion about our future, we cannot discount the possibility of so-called wild cards.
For decades, we have been broadcasting our presence into space via radio and TV signals. If there are any intelligent aliens out there with radio telescopes like ours, they probably know we are here.
It is just, remotely, possible that within my lifetime we may get the biggest shock in history and discover we are not alone. Then, nothing can be predicted as to what might happen.
Tragically, the world of the coming millennium will also lose many treasures. Whole ecosystems will undoubtedly be swept away by the tide of humanity.
We will probably have to say goodbye to the mountain gorilla and the orangutan, the snow leopard and the Bengal tiger, apart from those in protected reserves and zoos.
We will undoubtedly change, too. The geneticist Steve Jones claimed earlier this month that human evolution has stopped.
Maybe so, but the humans of a thousand, ten thousand, half a million years' time will surely not look exactly as we do. Racial mixing will mean the future is probably browner, and maybe healthier.
Dramatic advances in medicine may lead to 1,000-year lifespans and designer babies, but there still seems to be little appetite for these things. Predictions of a future full of perfect clones always ignore the fact that having babies the old-fashioned way is entertaining and cheap.
Equally, global warming may not kill us all (even nuclear war would not kill every human), but in 20 or 50 years' time we may perfect some ghastly new technology which could bring the great human project to an end.
Biologists say most species go extinct naturally, but the rules probably don't apply to one in possession of antibiotics and the Bomb.
Until our generation, thinking about the future always meant thinking, literally, about tomorrow. During my childhood in the Seventies, the Nineties seemed almost impossibly distant - paradoxically, far more so than the 2020s do today. Those three little zeroes of the Millennium were a barrier, a symbol of a new dawn - or a new nightmare.
Although we have passed that milestone, more or less safely, never before has the future seemed so vast and unknowable. The past is gone, so is the present - that future is all we have left.
• Michael Hanlon's book, Eternity: Our Next Billion Years (Macmillan, £15.99). To order (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.
dailymail.co.uk
In the 2000s, still none of these things has come to pass. So when WILL the future start?
Tomorrow's World it ain't! The fantastic innovations we were promised never materialised... so when WILL the future arrive?
By Michael Hanlon
20th November 2008
Daily Mail
Like millions, I grew up with a future that never arrived. The films and TV shows of my childhood, like those comic book and magazine stories, depicted an exciting new world that lay just around the corner.
This was a shiny, yet strange, future in which, by the Nineties at the very latest, we were all supposed to be going on holiday in orbit and living on the moon.
Movies set in a 'future' that was often not far away usually featured robots capable of satisfying our every whim, park-like cities with no traffic in which the leisured classes would stroll around in shiny jumpsuits, getting their meals in the form of a pill.
Many of us grew up with a future that promised exciting innovations, such as flying cars
That was one future, an optimistic tomorrow that looked a bit like Milton Keynes. But there was another, darker one running parallel to this fantasy.
This was the chilling world of the apocalypse. Here, we had book, movie and TV fantasies of a world ruined by atomic war, nightmare dictatorships, genetic meddling and over-population.
Today, of course, we still fret about global warming and intercontinental plagues. And although the helpful robots, jetpacks and flying cars may never have materialised, our future is possibly even more pessimistic than the ones of my childhood.
In a new book, I address two big questions facing us today: first, is it the case, as everyone assumes, that The End is nigh, with climate chaos, disease and famine round the corner?
And, if not, then what is our future going to be like? Could we, contrary to all popular wisdom, be facing a future that is dizzyingly long?
But first, what happened to that old future, the one of flying cars and robot servants?
In so many ways, the reality has been a letdown. Someone or other in California has been promising a flying car for the past 30 years - but it never seems to materialise.
And the robots of reality turn out to consist of cute toys and automatic vacuum cleaners which almost, but not quite, work as promised.
Manned space exploration - the staple of so many future fantasies - has also ground to a halt. I cannot fly to the moon; they are not even sending professionals to the moon any more.
Ten years ago, you could fly to New York in three hours, but with Concorde grounded even this is no longer possible.
Fictional robot Wall.E: The helpful robot servants we were expecting have never materialised
And yet, on a more subtle level, our world is extremely 'futuristic'.
No flying cars, but the average British schoolchild has access to more computing power in his bedroom than was available to the whole of Nasa in the early Sixties - in many ways, a more impressive achievement.
The contraceptive Pill has changed more lives than a Moonbase ever would have done. And a black man as the U.S. President and openly gay Cabinet ministers would have seemed like science fiction in the decade they sent men to the moon.
That's today, then, but what of tomorrow? It has become received wisdom, of course, that there will be no tomorrow. I have lost count of the
endless doomsday scenarios: nuclear war, global plagues, pesticides, a new Ice Age, rampant over-population and now, of course, global warming.
Without resorting to unrealistic optimism, I think a note of caution is needed here.
Ten years ago, the world got in a tizzy about a new threat, that of the Millennium Bug. This computer glitch, a consequence of the date changing to a two and three zeroes, was supposed to cause planes to fall from the sky, power stations to shut down and even trigger World War III.
In fact, the world spent between a third of a trillion and a trillion dollars combating the bug - money which ended up mostly in the pockets of computer consultants.
There was, of course, no Millennium Bug, at least not one which could destroy civilisation. It was all a fantasy, fuelled by our suspicions of technologies we do not understand and our peculiar desire to imagine Armageddon around the corner.
The story of the bug illustrates that we should always question the assertions of those who insist the world is on the verge of destruction.
Take climate change. It looks as though a compelling case can be made that human activity is warming the world and, furthermore, that we should do something about it.
But will it be the end of the world? I doubt it. My guess is that climate change will turn out to be an expensive and sometimes deadly nuisance, one of many problems which will accompany a century of spiralling population (there will be an extra two to three billion people to be fed, watered and housed by the time I reach retirement age) and pressure on resources.
Say, just for argument, that I am right and we manage to survive global warming (as well as nuclear war, which is surely still the most plausible threat to our way of life and wellbeing); what then? Could we survive into countless millennia ahead, and what would this future really be like?
We are the first generation able to make conscious choices which could limit the choices available to generations to come.
Do we remove the Amazon rainforest, or not? Do we wave goodbye to myriad species, which once gone will be lost for ever? All these choices are in our gift and make the present a good time to start thinking about the long-term tomorrow.
I believe our future will be quite unlike those futures we imagined in the Seventies and, indeed, unlike the futures we imagine today.
One certainty is that, barring some truly catastrophic plague or war, our immediate future is going to be very crowded.
Chilling fantasy: The film 1984 depicted a darker future
The depressing possibility is that tomorrow will be a shabby, overcrowded version of today, with a few hyper-wealthy, high-tech enclaves surrounded by a growing sea of poverty, overpopulation, crime and squalor.
The most profound near-future changes will happen in the third world. Today, there are just less than a billion Africans; however, in a few decades, that number will double. Africa can barely feed itself now; with a billion or more extra mouths, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this continent faces a century of extreme misery.
As for those of us in the West, most of the houses our grandchildren will inhabit in the 2050s have been built already.
It is astonishing how durable much of the Victorian world remains, from the railway network and the London Underground to the sturdy redbrick of urban Britain. Much of the future will be reassuringly old-fashioned.
Equally, predictions about the death of the automobile have been exaggerated. Flying cars are absurdly impractical, as are many of the more down-to-earth alternatives to petrol and diesel that have been touted.
For most of the rest of this century, we will get around in much the same way we have been doing for decades. Hopefully, by the time oil runs out (or before it becomes too expensive to burn in car engines), we will have found an alternative, almost certainly electricity.
On the human front, most of the social revolutions that will happen will take place in those parts of the world where attitudes to women's and minority rights are stuck in the Middle Ages.
In the West, the life of leisure will, as ever, elude us (half a century ago it was widely predicted that we would all be working part-time by now). The truth is that we like work more than we care to think.
Guessing what precisely we will be doing to entertain ourselves a century or a millennium hence is pointless, but some things will never change; humans will remain the same gossipy apes we always have been. Wine, women and song will (figuratively) continue to drive social discourse until we go extinct.
The orangutan could become a treasure of the past
But some parts of our lives are ripe for revolution. Education, even in the rich world, is failing millions of children. Sooner or later this scandal will have to be addressed, and my guess is we will need to rethink the way we educate our children rather than simply throwing more money at the problem.
Similarly, our attitude to crime, too, is confused and ineffective.
Crime costs Britain about 5pc of its GDP; worldwide, the figure is much higher. It is likely that we will face more profound questions. For example, it is likely we will discover that certain people's brains are hard-wired to make them act violently or commit sexual crimes.
This could lead to grave legal and moral ramifications. On the one hand, it would remove culpability from some of the worst offenders. On the other, society may conclude that some people are simply too dangerous ever to be freed, even if it is not, philosophically, their 'fault'.
Of course, in all the discussion about our future, we cannot discount the possibility of so-called wild cards.
For decades, we have been broadcasting our presence into space via radio and TV signals. If there are any intelligent aliens out there with radio telescopes like ours, they probably know we are here.
It is just, remotely, possible that within my lifetime we may get the biggest shock in history and discover we are not alone. Then, nothing can be predicted as to what might happen.
Tragically, the world of the coming millennium will also lose many treasures. Whole ecosystems will undoubtedly be swept away by the tide of humanity.
We will probably have to say goodbye to the mountain gorilla and the orangutan, the snow leopard and the Bengal tiger, apart from those in protected reserves and zoos.
We will undoubtedly change, too. The geneticist Steve Jones claimed earlier this month that human evolution has stopped.
Maybe so, but the humans of a thousand, ten thousand, half a million years' time will surely not look exactly as we do. Racial mixing will mean the future is probably browner, and maybe healthier.
Dramatic advances in medicine may lead to 1,000-year lifespans and designer babies, but there still seems to be little appetite for these things. Predictions of a future full of perfect clones always ignore the fact that having babies the old-fashioned way is entertaining and cheap.
Equally, global warming may not kill us all (even nuclear war would not kill every human), but in 20 or 50 years' time we may perfect some ghastly new technology which could bring the great human project to an end.
Biologists say most species go extinct naturally, but the rules probably don't apply to one in possession of antibiotics and the Bomb.
Until our generation, thinking about the future always meant thinking, literally, about tomorrow. During my childhood in the Seventies, the Nineties seemed almost impossibly distant - paradoxically, far more so than the 2020s do today. Those three little zeroes of the Millennium were a barrier, a symbol of a new dawn - or a new nightmare.
Although we have passed that milestone, more or less safely, never before has the future seemed so vast and unknowable. The past is gone, so is the present - that future is all we have left.
• Michael Hanlon's book, Eternity: Our Next Billion Years (Macmillan, £15.99). To order (P&P free), call 0845 155 0720.
dailymail.co.uk
