March 07 2008 / by futuretalk
Category: Other Year: General Rating: 9
By Dick Pelletier
By some fortuitous circumstance this writer was born on October
26, 1930, the day the government announced that world population
had exceeded two billion people, so I figure that was me.
In late 1920s, President Hoover announced that “Prosperity is
just around the 
corner,” but he could not have been more wrong. Unequal
distribution of wealth in the 1920s and runaway speculation on the
stock market was a formula for disaster – and the “Great
Depression” was on.
My five siblings and I were raised on a farm near Hermiston,
Oregon. Our home had no electricity and few modern conveniences. We
bathed in a small tub in the kitchen with little privacy, drank
water from a hand pump in the back yard, and made bathroom trips to
an outhouse.
In 1938 we finally connected to the electric grid and quickly
replaced the outhouse with an indoor toilet, installed electric
lights throughout the house, and built an indoor shower. And in
1939, another miracle arrived – our first telephone was installed.
The future was becoming incredible!
Jet travel didn’t exist in 1930; a five-day ocean trip was the
main way to go from America to Europe, and wireless meant the
wood-paneled Zenith radio in the living room.
But America’s mastery of the physical and biological world would
grow tremendously. Life expectancy soared from about 50 years in
1930 to nearly 80 today, and the Green Revolution transformed
agriculture, which now provides food for a world population that
exceeds 6.5 billion.
In late 1930s, President Roosevelt, emboldened by his “New Deal”
legislation which ended the depression, authorized the “Manhattan
Project”, an aggressive effort to build an atomic bomb and use it
to hasten the end of World War II.
Developing atomic energy led to nuclear energy and prompted a
demand for machines that could crunch numbers and arrange
information; this eventually produced the PC and Internet. Thanks
to advances like these, worker output in the U.S. increased an
average of 2% per year, raising our standard of living to the
highest in the world.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that computers
would double in cost/performance every two years. His correct
prophecy became known as “Moore’s Law”, and experts now predict
that all technologies advance exponentially.
So a fair question would be: “If over the last 77 years,
technology changed our lives so radically, what might we expect in
the future?” The following predictions offer some amazing
possibilities:
• By 2020. Regenerative medicine, the ability to use organs
built from stem cells and modified by genetic engineering, could
enable replacement of all body parts damaged by disease and
aging.
• By 2030. Molecular nanotech could provide replicators that
supply food, clothing, and necessities at little or no cost, and
nanorobots that rejuvenate cells, allowing middle-aged and elderly
people to regain their health, strength, and youthful beauty.
• By 2040. Robots with massive artificial intelligence systems
could outthink humans, sparking human-machine merges. Some refer to
this as becoming “transhuman”; others say it is simply the next
step in evolution.
Can this “magical future” become reality? Experts believe these
miracles will be driven by human needs and could happen in time to
benefit many alive today. Comments welcome.
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