The Future

There’s been a lot of news of the future recently: things that sound as though they might be straws in the wind.

Just today in the paper was a report from a conference of scientists predicting that human beings should be able to expect a normal 1,000 year lifespan in about twenty five or fifty years. Probably just far enough off that I won’t be in on it, and that is perhaps just as well. I wonder what the emotional burdens might be of living that long.

It would certainly be a change. Can you imagine Michelangelo still being around, or Shakespeare? Even the English language hasn’t really been here so long as a thousand years—not to mention the Americas as we know them. The implications boggle the mind.

Also in the news a few places this last week was the idea of fully automated robot war. War with no human casualties.

At least on one side. All played like a video game from a safe distance.

I’m not sure this would hold in a life-and-death struggle between fairly evenly-matched enemies. At some point the robot screen would be used up and you’d be down to more primitive means.

What else? One of my own theories is that the General Practitioner is as dead as the dodo. It’s just that nobody has realized this yet. All any doctor but a surgeon does is diagnosis and prescription, and any decent computer program can do this better than a human can. All we need is computer terminals, pharmacists to fill prescriptions, surgeons, and the various lab specialties.

Save a huge amount of money too. And this is part of the dynamic that I think makes it likely. Doctors are vulnerable because they have made themselves so expensive. This increases the incentive to try to find an alternative.

And, with government-funded socialized medicine, it is governments paying the bills. That is a powerful and well-coordinated opponent if they decide to save this money.

World hunger? Truth is, we already have more food than we can eat. But future potential here, with genetic modification, seems infinite.

Genetic modification ought also to make it easy to produce all the cheap fuel we want: just engineer an organism that produces petroleum as a waste product, but feeds on any old given thing we do not want: corn husks, whatever.

Or trees. Worried about the loss of forests? Why not a genetically engineered tree that grows to maturity in six months?

The extermination of species? The Tasmanian museum just gave up an attempt to revive the extinct Tasmanian Tiger using old DNA and cloning, but still says it should be theoretically possible. It’s just that the particular DNA they were relying on has become to degraded for present technology. Give this technology a few years, and we should see lots of old friends back. Imagine zoos featuring dodos, mammoths, and passenger pigeons.

Many people still do not seem to realize that world overpopulation is not a problem. First, as noted, we have all the food we can eat. Second, world population is expected, on present trends, to level off at about 2050, then begin to decline.

Of course, this does not take into account the possibility of thousand-year lifespans suddenly entering the mix.

Nor does it take into account further plagues like AIDS. Note the ominous news of a new, drug-resistant strain.

The pendulum is now swinging fast in the US against “liberalism” and towards “neo-conservatism.” I expect this to spread fairly quickly to the rest of the developed world. I predict the Conservatives to win the next Canadian election, whenever it is held. Things that are now still risky to say will soon become received wisdom. Don’t put your money in environmentalism, gay rights, the women’s movement, or secularism.