I was cheated. When I was growing up, I remember being enthralled about the incredible possibilities for the future. In my trusty Popular Mechanics and on television, I was told that when I grew up I would be driving my own personal flying car, robots would take care of my every need, and war would cease to exist. What happened? Where is my speedy flying car, my trusty robot and my sense of security? Now I find myself reading the same predictions for the 21st century, and I’ve got to tell you that I’m a bit skeptical.
Predicting the future is not an easy task. There are certainly trends that can be extrapolated into the coming decades, but every once in a while there is a technological advance or sociological transition that unpredictably revolutionizes our world. Civilization has never been the same since the splitting of the atom. The computer has transformed almost everything we do. And the fall of the Iron Curtain caused all of our maps and our mind-sets to be radically revised.
The ancient prophets are said to have been uncommonly accurate with their predictions, but in reality their prophecies were pretty safe bets. Most of them said in one way or the other that if people didn’t behave themselves all hell would break loose. Governments would fall, war would rage, natural calamities would occur. So what’s new? I certainly would be willing to prophesy a multitude of those same phenomena in the 21st century.
But I suggest we make it a little more challenging. My favorite futurist is Gentry Lee, a science fiction novelist, space systems engineer, computer product designer, and a television writer and producer. Lee was a NASA engineer who worked on the Viking Mission, which was the first robotic spacecraft to land on another planet. He was also chief engineer for the design of the Galileo spacecraft, which is still in orbit around Jupiter. And, to top it off, he was a partner to Carl Sagan in that incredible television series, “Cosmos”. Lee is also the author of a nonfiction book called “The History of the 21st Century” (will be published in summer of 2001), which I heard him speak about at Chautauqua Institute last summer.
This morning I want to tell you what Gentry Lee and some other futurists have to say about the 21st century. But first of all, we need to make a little attitude adjustment. Imagine yourself on a roller coaster called the 20th century. Recall the incredible changes that took place in those one hundred years, and the acceleration in change that occurred as the century advanced. Remember too the difficulties your grandparents and parents had trying to keep up with the transitions, as well as your own difficulties programming your VCR and learning Windows.
Well folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The roller coaster called the 21st century will be going much faster and higher, as well as doing flips every now and then. Life as we know it today will be transformed more in the 21st century than it was in the 20th century by a substantial amount.
Gentry Lee tries to get us to look back on the 21st century as if we were living in the 22nd century. What would stand out for us? It certainly wouldn’t be anything as trivial as Monica Lewinsky or hanging chads or even the inauguration of a new president.
Probably the most revolutionary change in this next century will be that after 4 ½ billion years of evolution, humanity learned how to control the process of evolution itself. The mapping of the human genome is just the first step that will redefine what it means to be human. We have only an inkling of an idea what the impact of genetic engineering will be. In addition, there is nothing we can do to stop this revolution from taking place. Pandora’s box has been opened, and there is no way we can put the lid back on.
What impact will genetic engineering have on our lives? We can expect that it will make our lives easier in many ways. In the year 2030 for instance, when you do your grocery shopping, you will sit in your living room and have every product holographically presented to you. But what you will see will have only a vague resemblance to what we see today. In fact, you would only recognize about 5% of the items since most every thing you eat will be genetically engineered.
This is a gigantic and risky experiment we are engaged in. We are tampering with 4 ½ billion years of evolution which has resulted in our species. Before we begin genetically changing everything on this planet, we should stop and question what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what the impact will be. We should also create another Noah’s Ark where we can preserve seeds from every existing plant and DNA from today’s animals because the plants and animals we are used to day, may never exist again. We do not know what is coming in the future, and so we need to take every precaution we can.
The biggest changes in genetic engineering will have to do with the two ends of life, the beginning and the end. Human reproduction is now capable of being totally transformed. The technology is just around the corner, as evidenced by the monkey named ANDi that just became the first genetically altered primate. Let’s reflect on what human reproduction will be like in the 21st century.
In 2025 your granddaughter has just conceived three days ago. A cell is removed and analyzed by a computer with huge data banks that will be able to give her and her partner a histogram – that is a distribution of likely outcomes -- concerning their child.
The histogram will include the gender and a statistical description of likely height and weight -- depending on different nurturing regimes -- as well as a likely mathematical aptitude, musical aptitude, and about every other kind of aptitude you can imagine. The parents will also be given the odds of the child having different diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.
In 2050, your great-granddaughter will have a different experience. She and her partner will go to a design counselor who will harvest between 500 and 1000 of her eggs and then take a specimen from the young man. Several hundred of the eggs will be fertilized, and then the entire extended family could visit the design counselor together to look at the statistical proclivities of all the possible offspring and probably be involved in the decision of which child will come into being. Can you imagine Uncle George lobbying for the child to be a tennis pro and Aunt Ellen throwing a fit when the likelihood of the child’s ballerina career is sacrificed for the possibility of being a CEO?
Now for your great-great-granddaughter. In 2080, she and her partner will go to a “Design My Child” booth at the local kiosk. They will be asked if they want the short form -- which is the quickest but riskiest -- the medium, or long form -- which may have more than one thousand questions. After processing the form, the couple will be told at a debriefing that there is an 89% statistical likelihood of all criteria desired being met if a specimen is taken from a particular Norwegian fisherman and an egg from a housewife in Mozambique. An analysis may also determine that the mother is 92.4% likely to carry the child to term, so it is recommended that a surrogate with a 99.9% likelihood of delivering the child, be used. The parents can then pick up their customized child in nine months.
Let me reiterate: we may not like this way of reproduction, but it is going to happen whether we like it or not. Our task is to decide how we can best use this technology for the benefit of society. There will be many ethical decisions that must be made along the way. Some will be more trivial, such as the popularity of fads. What if parents want all their daughters to look like Cindy Crawford and their sons to look like George Clooney?
Other decisions will be much more difficult and important. For instance, which traits would you check for when planning a child? Would you check genes for a trait like laziness? How about conformity? Or even aggressiveness? What would happen in a society where certain traits were eliminated whole scale?
Just look at a country like India where females are being aborted in mass. What if you had a society where artists were eliminated by gene selection because they were not economically productive? A government could even genetically create a population of obedient followers so that firing squads would not necessary. These are just some of the thousands of ethical questions we will need to struggle with in this next century. And we better start getting ready for them now.
There will also be many ethical questions about the end of life. Perhaps as early as 2050, or at most by 2080, people will only die of accidents or total systems failure. Doctors will eradicate terminal illnesses through improving and replacing genes.
We need to be asking questions now about the ethical, sociological, and philosophical ramifications of such a reality because this is happening very quickly. My children and their contemporaries may be living in a world where death could be postponed virtually indefinitely.
One result of this technology would be that the whole idea of a retirement age will go out the window. People will also be forced to wrestle with the realization that life may not be worth living forever. The right to die will be a necessity in the future so that people can decide for themselves whether their quality of life, as we become more dependent on machines to keep us alive, will be so unsatisfying that we may not want to continue our existence.
We can also expect enormous changes in the medical world. Aside from constructing artificial limbs which are stronger and more precise than the real thing, scientists will be able to grow skin tissue and organs for transplant.
Soon, about 2020-2025, each of our bodies will be injected with around 150 tiny probes, invisible to the naked eye, that will constantly monitor our physical condition. Each probe will have a recording device that will tell you and your doctor if there is anything outside of tolerance.
Space travel is certainly one fantasy many of us have about the future. We’ve seen so many Star Trek episodes that we may expect in the near future to warp around the cosmos and encounter other life forms. But will we meet little green men in the 21st century?
There are a variety of opinions by different futurists, but Gentry Lee -- even though he is a science fiction writer as well as a space engineer -- is skeptical. The first problem is that we will not be able to travel to other planets outside of our solar system in this century and probably for many more to come.
The obstacle of course is the speed of light which is -- in spite of Star Trek mythology – impossible to achieve. You can never be where you are right now at any other time in the past or the future, or the entire system would collapse. And we wouldn’t want that to happen.
So if we can’t go there, why can’t they come here? Even though Lee believes that there is extraterrestrial life, the likelihood is that it is far more advanced than we are, and so any self-respecting alien would be reluctant to hang out with such inferior creatures who are so stupid that they are destroying their own planet. If an alien life form does decide to contact us, then you can throw all the other predictions out the window, because such a contact would so radically and unpredictably change our future.
If genetic engineering is the most revolutionary change of the 21st century, then the destruction of our environment is the biggest danger. We must stop the unprecedented environmental damage that humanity is causing or else we will not survive as a species into the 22nd century.
Gentry Lee tells us that there is only one way that the human species can guarantee the survival of our environment. His solution is a simple one: for every product produced, the manufacturer must pay the cost of leaving the environment in an essentially equivalent level of benign state. When a car is manufactured, imbedded in the cost of the car would be the energy used to produce it, the cost of totally recycling it when the car is of no more use, and the cost of cleaning up any environmental damage caused by the car. This extra environmental cost would quickly lead to the development and use of effective planet friendly technology.
There are no other options. We are doing something much worse than leaving budget deficits for future generations. We are accruing an enormous environmental debt for our children and grandchildren to clean up at some time in the future. We need to make absolutely certain that our major priority will be to protect and preserve our environment, or there will be nothing to predict for our future.
In terms of geopolitics, there will be a new world order in the 21st century, which we can see developing now. By the middle of the century the four major world powers will be China, a monolithic Islam, a unified Europe and North America. Everything else will shift in terms of relationship to these great powers.
Taiwan and the Middle East will continue to be hot spots, but there is an increasing possibility that nuclear war will occur between Pakistan and India. Hopefully the world will learn from that disaster to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Another political danger in the future will be the widening gap between the wealthy and impoverished both in our nation and the world. The convergence of technology will create a bimodal population in which it will be easy for those with skills and education to earn a good living but virtually impossible for those with low intelligence and little education to be employed.
By 2030 any American who has thought processes below the average high school graduate will never work a day because there will be no positions that will require that little capability. All menial work will be done by machines and computers. No one will work at McDonald’s within a decade, except for the engineers who keep the machines functioning.
This will create an enormous sociological problem. If the haves of our society ignore this increasing bimodal reality, history tells us that they do so at their own risk. We must find ways for people to live productive, fulfilling lives no matter what their capability. And we must help everyone to meet their full potential by providing their basic health needs and a vastly improved educational system.
Overpopulation and starvation will remain long-term crises as long as we allow worldwide poverty to exist. If we could optimally plant crops throughout the world today without interference of political systems, we could feed 100 billion people and do no additional damage to the environment. Famines are not a result of overpopulation but the result of political systems that make food a resource rather than a right.
Studies show that populations stabilize once a society reaches a certain level of economic development. If our nation can learn to share the great wealth we are hoarding as well as our technological knowhow, we can put an end to the crises of overpopulation and starvation in the 21st century. But if we continue on the road to globalization with corporations running the world like a giant Microsoft, then ongoing warfare and rebellion will embroil the planet in destruction.
In the religious realm, I predict that there will be a growing ecumenical movement that will bring together many Christian denominations and world religions to learn from each other and to try and solve the critical problems of our future. But at the same time, the fundamentalist movement will also grow in most of the religions of the world, creating a widening division and tension that could result in more religious warfare.
I’ve touched on just a few of the changes we can expect in the next century. It sounds pretty frightening, doesn’t it? And yet it will be incredibly exciting as well.
Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future? I confess that I am optimistic – in spite of all the problems I’ve presented. When we look at the big picture, not just the next century but back over billions of years of time, we can see that each one of us is a creation of the cosmos, stars forming and exploding, sending stardust across the cosmos to create the beings we are today.
In the words of Gentry Lee, “You and I and every living thing on this planet is a miracle. We are chemicals risen to consciousness with the ability to look backward to understand where we came from and forward to comprehend what we might become in the future. Whether we believe in a creator God or not does not take one thing away from the miracle that we are. This miracle has evolved to such a stage that when faced with the difficulties of the 21st century, if we use our greatest talents, loving and learning, we shall overcome.”
-Amen and shalom!
