Posted on 12/28/2003 10:41:58 PM PST by Utah Girl
Predicting the future can be tricky. That is because many of us have a hard enough time understanding the present.
One hundred years ago this week, the New York Times wrote an end-of-the-year editorial summing up the most important events of 1903. It was a long, rambling essay that took up most of a page and attempted to cover every aspect of life from foreign affairs to industry and the labor movement.
One section was titled, "Invention and Discovery." The author meandered for awhile about the discovery that year of radium and its possible benefits to mankind. Then, near the end, as an afterthought, he writes this:
"Transportation has profited little from the Zossen high-speed experiments in Germany and still less from the persistent attempts at aerial navigation, in which no useful progress has been made or can be considered 'in sight.' "
No useful progress?
The Zossen experiments were attempts to get an electric rail car up to 110 mph or more on a specially built track between the suburbs of Berlin and the town of Zossen. A century later, we do, indeed, have bullet trains, but we don't stage lavish re-enactments of Zossen the way we did two weeks ago near Kitty Hawk, N.C., when the world recognized the greatest achievement in transportation, which happened to fall in the now-momentous year of 1903.
It was momentous only in retrospect, of course — the way the day you met your spouse likely became important as a life-changing event only a long time later. But today it all seems so obvious, and the Times seems so obviously oblivious. Or perhaps arrogantly oblivious. The Times hadn't reported on Wilbur and Orville's success until Dec. 26, and then threw it on an inside page, noting, "They claim that they have solved the problem of aerial navigation." It was as if the Wright brothers were just another in a long line of self-promoting hucksters to be considered, if at all, like tonic salesmen at a carnival.
For the record, the Deseret News put the Wright brothers' flight on the front page the day after it happened, stating matter-of-factly that "A successful trial of a flying machine has been made . . ." But our editorial writers were equally as nonplussed as the ones in New York, albeit with a touch more optimism.
Our end-of-the-year editorial put the year's research in color photography ahead of flight, then added this piece of embarrassment: "According to all accounts, Dr. Alexander Graham Bell now has the framework of an aeroplane strong enough to lift a man, and it weighs but twelve pounds. He feels certain that he has solved the problem of human flight . . . "
Mr. Watson, come here! I want you! What's the area code in Kitty Hawk?
The point of all this is not to demonstrate how clueless editorial writers are. Judging by many of your letters, that's a point that hardly needs illustrating. It is to show how the present often is shrouded in ways that make it difficult for us to see. When Elizabeth Smart was found, a lot of people felt it had been so obvious. Suddenly, dozens of people remembered having seen her veiled figure walking around. But each had been blinded at the time by hidden assumptions and personal preoccupations. So it is with the way we daily see the events unfolding around us.
This is the week each year when a lot of people pause to look back on the passing year and peer forward through the fog of time not yet spent. We seldom get it exactly right on either count. And yet, predictions are important. They tend to point the world in the direction its current inhabitants would like to go. They articulate dreams as well as values, and they serve as a good barometer of our collective optimism. They say more about who we really are than they do about the people of the future.
A newsletter from the World Future Society arrived on my desk this week. It catalogs some of the official predictions of today. Books could disappear completely from the globe, unless the world finds a way to continue protecting intellectual property; ocean-current turbines, not windmills, will provide the electricity of the future; business and commerce will flow to areas of the United States that are the most tolerant of gays and lesbians; and we could soon learn how to engineer longer lives for humans. That's just a sampling.
Given what we know of the past, there may be kernels of truth to some of these. But the real big news of 2003 could have happened in someone's garage or basement laboratory, and we just don't know about it yet. And once we see it, the future will suddenly look a lot different.
That's the lesson of the past 100 years. Frankly, it gives a lot of reason for hope this New Year's Eve.
People never see the future until it walks up and slaps them in the face.
Human Genome Project, MEMS, Cloning, Brain-Machine Interfaces Program and nanotechnology. Add to that some UN Global Governance, some Islamist terrorists and rouge supranational corporations. You got the plot for a good book, but sneak peak through the window to the future.
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