Thread: 50 Years From Now, Big Brains Have Big Ideas

These are just predictions for the future, but I don't think any freedom loving American will like to here numbers 12 and 13!



50 years from now: Big brains have big ideas for what lies ahead


By CECELIA GOODNOW
P-I REPORTER

We'll live to be 140 -- if we don't kill each other first.

We'll still need oil.

Water will be scarce and AIDS will be eradicated -- along with a host of chronic diseases that will turn out to be the fault of Sylvester and Tweety Bird.

We'll even be able to e-mail products to ourselves and "print" them out at home.

That's a snapshot of life in 2058 as envisioned by 60 top thinkers whose short essays make up "The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today," edited by CBS newsman Mike Wallace, correspondent-emeritus of "60 Minutes."

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, as anyone who's laid odds on the Clinton-Obama race can attest. Projecting half a century is especially tricky, because change is accelerating and no one can foresee the "eureka" moments that propel science.

But leaders in medicine, technology and global issues -- including 15 Nobel Prize winners -- gave it a shot.

Contributors include Francis S. Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project; Ronald Noble, secretary-general of Interpol; Google Vice President Vint Cerf, often called the "father of the Internet"; and Kim Dae-jung, former president of South Korea.

A few other biggies: Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health; master inventor Ray Kurzweil, and economist Thomas C. Schelling.

"Some of these people are astounding minds," said Joel Miller, vice president and publisher of the business and culture division of Thomas Nelson books. "Some will be wrong and some will be right, but it's all fascinating stuff."

Wallace, pushing 90 and still recovering from a triple bypass, isn't out flogging the book, but his involvement was somewhat limited anyway. His role (apart from helping sell the book by putting his face and name on the cover) was "starting the conversation," as Miller put it, and vetting the contributors.

The essays vary in quality and some are more wishful thinking than prediction. Still, there are many thought-provoking ideas and some areas of consensus.

World population will soar from today's 6.5 billion to 9 billion or more, and globalization will accelerate -- lifting much of the developing world out of poverty. But greed, power-mongering and terrorism could lead to totalitarianism and loss of privacy.

So, while we can look forward to amazing technological leaps, the world's fate still comes down to human nature.

"The longer we live," Miller said, "the more thoughtfully we have to live in order to have a future on the planet. The real question is, What do we do with our choices?

"The singular value of a book like this is it starts the conversation, it starts people thinking. Imagining how we'll be 50 years from today is not as important as what we do today."


20 PREDICTIONS FOR 2058

[size=12]1. We'll all know our personal DNA sequencing, allowing medical treatments and health-prevention strategies to be tailored to our genetic profiles.

2. Life spans will reach triple digits as we learn to reprogram cells to compensate for failing organs.


3. Five to 10 percent of children will be born with genetic enhancements, speeding human evolution. Part of the motivation will be to keep up with fast-evolving artificial intelligence.

4. The recognition that infection causes most chronic diseases will lead to vaccines against schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, heart disease, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, obesity, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, dental caries, autism and some cancers. AIDS will be eliminated.

5. Pets such as cats, hamsters and birds will become rare as it becomes clear that animals are a major source of transmission of chronic diseases. The exception is dogs, which have lived with humans and shared their pathogens for 14,000 years.


6. Hand-held neuroimagers will reveal when people are lying.

7. People must have government approval to marry and have children, based on their genetic compatibility, or face a huge tax burden for any sick or disabled children they produce in defiance of a ban.


8. Children of the baby boomers will work into their 70s because of a labor shortage -- and because they can.

9. The merger of real and virtual worlds will allow people to meet holographically and to feel, smell and taste products they buy online.

10. Nanotechnology will let us turn information files into physical products. For example, we can e-mail a toaster and print it out on a desktop "nanofactory."

11. Integrated, hand-held devices will coordinate appointments, track family members, even plan vacations by matching our wish list of destinations with free blocks of time. Many people will vacation in virtual worlds.

12. Global interdependence will allow people, capital and information to flow freely across borders, eroding the power of nation-states. Simultaneous translation will let us talk with people of any language.

13. Goodbye, privacy. Data from cameras, biometrics (retinal scans, fingerprints, face recognition software), full body scans and perhaps microchip implants will be sent to intelligence "fusion" centers to tell governments where people are going and what they're doing in the public realm.

14. We may be able to add memory to human brains, just as we do to old computers, and download human memory into remote storage devices.


15. Thanks to research begun in the early 2000s, a child who is born blind can have nerve signals wirelessly rerouted to the brain's auditory cortex, which will process both sight and sound. A child born deaf will undergo a similar procedure, routing impulses from the ear to the brain's visual cortex.


16. Nanotechnology will allow paralyzed people to walk. Molecules injected into the spinal cord will form into nanofibers that prevent scar tissue and promote new cell growth.


17. People can get artificial retinas that let them switch (simply by thinking) between "reality" mode and virtual reality, including the ability to see real events in other locations -- say, checking on Mom in the nursing home.


18. Handshakes and other types of human contact will be reserved for family members to avoid spreading disease.

19. Animal diseases such as mad cow will reduce meat consumption and lead to germ-free, engineered meat.

20. We will understand the origins of life and re-create it in the laboratory.

From "The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today," edited by Mike Wallace (Thomas Nelson, $24.99)


P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow can be reached at 206-448-8353 or ceceliagoodnow@seattlepi.com.




http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/365 ... ure30.html

Will the planet even be here in 2058 ?

Originally Posted by tencz57

Will the planet even be here in 2058 ?

Well, the planet might........life on it, who knows?

I gotta say this much, the world is becoming a scary place indeed

Thank heavens I won't be around to see it.