part0059

I wonder whether, like me, you have noticed that most books, most of the time, are discussing things that have already happened. Even texts that purport to be about the future seem to be largely focused on events of the past. Why is this? We all understand that we have to have some appreciation of the past to help us see where we might go in the future, but I believe there is more to it than this. There are, I think, quite a few factors that tend to lead authors towards historical discussions. The first and most obvious is the fact that since past events have occurred and have usually already been discussed in some detail by others, we know a great deal about them and so can say much about them without fear of being in error. Most people also enjoy reading about the past – we all, to some extent, like to be told things we already know, and sometimes an historian can approach a subject from a slightly new angle and perhaps we can gain some new insights on familiar themes. However, in-depth study of the past does have one obvious disadvantage – we cannot have an influence on the past . Yes, historical events, on their face and by their very nature are not things we can do anything about – if it’s part of history, ipso facto it cannot be changed. In stark contrast, the future is all in front of us and, by our decisions, we can have a very profound influence on how it plays out - at least for us as individuals; that is, assuming you are not a person who believes completely in fate, who some would term a predestinarianist or determinist (or possibly simply a fatalist). So, given that the future is critical for our wellbeing and is something that we can have some effect on, why do not more books discuss it? Well, predicting the future is bloody difficult; and I’m not just talking about palm-readers – anybody can understand that giving specific details on future developments is nigh on impossible, but even predicting general trends in the future is certainly a non-trivial task. Even people who are acknowledged experts in their field find predicting future developments very difficult. Curiously, there even seems to be some evidence that the more of an expert a person is, the harder they find it to reliably predict the future – even for matters that are within the scope of their own expertise . That may seem amazing, but I feel it is true. There is much anecdotal evidence to support this claim, in fact far too much to go through in detail here. So, I will just provide a few examples from the past of experts who have famously and spectacularly gone wrong in their predictions of the future. In 1935, the esteemed journal Nature reviewed a book about rockets passing through space, saying that “…the whole procedure sketched in the present volume presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable.” In 1941, the distinguished Canadian astronomer Professor J. W. Campbell wrote a paper in Philosophical Magazine where he stated his belief that “…it would appear that the statement that rocket flight to the Moon does not seem so remote as television did one hundred years ago is over optimistic.” Then in 1956, the new Astronomer Royal, Dr Richard van der Riet Woolley, remonstrated with the press, saying “Space travel is utter bilge” - just a year before the appearance of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. And in the same year as Sputnik went up into orbit, Lee de Forest, an inventor who worked on wireless telegraphy, broadcast radio, and synchronized-sound films, boldly proclaimed that sending a man to the moon and returning him to Earth alive was: “a voyage [that] will never occur regardless of all future scientific advances.” He made his remarks just 12 years before NASA proved him wrong. It must have been considerations of these and similar events that led the science fiction author and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke to formulate his First Law, which states that: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” This law, by the way, makes me think that, eventually, travel at speeds greater than that of light might be attained – since many distinguished/elderly scientists appear to believe it to be impossible. More on this later. (Arthur Clarke also formulated two other interesting laws: 2, the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)