The future has long been one of my little guilty pleasures. A bit like single-malt scotch and bad sci-fi (in which the future crops up a lot). ‘Guilty’, because serious people are not supposed to concern themselves too much with tomorrow. Sure, if you are an economist or sales exec you have your five-year targets, your strategies and plans, ways of teasing out thence from now. All very respectable.
But start talking about the world of 2500 and what it will be like, and people start whistling the X-Files theme tune. If history is bunk, the history of the future is something even smellier.
This will not do. The future is interesting for so many reasons that it seems criminal to leave it to the shlock-merchants, doomsayers and purveyors of space opera. The premise for my book Eternity: Our Next Billion Years is simple: what makes today so different from yesterday? And can we say anything at all sensible about tomorrow?
Yes, so the saying goes, we can. And this is perhaps surprising. For one thing, the future is a funny thing. And our today is one of the funniest futures of all. Take a time traveller from, say, late 15th-century London and transport him two full centuries hence. Most of the buildings will be different, the language will have changed (rather imperceptibly), hairstyles and fashions may well strike this child of the Tudors as mad. In his time men wore tight breeches and felt hats. In this strange new world wigs are all the rage.
And yet. More or less everything of real importance remains the same. There have been no radical changes to the way people live. Getting about is still a matter of muscle-power. The streets are still full of horseshit. Crossing oceans involves a sailboat. Medicine is still a mixture of random guesswork and witchcraft. After a short while our time traveller will feel completely at home. But take someone from the early 1800s and transport him to the world of today – the same 200-year jump – and you might as well have taken him to Mars. People are much the same, it is true; our technologies do not yet run to the transplantation of supplementary heads or fashionably green skin, but just about everything else is different. From cars to aircraft, computers to electricity. Some of this stuff you could sit down and explain, to a bright Hanoverian. But trying to explain YouTube or just why so many people seem to be walking down the street apparently talking to themselves like lunatics, sometimes with wires dangling out of their ears, would take a lifetime.
The last century was more unlike any century that preceded it than any century was unlike any other before. In this sense, we live in interesting times, pivotal times even. And there is a good chance they will become more interesting still.
I wanted to write about the future not only because it is fun and fascinating, but because I have become bored with so many of the attempts by others to do so. A trope has emerged in which the future is seen as one long series of disasters. First a radioactive wasteland, latterly a parched world ruined and drowned by climate change. The future will be too hot, too crowded, poor and starving, radioactive, toxic, riven asunder by war. And if none of that is enough we might get smacked in the teeth by an asteroid.
I do not think the future will be a bowl of roses. Far from it. But I have chosen, for reasons of bloody-mindedness as much as anything else, to take the unfashionable view that we do at least HAVE a future, albeit one which might be rather disturbing and weird.
Boring also is the vision of a future of spaceships and flying cars, lunar colonies and silver jumpsuits. Actually, it could be rather camp and fun if we consciously created a retro-future along these lines, but somehow the idea that the world of my son’s old age will look like a massive interior designer’s house party from the late 1960s seems implausible, to say the least.
So what have we got to look forward to? Computing technology and the rate at which it is currently evolving seems to offer one obvious route to a near-medium future that is very different to that of today. If we imagine the world of, say, the early 23rd century and try to make it as different to the world of today as the world of today was from the world of 1809, then we need some radical changes. Disasters are one possibility. The machines are another. In my book I speculate two possible futures, one essentially benign, where machine intelligence surpasses our own but does not replace it, and (having some fun) one in which we face a foe beyond our ken.
Of course it is possible that the future will not be very different to today; in this future, the world of 2209 may be pretty much like the world of 2009, save a bit dirtier, more crowded and with no elephants. The idea that tomorrow will merely be a shabbier version of today is depressingly plausible (an idea not much explored by science fiction). There will be nine billion of us alive in my lifetime (if I look after myself). That is not science fiction, it is fact. No Soylent Green, perhaps, but fitting an extra two and a half Chinas into an already overcrowded planet is going to be no picnic. Yemen, in 1900, was half a dozen Bedouin and a hundred camels. By 2100 Yemen will be bigger, in population, than Russia. Russia! Go figure. This alone will make the world a very different place.
The early 22nd century will be more African, more Asian and a lot more Islamic than today. It will probably be poorer too – it is hard to see current increases in Third World prosperity continuing under the onslaught of burgeoning population increases. One near-future is slumworld, the hi-tech megalopolis of Blade Runner replaced by 50-mile smears of unlit gray and rust, feculent alleyways and mounds of garbage and excrement. If you want to see how three billion humans may be living in 2109 go not to Seattle or even Shanghai but to Kibera, the immense shanty-slum outside Nairobi in Kenya.
This, believe it or not, may not be all bad. Cities are good, even poor slum-cities. That is why people flock to them. There are more jobs, more opportunities for education and, especially, more opportunities for women in the great conurbations of Africa and Asia than in the countryside, quaint though the latter may appear. As ever, there is hope.
And what then? I do not believe we will all be off to live on Mars any time soon. We could live in Antarctica tomorrow if we wanted, but choose not to do so. And Mars is a much bigger deal than Antarctica. ‘Because it’s there’ is not always enough. We’ll crack space eventually, it is quite possibly our destiny, but not in my lifetime.
Barring oddities such as an alien visitation or contact (more likely in our immediate future than at any other time in our history thanks to our recent capability to inadvertently broadcast our presence into interstellar space), global thermonuclear war, some kind of Terminator scenario, or a transition to some form of ‘transhuman’ or postsingularity world, in which all bets and guesses are off, I believe that, somehow, against all the fashionable odds, we will muddle through.
When I was growing up, the threat of imminent atomic annihilation was terrifying; in the 1960s and 1970s the consensus view was that humankind had no future at all. Now, I believe, the pendulum is swinging back. Now we have broken through the psychologically important barrier of the Millennium, we see the centuries and millennia stretching beyond us, like a high-wire walker suddenly aware of the chasm below his feet. Suddenly the future looms like never before. And this may be even more terrifying than the prospect of imminent Armageddon.
Copyright Michael Hanlon 2009
Michael Hanlon is the author of Eternity: Our Next Billion Years (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and 10 Questions Science Can’t Answer Yet, out in paperback March 2010 (Palgrave Macmillan). He is the Science Editor at Britain’s Daily Mail.
Synopsis for Eternity: Our Next Billion Years:
It has become received wisdom that our world is doomed, that we live in the End of Days. Bleak predictions by psychics and scientists alike portend extreme weather, droughts, famines and floods that will overtake humanity within the century, or sooner. If not global warming, then supervolcanoes, meteoric impacts, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or natural plagues will get us. But whatever happens, Michael Hanlon believes that humankind will go on…and on. The shape of things to come will be strange, and somewhat terrifying, but will very likely seem banal to the people who inhabit it in the future. Humankind may be thrown back to the Stone Age on hundreds of occasions and may come close to extinction. But recovery will follow–each time more rapidly than the last. The world of 10,000 years hence, let alone 100,000,000 years hence, will be strange and almost unrecognizable. But no matter how battered and re-born, it will still be our world, populated by us through eternity.
