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Would you like to know
what's in our future?
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What's going to happen tomorrow,
next year, or even a millennium from now?
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Well, you're not alone.
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Everyone from governments to militaries
to industry leaders do, as well,
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and they all employ people
called futurists
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who attempt to forecast the future.
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Some are able to do this
with surprising accuracy.
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In the middle of the 20th century,
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a think tank known as
the RAND Corporation
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consulted dozens of scientists
and futurists
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who together forecast
many of the technologies
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we take for granted today,
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including artificial organs,
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the use of birth control pills,
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and libraries able to look up
research material for the reader.
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One way futurists arrive
at their predictions
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is by analyzing movements and trends
in society,
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and charting the paths they are likely
to follow into the future
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with varying degrees of probability.
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Their work informs the decisions
of policymakers and world leaders,
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enabling them to weigh
options for the future
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that otherwise could not have
been imagined in such depth or detail.
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Of course, there are obvious limits to how
certain anyone can be about the future.
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There are always unimaginable
discoveries that arise
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which would make no sense
to anyone in the present.
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Imagine, for example,
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transporting a physicist
from the middle of the 19th century
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into the 21st.
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You explain to him that a strange material
exists, Uranium 235,
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that of its own accord can produce enough
energy to power an entire city,
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or destroy it one fell swoop.
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"How can such energy come from nowhere?"
he would demand to know.
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"That's not science, that's magic."
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And for all intents and purposes,
he would be right.
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His 19th century grasp of science
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includes no knowledge of radioactivity
or nuclear physics.
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In his day, no forecast of the future
could have predicted X-rays,
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or the atom bomb,
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let alone the theory of relativity
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or quantum mechanics.
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As Arthur C. Clarke has said,
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"Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic."
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How can we prepare, then, for a future
that will be as magical to us
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as our present would appear to someone
from the 19th century?
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We may think our modern technology
and advanced data analysis techniques
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might allow us to predict the future
with much more accuracy
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than our 19th century counterpart,
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and rightly so.
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However, it's also true that our
technological progress
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has brought with it new increasingly
complex and unpredictable challenges.
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The stakes for future generations to
be able to imagine the unimaginable
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are higher than ever before.
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So the question remains:
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how do we do that?
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One promising answer has actually been
with us since the 19th century
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and the Industrial Revolution
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that laid the foundation
for our modern world.
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During this time of explosive development
and invention,
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a new form of literature, science fiction,
also emerged.
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Inspired by the innovations of the day,
Jules Verne, H.G. Wells,
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and other prolific thinkers explored
fantastic scenarios,
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depicting new frontiers of human endeavor.
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And throughout the 20th century
and into the 21st,
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storytellers have continued to share their
visions of the future
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and correctly predicted many aspects
of the world we inhabit decades later.
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In "Brave New World,"
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Aldous Huxley foretold
the use of antidepressants in 1932,
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long before such medication
became popular.
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In 1953, Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451,"
forecast earbuds,
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"thimble radios," in his words.
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And in "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
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Arthur C. Clarke described a portable,
flat-screen news pad in 1968.
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In works that often combine entertainment
and social commentary,
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we are invited to suspend our disbelief
and consider the consequences
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of radical shifts in familiar
and deeply engrained institutions.
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In this sense,
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the best science fiction fulfills
the words of philosopher Michel Foucault,
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"I'm no prophet. My job is making windows
where there were once walls."
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Free from the constraints of the present
and our assumptions of what's impossible,
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science fiction serves as a useful tool
for thinking outside of the box.
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Many futurists recognize this,
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and some are beginning to employ
science fictions writers in their teams.
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Just recently, a project called iKnow
proposed scenarios
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that look much
like science fiction stories.
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They include the discovery of
an alien civilization,
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development of a way for humans
and animals to communicate flawlessly,
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and radical life extension.
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So, what does the future hold?
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Of course, we can't know for certain,
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but science fiction
shows us many possibilities.
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Ultimately, it is our responsibility
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to determine which
we will work towards making a reality.