Are Scientific Predictions Pointless?

Recently I came across Arthur C. Clarkes predictions for the next hundred years, and wondered if theres any point to such endeavors.

So many predictions about science and technology have been wrong...the development of fusion power comes to mind, and theres always the possibility of a breakthrough in some area that no one could have imagined:

Lets hear your commentary on Clarke's vision of the next century...predicted in 2001!

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0361.html?

2002 Clean low-power fuel involving a new energy source, possibly based on cold fusion.

2003 The automobile industry is given five years to replace fossil fuels.

2004 First publicly admitted human clone.

2006 Last coal mine closed.

2009 A city in a third world country is devastated by an atomic bomb explosion.

2009 All nuclear weapons are destroyed.

2010 A new form of space-based energy is adopted.

2010 Despite protests against "big brother," ubiquitous monitoring eliminates many forms of criminal activity.

2011 Space flights become available for the public.

2013 Prince Harry flies in space.

2015 Complete control of matter at the atomic level is achieved.

2016 All existing currencies are abolished. A universal currency is adopted based on the "megawatt hour."

2017 Arthur C. Clarke, on his one hundredth birthday, is a guest on the space orbiter.

2019 There is a meteorite impact on Earth.

2020 Artificial Intelligence reaches human levels. There are now two intelligent species on Earth, one biological, and one nonbiological.

2021 The first human landing on Mars is achieved. There is an unpleasant surprise.

2023 Dinosaurs are cloned from fragments of DNA. A dinosaur zoo opens in Florida.

2025 Brain research leads to an understanding of all human senses. Full immersion virtual reality becomes available. The user puts on a metal helmet and is then able to enter "new universes."

2040 A universal replicator based on nanotechnology is now able to create any object from gourmet meals to diamonds. The only thing that has value is information.

2040 The concept of human "work" is phased out.

2061 Hunter gatherer societies are recreated.

2061 The return of Haley's comet is visited by humans.

2090 Large scale burning of fossil fuels is resumed to replace carbon dioxide.

2095 A true "space drive" is developed. The first humans are sent out to nearby star systems already visited by robots.

 

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ITER fusion reactor
http://www.iter.org/

California's Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate
http://www.mindfully.org/Air/GM-Sues-CA-ZEV.htm

UK scientists clone human embryo
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4563607.stm

Justice Department to declare warrantless wiretaps legal
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Justice_Department_to_declare_warrantless_wiretaps_0119.html

even at $20 million a ticket, the Russian Space Agency is fully booked until 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism


I think there's always a point in speculating on the future. Who knows what will come of today's scientific advances?

 

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This is an odd one. Instead of a gold standard we would have a MWh standard.

Is this workable?

 

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Sure! They might even call them "credits".

 

These aren't scientific predictions, they are just predictions by a science-fiction writer.

 

Some of them are, some are more political, and some are just downright weird...like the recreation of hunter gatherer societies??? :bugeye: He also talks about closing coal mines, and then later resuming the burning of fossil fuels to replace CO2!

I believe Clarke has degrees in math and physics, and his involvment in space flight and satellite tech with the British Interplantary Society would qualify him as more than just a SF writer methinks.

 

I'm totally sure that one will happen, it's called the archaic revival.

 

Some people are already embracing a kind of tribal aesthetic...primitivism, except they prefer to do their hunting and gathering at the mall.

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Except the environment will be full of computers and nanobots that do our bidding.

 

Clarke himself doesnt seem terribly impressed with hot fusion. Billions have been spent on it and the best efforts have only managed to extract a 60% energy return for a few seconds.

Hes more intrested in cold fusion, but explains that at present there is no theoretical basis for understanding why it has worked in small scale experiments:

http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue20/clark2.html

"Even more controversial than the threat of asteroid impacts is what I would call perhaps one of the greatest scandals in the history of science, the cold fusion caper. Like almost everyone else, I was surprised when Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had achieved fusion in the laboratory; and surprise changed to disappointment when I learned that most of those who had rushed to confirm these results were unable to replicate them. Wondering first how two world-class scientists could have fooled themselves, I then forgot the whole matter for a year or so, until more and more reports surfaced, from many countries, of anomalous energy production in various devices (some of them apparently having nothing to do with fusion). Agreeing with Carl Sagan's principle that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs' (spoken in connection with UFOs and alien visitors), I remained interested, but skeptical."

"Now I have little doubt that anomalous energy is being produced by several devices, some of which are on the market with a money back guarantee, while others are covered by patents. The literature on the subject is now enormous, and my confidence that 'new energy' is real slowly climbed to the 90th percentile and has now reached the 99% level. A Fellow of the Royal Society, also originally a skeptic, writes: 'There is now strong evidence for nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low temperature.' The problem, he adds, is that 'there is no theoretical basis for these claims, or rather there are too many conflicting theories.'"

"Yet recall that the steam engine had been around for quite a while before Carnot explained exactly how it worked. The challenge now is to see which of the various competing devices is most reliable. My guess is that large scale industrial application will begin around the turn of the century--at which point one can imagine the end of the fossil-fuel-nuclear age, making concerns about global warming irrelevant, as oil-and-coal-burning systems are phased out..."

 

Free Inquiry: This is a rare opportunity. Thanks for talking with us.

Arthur C. Clarke: Rare indeed. My agent will probably shoot me for granting this interview. I turn down interviews all the time, but for Free Inquiry, I'm happy to make an exception.

FI: Our readers have some familiarity with your views and in particular your very strong emphasis on the use of science in understanding the natural world. But could you say something about your views on moral issues?

Clarke: One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all. It's this: "Don't do unto anybody else what you wouldn't like to be done to you." It seems to me that that's all there is to it.

The other issue is, why can't humans live up to this principle? Why is it that people can't act as human beings should? I'm appalled by what we all see on the news every day-massacres, atrocities, injustices, outrages of all kinds. When I see what's happening, I sometimes wonder if the human race deserves to survive.

FI: In recent years a lot of ethical issues have arisen from advances in technology, as they have, for example, in cloning.

Clarke: Yes, and such issues will continue to arise at an increasing pace. They will challenge all of us - but especially those who hold rigid moral outlooks like those found in most religions.

By the way, I was - in a strange way - involved in a cloning project. There was a project afoot to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me, though - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. It was quite a serious project by a company that launched a lot of spacecraft. The idea was that maybe in a hundred million years or so, an advanced civilization would find this little space capsule containing my hair, an Arthur C. Clarke would be cloned from it, and I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future. Interesting thought.

FI: Yes, but perhaps a little disturbing.

Clarke: Well, it's better than the Celestes Project, in which you have to be dead before your ashes are sent into space.

FI: You have written a great deal about possible technologies of the future. For example, you're well known for thinking up the idea of geostationary orbit. But as we look into the next century or even the next millennium, what do you see as the big technological changes that are likely to alter the direction of the human species or will present major new dilemmas or problems to the human race?

Clarke: I think most of the major changes will be biological, involving advances in DNA research and technologies, among other things. But there's also potentially revolutionary research going on in the physical sciences. The thing that I'm most interested in at the moment is the so-called Infinite Energy solution - the possibility of finding new ways of tapping into virtually limitless sources of energy. It's been about ten years since cold fusion was touted and then laughed at. But since then there's been a groundswell of scientific opinion and lots of experimentation suggesting that maybe there's something important going on, that maybe we can solve our energy needs once and for all. This field is subject to hype and disappointment, yet I'm seeing evidence now that hints that we may be on the verge of an energy breakthrough.

This would cause a total transformation of our society, an end of the fossil-fuel age and all the geopolitical implications of that. No more worry about global warming; now we start worrying about global cooling. So an energy revolution is the biggest joker in the pack at the moment.

FI: Do you think that the breakthrough will be in cold fusion or something different?

Clarke: I don't know whether it will come in cold fusion or warm fission or something else. I suspect it might be something totally unexpected-perhaps a way of tapping into quantum fluctuations of space-zero-point energy, as it's sometimes called. Now, this new finding may turn out to be an experimental laboratory curiosity that can't be scaled up. But remember, nuclear power started as a small laboratory curiosity.

FI: But what about that giant leap into the future that you foresaw so many years ago-space travel?

Clarke: Yes, I'm still intensely interested in that, of course. And the whole field is very exciting now - with all these fleets of robot explorers to come, the new space station going to be assembled, new forms of space propulsion. There will be a big space conference involving all the top people at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration this spring. I'm recording a video address to them soon.

FI: Have you been disappointed by the lack of progress in the space program since the 1960s?

Clarke: Good heavens no! I've seen far more than I ever imagined would happen. I mean, I never dreamed we would have explored the solar system as we have. It's the most exciting time. Of course, I'm sorry for the youngsters who thought they'd be flying into space by now, and you know that manned - or womanned - space flight has been rather limited, but efforts are still being made and will continue in the next century.

I'm astonished by what we've seen. I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?

FI: What are your thoughts regarding the future development of something else you've often written about - religion?

Clarke: Well, I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion? Anyway, that's one of the nice things about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project; if it is successful, we could perhaps answer such questions one day. I've just seen Contact, by my late friend Carl Sagan. It's quite an impressive film that offers hints on this subject.

FI: If religion does indeed represent an immature stage of humanity, do you see any prospects for humanity growing up?

Clarke: Yes, there is the possibility that humankind can outgrown its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in Childhood's End. But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are. There are, for example, so many different religions - each of them claiming to have the truth, each saying that their truths are clearly superior to the truths of others - how can someone possibly take any of them seriously? I mean, that's insane. And such insanity concerns me, especially now that waves of lunacy are washing over the United States and the world in the form of millennial cults. Time magazine recently reported on them. The crazy thing is, according to traditional Christian dogma, the real millennium was four years ago, for Jesus was supposedly born circa 5 B.C.E. - so it's already 2004! Apparently some millennial nuts are blithely ignoring their own dogma.

FI: Do you see any value at all in the various religions?

Clarke: Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.

FI: What appeals to you in Islam?

Clarke: Historically, Islam had a great deal of tolerance for other views and offered the world its priceless wisdom in the form of astronomy and algebra. And, as you know, Islam helped rescue Western civilization from the Dark Ages by preserving classical texts and transmitting them to the West. We, on the other hand, burned the library at Alexandria. If Islam hadn't fallen into internecine warfare and had gone on to conquer the rest of Europe, we'd have avoided a thousand years of Christian barbarism.

FI: Your television series, The Mysterious World of Arthur C. Clarke, is still a classic. It appeals to the human yearning for mystery but also shows how to apply some scientific principles to get answers. Do you feel that the human yearning for unexplained mysteries will always be greater than the need for scientific explanation? That is, will people always reject scientific explanations if they can have an inspiring mystery or wonder?

Clarke: There does seem to be a tendency to do that. People get very exasperated when people like James Randi show how some trick is done or reveal the true, naturalistic explanation. They say, "No, the trick is really paranormal." How can you argue with people who want so badly to believe?

Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle had a friendly argument about that. Conan Doyle was convinced - and tried to convince Houdini - that Houdini did his tricks with supernatural powers. Somewhere I have my door key bent by Uri Geller. I don't rule out the possibility of all sorts of remarkable mental powers - there are even things like telekinesis and so forth. And I'm sure that there are many things we don't know about. But they've got to be examined skeptically before they're accepted.

An example is reincarnation, which everyone in Sri Lanka believes in. An American, Dr. Stevenson, has done a lot of papers on that, and has produced studies of about 50 cases that are hard to explain. But the problem with reincarnation is that it's hard to imagine what the storage medium for past lives would be. Not to mention the input-output device. I hesitate to rule it out completely, but I'd need pretty definite proof.

 

I heard that it was predicted in the 1950's that man may land on the moon in the 21st century.

That kind of sends a shiver down my spine.

 

Ray Kurzweil seems to be a decent predictor of future advances in technology.

 

You and George Bernard Shaw.

"Their tastes may not be the same!"...he cried.

To be fair to Clarke however, his version is drastically different from Jesus, being presented in the 'negative'...do NOT do unto others.

If our legal code was a list of 'thou shalts' instead of 'thou shalt nots'...there would be rioting in the streets.

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Its likely only because the weapons have become too dangerous, that major wars have been absent from the radar of late.

When taking on weaker opponents the superpowers have not shown much in the way of a kinder gentler approach.

Korea...Vietnam...Afganistan...Iraq...all miserable failures, but still immensely destructive.