Over the past few days I've been reading bits and pieces, nothing of any real consequence (or so I thought) but noticed a pattern forming – a lot of the things I read, or read about, pertained to how people in the past, had a view of the future. For example, for some reason I started reading about 2001 – A Space Odyssey, and it's sequel 2010. Both of those years have, obviously, passed without anything like the levels of technological advancement as postulated in the books (and movies).
I know that they are works of science fiction, not science fact, just as Star Wars were sci-fi, Star Trek, Stargate (I'm starting to notice a trend here!), but it made me think about how people in the past, viewed the future, and how much of what has been written about has actually come to pass. A cursory glance around the internet throws up things like:
CCTV – from '1984' by George Orwell, written in 1949.
Global telecommunication – Mark Twain (yeah, it surprised me too) in 'From the London Times of 1904' which he wrote in 1898.
Communications Satellites – Arthur C Clarke is widely credited as being the 'inventor' of the geosynchronous satellite, which possibly over-eggs the pudding somewhat. In a magazine article called 'Extra Terrestrial Relays', published in 1945 he first postulated the idea, although Hermann Oberth (1920) and Dr John R Pierce (undated) have made similar claims.
iPods – An early reference to what could be considered a video iPod or video phone can be found in HG Wells' 'When the Sleeper Wakes', published in 1899, although I'm sure Bill Gates will claim he thought about it in 1898.
Test Tube Babies – Aldous Huxley's magnum opus 'Brave New World' introduced the idea of a world populated by machines, rather than natural birth.
CD and DVD – EE Smith (no, I'd never heard of him either until I started doing a bit of research for this) introduced a metallic disc (which, in his book was made of platinum alloy) used for storing information in 'Triplanetary', published in 1934.
Robots – The word was famously coined by Karel Kapek (the word is of Czech origin, 'robota' meaning drudgery) in his 1920 book 'Rossum's Universal Robots'
Nanobots – The world of nanotechnology was first seen in a story in Astounding Stories magazine called 'A Menace in Miniature' by Raymond Gallun way back in 1937.
Credit/Debit Cards – A feature of Edward Bellemy's 1888 novel 'Looking Backward' was that money had been eliminated, and in their stead people carried cards which were used to pay for stuff.
There are, of course, many more, some very well known (submarines by Jules Verne, tanks (the shooty kind, not the watery kind) and the atomic bomb, both my HG Wells – he was such an optimist – the iPad and online newspapers, both by Arthur C Clarke, the list goes on), some more obscure.
So, looking around us today, we would see a world full of wonder, full of technological advancement (something I touched on in another blog), yet there is an aspect of 'The Future' which is a common theme to many sci-fi works, namely that the world of tomorrow will be a veritable utopia, where pain, disease and poverty are eradicated. Sadly, this is (thus far anyway) not even close to being the case.
It was an article about child poverty in the UK which actually got me thinking about this. It is estimated that approximately 3.5 million children in the UK live in poverty. 75% of the British children who have serious problems with asthma come from the poorest 10% of the population. Infant mortality rates are much higher amongst families who are living under the breadline, which leads me to wonder how much of an impact the rise of the technological revolution has really had.
Yes, technology makes life easier – if you can afford to have it. Technology can help us understand the universe, can allow us to break down and examine the human body to it's simplest parts, it can help us talk to someone on the other side of the planet as easily as if they were in the next room, so why is it then, that all the amazing advances in technology, all the understanding we now have of life, the world, everything, how is it that despite all we as a species have achieved, we cannot create a world where children don't go to bed hungry during school holidays because their parents (or, in a number of instances, parent) relies on free school dinners to keep their children fed.
From a global perspective, is it more important to the world that we spend $300 billion (yes, three hundred billion dollars) on the F-35 Lightning II JSF development project (bear in mind, I am a huge aviation geek!!) when there are already aircraft in the world with very similar capabilities, or we take that money and use it to develop ways of maximising food production in the 3r4d world? And yes, I know that there isn't really a single aircraft which does everything the F-35 L-2 does, but that's neither here nor there.
Is this a naive, massively simplistic view of things? Absolutely, I'm not going to deny that. It's also not a dig at the Pentagon for funding the JSF programme, I used that as merely an example, as it's something I was familiar with, I could find hundreds of examples in pretty much every country on earth.
Will there ever be the utopian society we have been promised? The cynic (or realist, depending on your point of view) in me says there won't be – human nature being as it is, I doubt we will ever have a society where everyone has what they need to live comfortably, there will always be those who want more.
Technology, ladies and gentlemen, is progressing at an amazing pace. In little over 100 years we have gone from the Wright brothers groundbreaking first flight, to sending people into space with such frequency that it becomes fairly routine. We have gone from wax cylinders to MP3s, from the telegraph to the internet, from thinking that the sun god Sol was responsible for making the sun rise in the morning, to being able to work out what powers the sun's interior. Sadly, we as humans have not made the same development. If we had, if humankind had developed at the same pace technology has, I think we would be a fair few steps closer to Utopia.
Now... where's my jet-pack...
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