A 1985 View of Science and Technology in Year 2000

The glib words of years past from our politicians are hollow nightmares indeed when we are confronted with the staggering realities of what has to be done. But the key is there--technology, using it-and we hardly do now. The future may be unpredictable, but we can make a few well-aimed guesses about what life will be like in the year 2000. We’ll fly on supersonic transports, or more likely hypersonic transports, for which the ground work (or should I call it air work) has already been laid at places like NASA Langley Research Center. We’ll have put the genetic code to work and begun to engineer out congenital birth defects and inherited diseases. We’ll have made a real start toward the prevention and conquest of both heart disease and cancer. The remaining villains, of course, will be the common cold and hay fever.

The normal life span should be 85 to 90 years, and anybody who suggests mandatory retirement at age 65 will face unthinkable punishment. What that longer lifespan will make possible is two or more careers for most of us. At age 40 or 50, we might go back to school and retrain ourselves for another career. Just think of the possibilities-politicians could even become statesmen. But those promises are distilled from much research by top thinkers, and you’ve got to watch researchers carefully. Our real goal in research, as one friend persists in telling me, is to reduce utter chaos to mere disorder. Well, we’re a little like Columbus before he set sail. When he departed he didn’t know where he was going. When he got there he didn’t know where he was. When he returned he didn’t know where he’d been, and he borrowed all the money to do it with. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not.” Let me end on a quote from T. S. Eliot, who once wrote, “We shall never cease our exploration, and at the end of our exploring we will get back to where we started and know it for the first time.”

Prescient with the qualifier that these things will only happen if America puts emphasis on science and technology education.