Thursday Things: Welcome to the Future
2 January 2020. Vol 2 No 1. By Dan McGirt. #21
Welcome to Thursday Things! The future is here, and so is this week’s edition!
Not that far off, actually. The future as imagined in 1930.
For those of us born in the 20th century, the 2020 sounds like the future. When I was a child the Year 2000 evoked images of a future of flying cars and space hotels and robot butlers — or possibly some horrible post-nuclear apocalypse world. 2001: A Space Odyssey promised us intelligent computers (albeit, with a few bugs…) and PanAm flights to the moon. The year 2020 was also a frequent setting for science fiction futures. (Blade Runner was set in 2019 — close enough!) Yet now that the evocative year is here, it doesn’t feel much like The Future at all. Sure, we’ve got smartphones and Alexa. But where are the replicants? The flying cars? PanAm is gone, though the moon is still there (Space: 1999 got that wrong, thank goodness!). On the other hand, the terminators did not rise, the apes did not take over the planet, and aliens have not invaded. So we’ll call it a draw. The future is dead … long live the future!
Here is another roundup of the future of 2020 as seen in SF movies compared to our reality. Glad Soylent Green was off the mark. The Running Man was uncomfortably on target in some ways, presaging the plague of reality shows that currently grips the world.
The image at the top of this issue comes from a collection of futuristic visions of Germany as imagined by artists in 1930 (in a project commissioned by a margarine company, oddly enough). It’s worth clicking through to see the things they correctly foresaw: monorails, giant ocean liners, moon landings, flying wings, space stations, mobile videophones. And a few that we’re still waiting for (nuclear cars!). Unfortunately, what these artists didn't see coming was their more immediate future of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Or, apparently, smoking bans.
While the world around us is not exactly the world we, or our predecessors, imagined it would be, in many ways 2020 is the bright, shiny future of optimists’s dreams. I’m one who believes in the idea of human progress, but doesn’t think progress is ever a given, inevitable, or something we can take for granted. Things can always get better — but that doesn’t mean they will. Yet if we look around we can find that a lot of things have gotten a lot better, almost without us noticing.
Columnist Nick Kristof points out some of the ways in which 2019 was the best time ever to be alive, and 2020 could be even better:
The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.
Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.
Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.
He also points out that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide has declined by more than 75% in less than forty years. And that is better than having a robot butler.
Other note a similar theme: Best Decade Yet: Humanity Grew Richer and More Sustainable in the 2010s. To wit: “Over the last ten years, energy production has become cheaper and more efficient, Americans and Britons have started to consume fewer resources even as their standards of living increased, and greenhouse gas emissions have decreased.” I’m old enough to remember the gas shortages of the 1970s and the constant warnings that we would run out of oil by, take your pick — the year 2000, 2010, 2020, fill in the blank. All of these forecasts of doom were wrong. Instead energy has gotten cheaper and more abundant:
One of the greatest untold successes of the 2010s involved the decreasing cost of energy and the expansion of energy sources, especially among renewables.
The shale oil revolution from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which started in 2006 but peaked in the past decade, nearly helped make the United States a net energy exporter for the first time since 1953.
"The entire psychology of energy as a country shifted this decade to one of scarcity to one of adequacy and eventually abundance," Kevin Book, managing director for research at ClearView Energy, told The Washington Examiner's Josh Siegel. "What it means is Americans are not afraid of running out of energy like they used to be."
Before the shale oil boom, the U.S. was expected to become a big importer of liquified natural gas, but America now exports LNG to 36 countries, double the 18 countries at the beginning of the Trump administration. Shipping the gas to Europe has reduced the continent's dependence on Russia.
(I should take a moment here to point out what a miracle it is that any kids of the 1970s survived to see this far off future year of 2020: 8 Reasons Children of the 1970s Should All Be Dead.)
The connecting theme is that the future is a choice. Some imagined future technologies don’t yet exist because we haven’t figured them out yet — warp drives and transporter beams, for example. And there will always be cases where our imagination exceeds our ability to bring such things into existence. Some don’t exist because we didn’t make them a priority, or went down blind alleys — see this maddening article on The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades for an example of how groupthink, failure of imagination, egos, and the grinding wheels of bureaucracy hobbled research into Alzheimer’s treatments and cures that didn’t follow the prevailing (and thus far, still unproven) consensus that amyloid plaques in the brain are the cause of the disease. We noted previously in Thursday Things how we could have had mobile phones decades earlier but for government and corporate shenanigans to protect the existing landline technology. That we haven’t returned to the moon since the 1970s or been to Mars or built space cities or accomplished a number of other things are all the result of choice we as nations, as societies, as a planet have made (or have had made, or allowed to have made, for us).
The future is a choice. So as we enter that 2020 that we have chosen, I hope you will take some time to consider the future you will choose for yourself and the world going from here. All I will say is that by 2050 I better have my flying car and my robot butler!
Thank you again for reading Thursday Things as we enter volume 2 of this weekly newsletter. I’m happy to have earned dozens of Happy Subscribers in 2019. I plan to continue Thursday Things through at least the first half of 2020!
Beyond that will depend on continued interest (both yours and mine!) and whether I can grow the audience a little more. So, if you enjoy Thursday Things, the best thing you can do to keep it coming is share this issue with a friend, using the button below. And if you’re not a subscriber, please sign up to get each issue delivered to your inbox. There is a button for that too. See you next Thursday!