Life in the future will be incredible. Flying cars. Robots driving buses. Exoskeletons that allow you to lift a car up as easily as picking a book off a shelf.
These are a few of the futuristic predictions in a new batch of documentaries that focus on man merging with machines, technology that produces self-aware computers, and medical advances that extend human life beyond imaginable limits.
I’ve been watching some of them on a very good website called Topdocumentaryfilms.com. If you’re into reality TV, but are sick of Storage Wars and Pawn Stars, I’d highly recommend this alternative. You can watch documentaries on all kinds of topics from health to art and politics.
No, not all of them are good, but there are some interesting selections. I recently watched one on planned obsolesence, called The Light Bulb Conspiracy, that was terrific.
What struck me about the futuristic films is how similar many of them are. They share the same themes I mentioned above, so assuming that great minds think alike, surely a lot of these 21st century trends are right around the corner for us. Right?
Then I remembered that the 20th century futurists were often well off the mark. Suspension bridge apartment houses. Robots that respond to verbal commands by 1960. Clothing with “electronic belts” that allow people to automatically adapt to changes in the weather.
This 1957 Soviet vision of the year 2000 showed women “cooking on a marble top that remains cold to the touch, even though the food is cooking!” The cooking is actually controlled by punch cards.
A YouTube visitor commented: “Excuse me while I go take my infra-red roasted chicken from my glass oven.”
Back to the 21st century. With so many futurists onboard with concepts like humans merging with robots, and medical advances leading to near-immortality, we might conclude that something quite different is in store.
Technology no doubt marches on, but fate has its own game plan. Round and round it goes, and where it stops nobody knows.
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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the researchers who developed an airborne version of the deadly H5N1 influenza virus in the lab. They created a mutation that nature itself has been thus far unable to produce. Ferrets exposed to it were able to transmit the new strain, a version of bird flu, from cage-to-cage.
The question many have been asking: What happens if this thing somehow gets out of the lab — or someone learns to duplicate it and decides to unleash it on an unprepared world?
The bird flu is a deadly agent, killing 60 percent of the people it infects. But H5N1 is not easily transmissable in its present form and usually only those who handle infected chickens or other birds are at risk.
So. Why deliberately create an airborne version? The argument is that it would allow other scientists to study it and develop preventive techniques should the mutations occur naturally.
But now a government advisory board has asked scientific journals not to publish details of the experiments. Officials are concerned that the information could be used by terrorists to trigger a worldwide epidemic. It’s the first such request on record.
The panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), made the request to two prestigious journals — Science and Nature. Advocates of the censorship believe that the conclusions should be published, but not experimental details “that would enable replication of the experiments.”
The board can’t force the journals to take the action, but editors are considering it. They want guarantees that the government will allow “legitimate scientists” to access the information around the world.
As more researchers obtain the information, however, the number of potential sources for something to go wrong grows. Essentially, the genie has been let out of the bottle and cannot be coaxed back in. So maybe the NIH should turn its attention to funding vaccines for this new mutated H5N1 virus. Seriously, get to work.
Because there’s a little axiom called Murphy’s Law, and it doesn’t take a scientist to see how it may apply here.
Photo via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/96khz/3127953038/
