The vision of future

Forty years from now, clearly technology will have progressed so

that the commodity products of the day will be vastly different, probably

unrecognizable, compared to those that we buy today. I mean, just imagine

yourself back in the 1960s of cars with tailfins, TVs with mechanical tuners and

glowing tubes, and room-sized computers programmed with decks of punched paper

cards.

From that vantage point, you might try to envision the commodity

1 GHz PC and marvelous 18.1 inch Compaq TFT8020 LCD display that I'm writing

this on, or the Internet through which you're reading it. Wouldn't have

happened. So I won't presume to forecast how things might look forty years from

now--as we all know, five years is stretching things. But as in the 1960s, there

remains a group of people who routinely do try to peer forward, and often, by

that effort, affect how new technologies comes about, and how people initially

perceive them.

That group, of course, is the science fiction authors, and the

best of them have no qualms at all of looking forward forty years, extrapolating

where today's nascent technologies may lead. History has proven that these

`speculations’ are worth reading–not necessarily because any one author's

vision will come to pass (although look at Arthur C. Clarke, who foretold the

communications satellites, and other authors' early visions of cyberspace), but

because these explorations help us to think beyond our `comfort zones’–something

increasingly important for all of us as `change’ continues to accelerate.

Recently, RCFoC reader Rob Streno pointed me to a book by James

Halperin titled `The First Immortal’. While nanotechnology (today's fledgling

`science of the tiny’ that holds extraordinary potential to change our world)

isn't the focus of this book, I did find an interesting passage that looks back

forty years to the `old days’ of 2000, which put me in mind of our looking

back to the technologies of `the sixties,’ from today: "Grandmother's

eyes came alive. I imagined she was recalling the forward march of computer

technology during her own early years. She had never even owned a PC until she'd

reached her thirties. Her first machine had been torturously slow, couldn't

respond to speech, and covered most of her desk! Nowadays, six-year-old kids

were wearing a hundred times more computing power in their belt buckles or their

pinkie rings."

'Remember,' I went on. 'Even the smallest silicon chips back

then were made from transistors comprising half a trillion atoms apiece. Yet

almost every late twentieth century scientist agreed we would have unimolecular

transistors by now--and, of course, we do. Most nanoscientists today believe

that such transistors, currently maintainable only under sterile laboratory

conditions, will be commercially available within a decade.

Already we can build a mechanical computer, as powerful as a

turn-of-the-millennium 'laptop' but much faster--because it's so much

smaller--in a space slightly larger than a human cell. In twenty years we'll

assemble electronic computers perhaps a thousand times smaller and ten thousand

times faster than those of today.

We now have nanomotors smaller and mightier than a bacterium's,

constructed atom by atom, molecule-by-molecule, from ceramics and metals far

more durable and predictable than proteins. Don't forget, nature typically

demonstrates only the lower boundaries of the possible.' Grandmother smiled,

nodding here head, envisioning, perhaps, an eagle trying to race against a

mach-seven luxury liner, or someday, a starship.

'We can already build computerized machines powered by today's

smallest motors, and your smallest capillaries could easily accommodate

hundred-lane superhighways of such machines. Yet nanoscience is still an infant;

a precocious one, but an infant nonetheless.' As I said, clearly science

fiction. Incredible things would have to happen in nanotechnology and molecular

and DNA computing to allow these visions to become reality in forty years. But

before you say, "it's impossible," remember to look back those forty

years into our own past...