Square One

Futurology is at best systematic guesswork, and at worst facile hubris. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” Niels Bohr (1885-1962) once quipped, but if you think about how successful science-fiction has been, you might be tempted to take Bohr’s piece of wisdom with a grain of salt. Is it really so difficult to predict the future?

HG Wells (1866–1946), one of the earliest writers of science-fiction, most popular of which were The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) made many predictions in his life time. He wrote his  most clearly and decidedly futuristic work, “Anticipations: An Experiment in Prophecy” (1901), where he predicted what the world would be like in the year 2000.

He got it right that trains and cars would result in population dispersal, that there would be much greater sexual freedom, that Germany will be defeated, and there would be a European Union. Expectedly, there were many misses: he said there wouldn’t be a successful aircraft before 1950, and that there would never be a successful submarine. For one of the fathers of the science-fiction genre, you expect it would be the other way round.

There was one more thing, partly scientific, he did get right though, which I think he is not being given enough credit for: the Internet, and the eventual creation of Wikipedia. Of course, he didn’t use the Wiki word, but his accuracy was stunning. The following are excerpts from his contribution to the new Encyclopédie Française in 1937, titled “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia,” reissued in a separate volume World Brain:

A microfilm, coloured where necessary, occupying an inch or so of space and weighing little more than a letter, can be duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail.

This in itself is a fact of tremendous significance. It foreshadows a real intellectual unification of our race. The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual.

Its uses will be multiple and many of them will be fairly obvious. Special sections of it, historical, technical, scientific, artistic, e.g. will easily be reproduced for specific professional use. Based upon it, a series of summaries of greater or less fullness and simplicity, for the homes and studies of ordinary people, for the college and the school, can be continually issued and revised.

In the hands of competent editors, educational directors and teachers, these condensations and abstracts incorporated in the world educational system, will supply the humanity of the days before us, with a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose and of a commonweal such as now we hardly dare dream of.

This concisely is the sober, practical but essentially colossal objective of those who are seeking to synthesize human mentality today, through this natural and reasonable development of encyclopaedism into a Permanent World Encyclopaedia.

If you substitute ‘computer’ for ‘microfilm’, what you have is the internet, and the makings of Wikipedia. There is however another of Wells’ scientific predictions, published in World Brain where he predicted that for an educated citizenship in a modern democracy, statistical thinking would be as indispensable as reading and writing.

Unfortunately, here is another HG Wells prediction failure, one that I would wish above all other scientific predictions was successful. Prediction has always been hubris.

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Arsenal FC (Competing Interest: I am a committed Gunner!) striker Robin van Persie would be traveling to Serbia to see Belgrade-based healer Marijana Kovacevic (Marianna the Therapist) for the horse placenta treatment of his ankle injury that has pretty much, amongst other things, destroyed the season for Arsenal. Frank Lampard, Yossi Benayoun, Albert Riera, Fabio Aurelio and Glen Johnson have also tried her out following reports that Serbia forward Danko Lazovic had been cured faster than expected by the massage that involves fluid from horse placenta.

Kamran Abbasi begins his editorial in this month’s issue of the  Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine titled “The Year of the Horse Placenta” by writing, “We are in the Chinese year of the ox but in the UK this could end up being the year of the horse placenta,” and later says, “This fashion for horse placenta therapy shows how the world of medical science is quickly marginalized by more powerful arguments of politics and money. Here the concern is league position and money, money and television rights deals.”

He ends by reminding us that Bertrand Russell once asked whether it was possible for a scientific society to exist, or if such a society must inevitably bring itself to destruction. In Kamran’s words: “Perhaps he should have asked a simpler question: ‘Is it possible to create a scientific society?’”