"Man: the Next 30 Years"

[Zyzzyva]

Published in 1968.

Just got it from the UW library. Will give more details as I read it... but it promises to be good.

 

[Thande]

Paleofuture hurrah!

1968, eh? That should be an interesting mixture of utopian optimism shading into paranoia, given the period.

 

[Zyzzyva]

Intro, Ch1: People, Ch2: Food from the land

The good:

The world population... will double to 6.4 billion by the end of the century.

India's population... is expected to pass 1 billion by the end of the century.

Within thirty-odd years the US will achieve a stable population somewhere between 250 and 300 million people.

The major change in population growth will come not from devices but from education.

...The Iowa farmer will collect the daily status report on his thousand acres of corn, a report collected by automatic sensors and fed to him through a central computer... [but see * below]

Weather prediction... will be only a fraction of the vast, coordinated myriad of services to be performed by orbiting satllites and their companion the large [] computer.

Fewer livestock are visible although the US now produces twice as much as in the sixties. Livestock are now kept in environmentally controlled shelters... More people are eating meat.

Every day, we are losing thousands of acres of theis prime agrucultuaral land to subdivisions, highways, airports, and industrial plants.

The [green revolution; he doesn't use that exact phrase, of course] has proved that food production can keep pace with a rapidly growing population.

The bad:

Demographers estimate [the world population in 1999] at 7.5 billion.

China's population will double in the next thirty years [to 1.5bn; in his defense, the OCP wasn't introduced till 1979.]

Within the next third of a century we can expect "vaccination" against babies... Even more probable [!] is a birth control agent which may be administered in the water supply of an entire city or region... without the knowledge or conscious effort of individuals.

A weatherman in the sky, perched within his polar-orbiting platform two hundred miles above the earth, will begin his routine scan of the earth's surface, using a complex but commonplace [?] set of special instruments and sensors, aided, coordinated, and their information translated instantaneously, by computer. [Not a bad "weather satellite" prediction, actually, but the "manned" part is laughable]

The weatherman will note that hurricane Cindy is beginning to break up... under repeated aerial barrages of silver iodide seeds...

*

...fed to him through a central computer which he shares and pays for cooperatively with all the other farmers in his county. Noting that one field shows beginning drouth symptoms, he picks up the telephone, dials the county airfield, and orders a thundershower. Then, with his work nearly finished for the day [!] he... watches the buildup of cumulus clouds in the west, where silver idodide seeding will produce his shower.

Cloud seeding will by then then be old-fashioned... [a newer invention may be] portable nuclear heaters with tall, thin exhaust stacks pointing skyward. Through these rifled [?] cylenders, a tight vortex of superheated air will be fired at high velocity into the upper atmoshphere, where it will spread, cool, and drop rain over a small selected field [!] as desired... In the Andes or the Himalayas the water stored in glaciers... may be released in dry summers by the heating effect of large capsules of radioactive waste materials... [!!!]

Combinations of biological controls, such as sterilization by radiation, and specific insecticides, will have eradicated the dozen insects that cause half of the world's crop losses... Scientists will have bred crops... that are unaffected by the plant diseases we know. Weeds will have become laboratory curiosities, for harmless chemicals will have been developed to prevent their seeds from germinating.

Lightning fires will be largely eliminated by weather control. Parasite and predator damage to timber will be biologically contorlled, tailor-made trees developed by genetic manipulation.

Despite the size and cost of these farms of tomorrow, they are still largely family-owned and -operated, for by the year 1999, a creatively flexible system of financeing [!] will have been devised to meet the mcuh heaveier farm credit needs of that era, and automation has reduced the required number of human workers to a minimum.

The ugly:

Thirty years ago [in 1938]... the guitar was a musical instrument from which the rare Segovia could draw celestial sounds, not an electronic absurdity designed to destroy the ear with the monotony of a pneumatic drill.

No attempt will be made to predict the unpredictable... we will not predict that the Negro will grow in stature to take his place in the mainstream of American or African [!] life, or that the starving Indians will learn to feed themselves.

Stay tuned! Next chapters we have "food for us all" and "food: the new pantry". Five words: "Bacteria steaks and algae cookies".

 

[Iamwinterborn]

*The ugly:

What's the context for the guitar? He was saying 30 years ago it sounded better, but what was he saying it would sound like in the FUTURE echo echo echo echo...

Edit: Just read that last line. Oh... dear... god... *Facepalm*

 

[Kyronea]

What's the context for the guitar? He was saying 30 years ago it sounded better, but what was he saying it would sound like in the FUTURE echo echo echo echo...

Edit: Just read that last line. Oh... dear... god... *Facepalm*

I think it's the author's personal opinion of electric guitars. To be honest, he has a bit of a point, considering the sheer annoying noise that certain artists at the time were fond of jamming into suddenly in their songs. (Think like what Marty McFly does in the Johnny B. Goode scene of Back to the Future.)

As for the bacteria steaks and algae cookies...precursors to vat meat and such things, basically. Not the worst of ideas.

 

[Sachyriel]

He's right you know. Rock-stars have done some pretty bad things to guitars. Besides setting them on fire, smashing them at the end of the show, hitting other people with them.... well, Punk pretty much killed any chance of a Classical/Baroque music on guitar revival...

 

[Hawkeye]

...The Iowa farmer will collect the daily status report on his thousand acres of corn, a report collected by automatic sensors and fed to him through a central computer... [but see * below]

Weather prediction... will be only a fraction of the vast, coordinated myriad of services to be performed by orbiting satllites and their companion the large computer.

Good, all that's left is flying cars and Captain Kirk.

 

[karl2025]

He's right you know. Rock-stars have done some pretty bad things to guitars. Besides setting them on fire, smashing them at the end of the show, hitting other people with them.... well, Punk pretty much killed any chance of a Classical/Baroque music on guitar revival...

Let a Classical Guitar Revival rest in peace I say. Some people just need to remember how good rock stars can be on guitar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCwCBh0z3Hs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0WO8XoVWes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7amYNaPTRI