• A "nine-days' wonder" is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day.
• A "common sense" prediction is sure to err on the side of timidity.
• The more extravagant a prediction sounds, the more likely it is to come true.

Some will be wrong - but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your door - C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.
2. Contraception and the control of disease is revising relations between sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.
3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.
4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will state a "preventative war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.
5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "break-through" into new technology which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.
6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.
7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called modern art will be discussed only by psychiatrists.
8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction.
9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration" i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.
10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be abuilding.
11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple queries, and transmit vision.
12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.
13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speeds.
14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.
15. We will not achieve a "world state" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.
16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.
17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain".
18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.
19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "civilization" be destroyed.

• Travel through time.
• Travel faster than the speed of light.
• "Radio" transmission of matter.
• Manlike robots with manlike reactions.
• Laboratory creation of life.
• Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter.
• Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
• Nor a permanent end to war. (I don't like that prediction any better than you do.)

Prediction of gadgets is a parlour trick anyone can learn; but only a fool would attempt to predict details of future history (except as fiction, so labelled); there are too many unknowns and no techniques for integrating them even if they were known.

Even to make predictions about overall trends in technology is now most difficult. In fields where before World War II there was one man working in public, there are now ten, or a hundred, working in secret. There may be six men in the country who have a clear picture of what is going on in science today. There may not be even one.

This in itself is a trend. Many leading scientists consider it a factor as disabling to us as the nonsense of Lysenkoism is to Russian technology. Nevertheless there are clear-cut trends which are certain to make this coming era enormously more productive and interesting that the frantic one we have just passed through. Among them are :

• Cybernetics: The study of communication and control of mechanisms and organisms. This includes the wonderful field of mechanical and electronic "brains" - but is not limited to it. (These "brains" are a factor in themselves that will speed up technical progress the way a war does.)
• Semantics: A field which seems concerned only with definitions of words. It it not ; it is a frontal attack on epistemology - that is to say, how we know what we know, a subject formerly belonging to long-haired philosophers.
• New tools of mathematics and logic: such as calculus of statement, Boolean logic, morphological analysis, generalised symbology, newly invented mathematics of every sort - there is not space even to name these enormous fields, but they offer us hope in every other field - medicine, social relations, biology, economics, anything.
• Biochemistry : Research into the nature of protoplasm, into enzyme chemistry, viruses, etc., give hope not only that we may conquer disease, but that we may someday understand the mechanisms of life itself. Through this, and with the aid of cybernetic machines and radioactive isotopes, we may eventually acquire a rigour of chemistry. Chemistry is not a discipline today; it is a jungle. We know that chemical behaviours depends on the number of orbital electrons in an atom and that physical and chemical properties follow the pattern called the Periodic Table. We don't know much else, save by cut-and-try, despite the great size and importance of the chemical industry. When chemistry becomes a discipline, mathematical chemists will design new materials, predict their properties, and tell engineers how to make them - without ever entering a laboratory. We've got a long way to go on that one!
• Nucleonics: We have yet to find out what makes the atom tick. Atomic power? - yes, we'll have it, in convenient packages - when we understand the nucleus. The field of radio-isotopes alone is larger than was the entire known body of science in 1900. Before we are through with these problems, we may find out how the universe is shaped, and why. Not to mention enormous vistas best represented by ?????
  Some physicists are now using two time scales, the T-scale, and the tau-scale. Three billion years on one scale can equal an incredibly split second on the other scale - and yet both apply to you and your kitchen stove. Of such anarchy is our present state in physics.

Call it the Crisis of the Librarian.

We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.

But we are not likely to get either one in a hurry and we have a powerful lot of grief before us in the meantime.

Fortune-tellers can always be sure of repeat customers by predicting what the customer wants to hear... it matters not whether the prediction comes true. Contrariwise, the weatherman is often blamed for bad weather.

Brace yourself.

In 1900 the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man's hand - but what lay ahead was the Panic of 1907, World War I, the panic following it, the Depression, Fascism, World War II, the Atom Bomb, and Red Russia.

Today the clouds obscure the sky, and the wind that overturns the world is sighing in the distance.

The period immediately ahead will be the roughest, cruelest one in the long hard history of mankind. It will probably include the worst World War of them all. It might even end with a war with Mars, God save the mark! Even if we are spared that fantastic possibility, it is certain that there will be no security anywhere, save what you dig out of your own inner spirit.

[...]

The gathering wind will not destroy everything, nor will the Age of Science change everything. Long after the first star ship leaves for paths unknown, there will still be outhouses in upstate New York, there will still be steers in Texas, and - no doubt - the English will still stop for tea.

And now we are paying for it and the cost is high. But, for reasons understandable only to bureaucrats, we have almost halted development of a nuclear-powered spacecraft when success was in sight. Never mind; if we don't another country will. By the end of this century space travel will be cheap.

This trend is so much more evident now than it was fifteen years ago that I am tempted to call it a fulfilled prophecy. Vast changes in sex relations are evident all around us - with the oldsters calling it "moral decay" and the youngsters ignoring them and taking it all for granted. Surface signs : books such as "Sex and the Single Girl" are smash hits; the formerly taboo four-letter words are now seen in both in novels and popular magazines; the neologism "swinger" has come into the language; courts are conceding that nudity and semi-nudity are now parts of the mores. But the end is not yet; this revolution will go much farther and is now barely started.

The most difficult speculation for a science writer to undertake is to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor. Many people correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage; some were bold enough to predict that everyone would use them and the horse would virtually disappear. But I know of no writer, fiction or non-fiction, who saw ahead of time the vast change in the courting and mating habits of Americans which would result primarily from the automobile - change which the diaphragm and the oral contraceptive merely confirmed. So far as I know, no one even dreamed of the change in sex habits the automobile would set off.

There is some new gadget in existence today which will prove to be equally revolutionary in some other way equally unexpected. You and I both know of this gadget, by name and function - but we don't know which one it is nor what its unexpected effect will be. This is why science fiction is not prophecy - and why fictional speculation can be so much fun both to read and write.

I flatly stand by this one. True, we are now working on Nike-Zeus and Nike-X and related systems and plan to spend billions on such systems - and we know that others are doing the same thing. True, it is possible to hit an object in orbit or trajectory. Nevertheless this prediction is as safe as predicting tomorrow's sunrise. Anti-aircraft fire never stopped air attacks; it simply made them expensive. The disadvantage in being the bottom of a deep "gravity well" is very great; gravity gauge will be as crucial in the coming years as wind gauge was in the days when sailing ships controlled empires. The nation that control the Moon will control the Earth - but no one seems willing these days to speak that nasty fact out loud.

Since 1950 we have done so in several theatres and are doing so as this is written, in Viet Nam. "Preventative" or "pre-emptive" war seems as unlikely as ever, no matter who is in the White House. Here is a new prediction : World War III (as a major, all-out war) will not take place at least until 1980 and could easily hold off until 2000. This is a very happy prediction compared with the situation in 1950, as those years of grace may turn up basic factors which (hopefully!) might postpone disaster still longer. We were much closer to ultimate disaster around 1955 that we are today - much closer indeed than we were at the time of the Cuban confrontation in 1962. But the public never knew it. All in all, things look pretty good for survival, for the time being- and that is as good a break as our ancestors ever had. It was far more dangerous to live in London in 1664-5 than it is to live in a city threatened by H-bombs today.

Here I fell flat on my face. There has been no breakthrough in housing, nor is any now in prospect - instead the ancient, wasteful methods of building are now being confirmed by public subsidies. The degree of our backwardness in this field is hard to grasp; we have never seen a modern house. Think what an automobile would be if each one were custom-built from materials fetched to your home - what would it look like, what would it do, and how much would it cost? But don't set the cost lower than $100,000, nor the speed higher than 10 m/h, if you want to be realistic about the centuries of difference between the housing industry and the automotive industry.

I underestimated (through wishful thinking) the power of human stupidity - a fault fatal to prophecy.

In the meantime spectacular progress has been made in organ transplants - and the problem of regeneration is related to this one. Biochemistry and genetics have made a spectacular breakthrough in "cracking the genetic code". It is a tiny crack, however, with a long way to go before we will have the human chromosomes charted and still longer before we will be able to "tailor" human beings by gene manipulation. The possibility is there - but not by year 2000. This is probably just as well. If we aren't bright enough to build decent houses, are we bright enough to play God with the architecture of human beings?

Our editor suggested that I had been too optimistic on this one- but I still stand by it. It is still thirty-five years to the end of the century. For perspective, look back thirty-five years to 1930 - the American Rocket Society had not been founded then. Another curve [...] derived entirely from speed of transportation, extrapolates to show faster-than-light travel by year 2000. I guess I'm chicken, for I am not predicting FTL ships by then, if ever. But the prediction still stands without hedging.

Predicting intelligent life on Mars looks pretty silly after those dismal photographs. But I shan't withdraw it until Mars has been thoroughly explored. As yet we really have no idea - and no data - as to just how ubiquitous and varied life may be in this galaxy; it is conceivable that life as we don't know it can evolve on any sort of planet... and nothing in our present knowledge of chemistry rules this out. All the talk has been about life-as-we-know-it - which means terrestrial conditions.

But if you feel that this just shows in me a childish reluctance to give up thoats and zitidars and beautiful Martian princesses until forced to, I won't argue with you - I'll just wait.

I must hedge number thirteen; the "cent" I meant was scaled by the 1950 dollar. But our currency has been going through a long steady inflation, and no nation in history has ever gone as far as we have along this route without reaching the explosive phase of inflation. Ten-dollar hamburgers? Brother, we are headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger - for the barter-only hamburger.

But this is just an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is plenty of hamburger.

This prediction stands. But today physics is in a tremendous state of flux with new data piling up faster than it can be digested; it is anybody's guess as to where we are headed, but the wilder the guess, the more likely you are to hit it lucky. With "elementary particles" of nuclear physics now totalling about half the number we used to use to list the "immutable" chemical elements, a spectator needs a program just to keep track of the players. At the other end of the scale, "quasars" - quasi-stellar bodies - have come along; radio astronomy is now bigger than telescopic astronomy used to be; and we have redraw our picture of the universe several times, each enlarging it and making it more complex - I haven't seen this week's theory yet, which is well, as it would be out of date before this gets into print. Plasma physics was barely started in 1950; the same for solid-state physics. This is the Golden Age of physics - and it's an anarchy.

I stand flatly behind prediction number fifteen.

I'll hedge number eighteen just a little. Hunger is not now a problem in the USA and need not be in the year 2000 - but hunger is a world problem and would at once become an acute problem for us if we were conquered... a distinct possibility by 2000. Between our present status and that of subjugation lies a whole spectrum of political and economic possible shapes to the future under which we would share the worldwide hunger to a greater or lesser extent. And the problem grows. We can expect to have to feed around half a billion Americans circa year 2000 - our present huge surpluses would then represent acute shortages even if we never shipped a ton of wheat to India.

I stand by prediction number nineteen.

I see no reason to change any of the negative predictions which follow the numbered affirmative ones. They are all conceivably possible; they are all wildly unlikely by year 2000. Some of them are debatable if the terms are defined to suit the affirmative side - definitions of "life" and "manlike" for example. Let it stand that I am not talking about an amino acid in one case, nor a machine that plays chess in the other.

Today the forerunners of these synthesists are already at work in many places. Their titles may be anything; their degrees may be in anything - or they may have no degrees. Today they are called "operations researchers", or sometimes "systems development engineers", or other interim tags. But they are all interdisciplinary people, generalists, not specialists - the new Renaissance Man. The very explosion of data which forced most scholars to specialise very narrowly created the necessity which evoked this non-specialist. So far, this "unspecialty" is in its infancy; its methodology is inchoate, the results are sometimes trivial, and no one knows how to train to become such a man. But the results are often spectacularly brilliant, too - this new man may yet save all of us.

I'm an optimist. I have great confidence in Homo sapiens.

We have rough times ahead- but when didn't we? Things have always been "tough all over". H-bombs, Communism, race riots, water shortage - all nasty problems. But not basic problems, merely current ones.

We have three basic and continuing problems : The problem of population explosion; the problem of data explosion; and the problem of government.

Population problems have a horrid way of solving themselves when they are not solved rationally; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are always saddled up and ready to ride. The data explosion is now being solved, mostly by cybernetics and electronics men rather than by librarians - and if the solutions are less than perfect, at least they are better than what Grandpa had to work with. The problem of government has not been solved either by the "Western Democracies" or the "People's Democracies", as of now. (Anyone who thinks the people of the United States have solved the problem of government is using too short a time scale.) The people of the world are now engaged in a long, long struggle with no end in sight, testing whether one concept works better than another; in that conflict millions have already died and it is possible that hundreds of millions will die in it before year 2000. But not all.

I hold both opinions and preferences as to the outcome. But my personal preference for a maximum of looseness is irrelevant; what we are experiencing is an evolutionary process in which personal preference matters, at most, only statistically. Biologists, ecologists in particularly, are working around to the idea that natural selection and survival of the fittest is a notion that applies more to groups and how they are structured than it does to individuals. The present problem will solve itself in the cold terms of evolutionary survival, and in the course of it both sides will make changes in group structure. The system that survives might be called "Communism" or it might be called "Democracy" (the latter is my guess) - but one thing we can be certain of: it will not resemble very closely what either Marx or Jefferson had in mind. Or it might be called by some equally inappropriate neologism; political tags are rarely logical.

For Man is rarely logical. But I have great confidence in Man, based on his past record. He is mean, ornery, cantankerous, illogical, emotional - and amazingly hard to kill. Religious leaders have faith in the spiritual redemption of Man; humanist leaders subscribe to a belief in the perfectibility of Man through his own efforts; but I am not discussing either of these two viewpoints. My confidence in our species lies in its past history and is founded quite as much on Man's so-called vices as on his so-called virtues. When the chips are down, quarrelsomeness and selfishness can be as useful to the survival of the human race as is ultruisim, and pigheadedness can be a trait superior to sweet reasonableness. If this were not true, these "vices" would have died out through the early deaths of their hosts, at least a half million years back.

I have no idea of what the copyright status of this passage. If
anyone could tell me,  I'd be delighted to know.  All I have is 4
double-pages of worn photocopies.  They are numbered pages 250-257.  On
the even numbered pages there is the heading "S.F. as Prophecy" and on
the odd pages,  "Pandora's Box". 

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