Fifty years later, what great minds’ predictions teach us
What will America and the world be like in 50 years — in August 2074?
Will we be driving flying cars? Have we cured cancer? Do people live on the moon? Will the world be at peace? Or, will a pandemic have wiped out a large part of our population or will parts of the globe — like the Persian Gulf — become uninhabitable because of climate change?
Fifty years ago this month, August 1974, the magazine Saturday Review tried to foresee what the world would be like in 2024. They assembled 20 luminaries, from U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, to scientist Werner von Braun, to astronaut Neil Armstrong, to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, to theologian Father Theodore Hesburgh to divine the future.
And here we are — August 2024.
Editor Norman Cousins noted the absence of doomsday prophecies, though former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy foresaw several possible catastrophes — a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon that levels an American city, a famine and global population growth out of control.
Four years after the first Earth Day, many saw environmental crises because we were exhausting our resources (surely we would have run out of oil by 2024), but no one saw the challenge of climate change. Cousteau noted the importance of oceans as carbon sinks as we continued to burn fossil fuels.
Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov foresaw the internet (sort of), calling it the “Universal Information System,” but no one guessed we would all be walking around with a device in our pockets with vastly more computing power than the system that had taken Armstrong to the moon five years earlier.
In 1974, Steve Jobs was 19, a college dropout, and was traveling through India on a spiritual quest. Bill Gates, also 19, was a year away from dropping out of Harvard.
Certainly scientific achievements were forecast. We would be living on the moon and the first lunar baby would have been born. We would have been to Mars, and manned flights would be heading deeper into our solar system. We would have fusion power.
Dr. Michael DeBakey, the father of modern cardiovascular surgery, felt that by 2024 the word “incurable” would be banished from our vocabularies.
Five years after Time Magazine’s infamous cover posing the question “Is God Dead?” Father Hesburgh thought that St. Thomas Aquinas had answered that question seven centuries earlier. However, having served a dozen years on the National Science Board, he wrote that modern men needed a relationship with “The Word” to guide them in using their increasing scientific powers wisely.
Unsurprisingly, the 20 brilliant minds chosen for this exercise got many, many things wrong. It was a hard task and as Abraham Lincoln observed, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” Many have echoed that idea since.
America is a nation of immigrants and, as such, we do not have a common past, but we have always believed that our future would be better. The exercise of picking up stakes and coming to a new land confirms that. Our founders called it the quest to form “a more perfect union.”
Some believe we try to predict things because we think it gives us some sort of control. It does not, as any losing bettor can tell you.
We live in a democratic republic and, as such, we have the power to choose leaders who will sit at the potter’s wheel of history shaping events and making the choices that will determine our futures.
The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “The greatest of all historical forces are set in motion when people decide to pit themselves against serious challenges.” Serious challenges are abundant.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His new book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.