GIGO

Predictions

For I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be...

What a lot of wonders there have been since Tennyson penned those words, some awe-ful and some awful, but few of them predictable in any specific sense. Clairvoyants do their best each year and fail dismally; informed futurologists do little better.

According to a 1981 Omni I have, by this year we should have seen the world dominated by a technologically and economically superior USSR, war between the two Germanies, human beings cloned and a 30-day accuracy for weather forecasts. Some of the predictions could have been lifted straight out of the 1938 Chicago World Fair, envisioning wrist telephones, three-dimensional television and artificial vision for the blind.

A prediction set for 2017 posits the discovery of a fossil life-form on Mars. It mightn't take that long -- there are plans for a joint US-Russian mission in 1998 which may finally show that ours has not been the only planet to harbour life.

What it won't find are the golden-eyed Martians of Ray Bradbury or the thoats of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Those visions owe more to the last century than to this century -- the slow-moving time machine in which we're all trapped has ensured that. It can be difficult to appreciate that chronological flow without stopping to think about it. Consider this: the original series of Star Trek is closer to Casablanca than to its 1990s offspring.

Despite the march of time, many of the issues raised in the Star Trek of the 1960s remain fresh today. Behind the primitive special effects lurked story lines which Shakespeare would have recognised, albeit taken in a broader sense than the Bard himself may have perceived. Star Trek enjoined us to look beyond the often artificial and petty barriers dividing humanity, and consider our future as a whole. It encouraged a generation of dreamers to think about our responsibilities as an intelligent species, to be aware of our planetary citizenship, to see the future as more than mere technological marvels.

Such visions can be powerful ones indeed.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.