1964: ARTHUR C CLARKE predicts the FUTURE | Horizon | Past Predictions | BBC Archive

horizon filmed him at the world's fair in new york he's arthur clark trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation because the prophet invariably falls between two stools if his predictions sound at all reasonable you can be quite sure that in twenty or most fifty years the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative on the other hand if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place his predictions would sound so absurd so far fetched that everybody would love him to

scorn this has proved to be true in the past and it will undoubtedly be true even more so of the century to come the only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic so if what i say now seems to you to be very reasonable then i'll fail completely only if what i tell you appears absolutely unbelievable having any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen let's start by looking at the city of the future some people think that it will be like this and

they're quite right in fact everything you see now already exists all the materials all the ideas these things can be put into practice immediately but what about the city of the day after tomorrow say the year 2000 i think it will be completely different in fact it may not even exist at all oh i'm not thinking of the atom bomb and the next stone age i'm thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by development communications particularly the transistor and above all the communication satellite these things will make possible a world in which

we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location it will be possible in that age perhaps only fifty years from now for a man to conduct his business from tahiti or bali just as well as he could from london in fact if it proves worthwhile almost any executive skill any administrative skill even any physical skill could be made independent of distance i am perfectly serious when i suggest that one day we may have brain

surgeons in edinburgh operating on patients in new zealand when that time comes the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense in fact men will no longer commute they will communicate they won't have to travel for business anymore they'll only travel for pleasure i only hope that when that day comes and when the city is abolished the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb in that world of the future we will not be the only

intelligent creatures one of the coming techniques will be what we might call bioengineering the development of intelligent and useful servants among the other animals on this planet particularly the great apes and in the oceans the dolphins and whales you know it's a scandal which we should be thoroughly ashamed that prehistoric man tamed all the domestic animals we have today we haven't added one in the last 5 000 years it's about time we did so and with our present knowledge of animal psychology and genetics we could certainly solve the servant problem with the help of the

monkey kingdom of course eventually our super chimpanzees would start forming trade unions and we right back where we started however the most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won't be men or monkeys they'll be machines the remote descendants of today's computers now the present day electronic brains are complete morons but this will not be true in another generation they will start to think and eventually they will completely out think their makers is this depressing i don't see why it should be we superseded the cro-magnon and neanderthal men and we presume we're an improvement i think

we should regard it as a privilege to be stepping stones to higher things i suspect that organic or biological evolution has about come to its end and we're now at the beginning of inorganic or mechanical evolution which will be thousands of times swifter but even if the future does belong to the robots our bodies and our brains still have immense untap potentialities for example to cope with the information explosion we may develop a machine for recording information directly onto the brain as today we can record a symphony on tape so we may one day be

able to become instant experts uh learning chinese overnight for example or we may be able to recall completely memories of past events so that we seem to relive them in fact techniques already known for doing this in a rather limited way at the present alternatively we may prefer to totally erase past unpleasant memories our bodies will also be more efficient and they'll last longer after all it's only in this century that a patient had a better than 50 chance of any improvement when he was treated by his doctors one of the great medical discoveries of

the near future will be a method of suspended animation so that a man can sleep away down the centuries and in this manner travel into the future this technique which may possibly be based on deep freezing will one day be used to send into the future people suffering from diseases or ailments beyond the ability of present-day medical science to cure though i don't really know how one will calculate the health insurance contributions to pay for medical treatment 500 years hence another use of suspended animation will be for the long-range exploration of space in this way

us short-lived creatures will be able to travel enormous distances although we may not of course be so short-lived in the future because even immortality may be on the cards one day however even without immortality we may be able to make journeys lasting thousands of years and such journeys will be necessary if you ever wish to cross the enormous gulfs which separate from us from the stars distance is so great that even light traveling at 600 million miles every hour takes years to cross them but why should we attempt these immense voyages well because it seems

very certain that at least at this moment in time there are no other intelligent creatures in our own solar system we'll have to go out to the stars to meet them for certainly out there among the 100 000 other sons of our universe there must be many civilizations perhaps far higher than our own the first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials will be the greatest adventure in the future of man it may not happen for centuries but one day it will come meanwhile near at home there's plenty to do in this solar system on the morning planets

today we can just reach the moon tomorrow men will be living there a hundred years from now some men will call it home at the moment it's a very unattractive kind of place to imagine as a home and this is true of all the planets there's not one on which unprotected men could live or in which any form of life as we know it could exist with a possible exception of mars however a hundred years from now things will be very different with the techniques which we are now acquiring it will one day be possible

to modify the environments on at least some of the planets so that men can live there without spacesuits or airtight cities the technique for this has been called planetary engineering and one astronomer has coined the very optimistic phrase the reconstruction of the solar system looking as far into the technological future as i dare i'd like to describe the invention to end all inventions i call it the replicator and it's simply a duplicating machine but it's a duplicating machine that can make an exact copy of anything now we're already familiar with perfect copies of printing of

pictures and of sounds yet the camera and the tape recorder would have seemed miraculous to our ancestors and to a medieval monk who perhaps in his whole life only saw a few dozen books each one patiently copied by hand our present world in which literally millions of books exist would again have seemed absolutely inconceivable can we imagine a world in which objects can be made as easily as today we can make books well don't ask me exactly how the replicator would work if i knew i'd patented it once confronted with such a device our present

society would probably sink into a kind of gluttonous barbarism because everybody would want unlimited quantities of everything since nothing would cost anything in fact cynics may doubt of any human society could survive an invention which would lead to unlimited abundance and the final ending of the curse of adam and yet you know human beings are almost infinitely adaptable look at the incredible changes we've experienced and survived from the stone age to the present time and yet even greater changes are still to come because the future is not merely an extension of the present with bigger

and better machines and cities and gadgets it'll be fundamentally different and many of the things we take for granted will one day pass away as completely as or spinning wheels and sedan chairs and oil lamps and that is why the future is so endlessly fascinating because try as we can we'll never outguess it you