Probable Tomorrows
How Science and Technology Will Transform Our Lives in the Next Twenty Years
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating look at near-future advances, inventions, products, services, and everyday conveniences that will change how we live and work. Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies explore these changes and the impact they will have on everyday life. For example, by the year 2010:
-Personal computers will offer the power of today's supermachines and artificial intelligence.
-A telecommunications network will supply the world with services from the contents of the Library of Congress to pornographic videos in Cantonese.
-The United States-reversing a decades-old trend-will link its major cities with hig-speed railroads.
-Airplanes will be capable of leaping halfway around the world in just two hours.
-Consumer goods will be produced at prices so low the poor of tomorrow could live as well as the rich of today.
-Scientists will have learned to purge the air of pollution, closing up the Antarctic ozone hole and ending the threat of global warming.
-Heavy industries can move into space, so that Earth can recover from our past environmental follies.
-Dramatic advances in gene mapping and organ transplants will extend the healthy human life span well beyond the century mark.
Science and technology have dominated life in developed countries since the Industrial Revolution. In the twenty-first century, the will change it almost beyond recognition. Probable Tomorrows tells us how.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an aptly titled examination of the scientific and technological development that will shape the next two decades, futurists Cetron and Davies (Crystal Globe, etc.) present a well-reasoned and optimistic forecast. Although individual experts are likely to disagree with details of the authors' predictions, few would argue about its breadth of coverage and comfortable tone. High technology and complex science are presented in clear, lively prose and connected to the facts and issues of everyday life. The book's nine chapters on key fields (information, communication, materials science, nanotechnology, transportation, aerospace, energy, environment and medicine) include speculation as well as forecasts; but the authors clearly distinguish among what they view as probable, possible or unlikely developments. The capstone of the book is its appendix, which includes a consensus view of the future from a 1996 George Washington University Delphi survey, a list of contributors to that survey, a detailed response to that survey by Forecasting International (Cetron's company) and a time line of technological evolution. While not quite a crystal ball, this book likely does depict the future, albeit through dark glass.
