From a struggling past to a bold future, technology leads the way

By Dick Pelletier

      

    After celebrating my 79th birthday recently, I began thinking about how technologies have affected my life. In 1930, President Hoover announced that "Prosperity is just around the corner," but he couldn't have been more wrong. The 1929 Stock Market Crash had just brought America into The Great Depression.

    My five siblings and I were raised on a farm near Hermiston, Oregon. Our home had no electricity and few modern conveniences. We bathed in a small tub with little privacy, drank water from a hand pump in the back yard, and made bathroom trips to a two-seater outhouse.

    Then in 1938, we were connected to the electric grid. We installed electric lights, a water pump, an inside shower, and replaced the outhouse with an indoor toilet. As an eight-year-old, I was in awe of how electricity had changed our lives.

    Jet travel didn't exist in the 1930s; a five-day ocean trip was the main way to go from America to Europe, and wireless meant the wood-paneled Zenith radio in the living room. Radio was the most popular form of home entertainment; and for travel, we rode crude cars on mostly unpaved roads.

    Today, we drive cars loaded with creature comforts on superhighways. America's mastery of the physical and biological world grew tremendously. Life expectancy soared from 50 years in 1930 to nearly 80 today. TV, cell phones, and computers are everywhere, and modern machines have transformed agriculture, which now provides food for 6.7 billion people.

    In late 1930s, President Roosevelt, emboldened by his "New Deal" legislation which ended the depression, authorized the "Manhattan Project," an effort to build an atomic bomb and use it to hasten the end of World War II.

    Understanding atoms helped drive our nation's hi-tech prowess, which prompted demands for machines to crunch numbers and arrange data; this brought us the PC and email. These advances raised worker output by 2% per-year, giving Americans the world's highest standard of living.

    So, if technology altered lives so drastically over the last 79 years, what might we expect in the next 79 years? The following predictions describe some mind-boggling possibilities:

    2020 – Personal genomes and regenerative medicine changes healthcare from reactive to proactive enabling doctors to replace damaged and aging body parts and cure some diseases.

    2030 – Nanotech provides household replicators that supply food, clothing, and necessities at little or no cost; and nanorobots whizz through our bodies to eliminate aging and restore youthful health and beauty to older adults.

    2050 – Scientists have produced non-biological bodies, immune to disease, accidents, and violence. Should a fatal disaster occur, consciousness and memories are transmitted to an automated system where a new body is cloned with the original mind intact. Patients 'wake up' in their new body and resume life; not even realizing they had died. All deaths are now preventable.

    2088 – Nanotech eliminates storms and bad weather, Moon and Mars colonies will soon boast one billion inhabitants, and intelligent aliens were discovered on a planet orbiting a nearby star.

    Could these events unfold so quickly? Forward-thinkers believe this "magical future" will happen, and many alive today could live to experience it.

This article appeared in various print publications and on-line blogs. Comments always welcome.