Speculations on the future

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

■ I have just finished reading a number of books written by scientists—physicians, chemists and biologists—on the future of science. I, for one, like to contemplate a probable picture of ways of living that will, perhaps, one day be ours. Modern prophets are modest, and for the past fifty years, their discoveries have swiftly outnumbered their prophecies:

In 1902, Wells timidly announced that heavier-than-air flying machines would, by 1950, prove serviceable in time of war—and the scientific paradox of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.

For several years it has been increasingly likely that radio-television—the transmission of a moving picture by a sending station— will be realized, and that in a very short time all telephone subscribers will be able not only to hear but to see the person with whom they are conversing at a distance by the aid of a wireless apparatus which will, perhaps, be called the telepliotophone. "Pocket models" will then make it possible to carry on a conversation with a friend while traveling or even when taking a stroll, and lovers will plan rendezvous at "twenty minutes and sixteen seconds after four o'clock—wave length 452." A radio police force will reserve certain official wave lengths for official communications of a secret nature. Subscriber's blanks will permit people to reserve a given wave length for five, ten or fifteen minutes, within a definite radius. There will be wave lengths entirely for ladies, and others for educational bureaus. (Even today certain central broadcasting stations have a "bedtime hour", at seven o'clock or so, for singing your children to sleep.) The telephotophone will also be a great help to reformers, because it will permit a longdistance supervision of their people's morals, but it will also aid the criminal, for it will transmit pictures which will warn the guilty.

This continuous double presence of vision and sound will transform every phase of life. Absence and separation will become several degrees less important in the scale of sentimental values. Lying will become increasingly difficult. Although, for a while, we will still be masters of our own privacy and able to give or refuse visual communication to others, undoubtedly the time will come (or so Professor Haldane tells us) when, thanks to an instrument lined with selenium plate, everything that can be seen from an airplane passing over our gardens, or over entire countrysides can be freely transmitted elsewhere. Since, moreover, the distant control of airplanes by wireless, with the aid of gyroscopes, is now conceivable, it is possible to imagine a small dial-apparatus which everyone, from his own bed, will be able to move about over the surface of a map, while on a screen changing pictures of the cities and streets and people below their corresponding spots will unroll before us.

A professor of physics warns us that a still more formidable invention will be made during the next century: "It is certain," he says, "that human thought, since it is composed of pictures and of words, must correspond to the emanation of certain light rays and sound waves. These rays and waves will one day be brought under control, and then it will be only a question of amplifying them." From that moment on, it will be possible for anyone, thanks to a sort of radioscope which he can carry in his pocket, to read the thoughts of the person he is talking with, even as they are being formed, and to see, as soon as the thinker himself perceives them, the thought-pictures evoked in his neighbor's mind. Conversation will then resemble very much what is now silent, solitary meditation. A will watch B think for a few minutes, then he, in turn, will think his answer, while B watches him think. In this way only true feelings, free from affectation, will be expressed, and hypocrisy will come to an end. . . .

Once long-distance communication has become a simple matter, speed in transportation will be of less importance, although naturally it will tend to increase. "Theoretically," says one scientific writer, "the only known limit to speed is the velocity with which light travels." A more serious consideration, however, will be the complete transformation of the means of producing energy. Coal and oil will give way, on the one hand, to centralized maritime control stations, which will utilize the differences in temperature between adjacent ocean currents; and, on the other hand, to the wind, the force of which will be harnessed by perfected transformers. These inventions will completely change the method of dividing a country into industrial regions. All the factories which were formerly clustered about coal fields will slowly move toward territory where the wind blows steadily. Certain desert regions, hitherto unpeopled, will become the most densely populated corners of the earth. Countries will go to war to gain control of them. At the same time, since chemistry will have recreated most of the necessary foods, by synthetic means, from a base of atmospheric nitrogen, agriculture will practically cease to exist. The very character of the earth itself will change, and forests and gardens supplant cultivated fields.

The sources of light that we employ today are totally primitive. "These are heatgiving bodies," says Professor Haldane, "and 95% of their light rays are invisible. To light a lamp as a source of illumination, is a consummate waste of energy comparable almost to that of burning down a house to toast a piece of bread. It is quite safe to predict that fifty years from now light will cost only a fiftieth part of what it costs at present, and that night will be completely done away with in all our cities."

■ This is alarming enough, but some of the biologists make us still more uneasy. They believe firmly that they will be able to explain our emotional and sentimental life by the abundance or scarcity of the secretions of certain endocrine glands. "It will be possible to make people violent or timid, sensual or frigid, whichever is preferred, by simple injections of the secretions from these glands. If you want a strongly organized oligarchic form of government, with the power vested in the hands of a small aristocracy, it will be possible to inject an authoritative temperament into the children of the rulers, and a spirit of submission into the children of the proletariat! Against these injections, given hy government doctors, the most stirring orations of an opposition party will be powerless. The only difficulty will be in combining an inward submission with the seeming ferocity that is necessary against outside enemies—but doubtless the official scientific skill will solve this problem."

A paradox? Of course. However, a French scientist told me the other day about the following experiment. If you take a number of virgin mice, and place a number of newly born baby mice near them, they will continue to eat, to play, to scamper about, without paying the least attention to the baby mice, and will even let them die without paying the slightest attention and without showing the least concern. Inject into these same mice, however, the secretions of certain glands, and immediately the callous little amazons are transformed into admirable mothers! Before your very eyes they abandon their games, devote all their time to these babies which are not theirs; they will even die to defend their adopted foundlings. In this particular case we are concerned only with a simple and powerful elementary instinct, hut it is possible, on thinking over these experiments, to predict that a time will come when scientific combinations and proportions of these gland secretions will make it possible to obtain more and more subtle and delicate nuances of sentiment. You will see joint laboratories of psychologists and biologists; romanticists and scientists will collaborate to produce Tender Friendship (guaranteed free of sensuality) out of test tubes; even as now medical agents which are too violent are tempered by others in order to attain a normal heart action in a patient, compounds will be made of verbal romanticism and emotional indifference.

(Continued on page 78)

(Continued from page 43)

Naturally, the development of all the sciences will make education, by the year 2000, a new and extremely complicated problem.

Doubtless it will be impossible to teach the sciences to any one human being. Up to the age of twenty, students will have to be taught only subjects of general culture, and all citizens will be required to take this cultural education. After the age of twenty, they will begin a long and intense period of specialized study. "Childhood study," says Professor Ogburn, "will be prolonged to the age of thirty, then to forty. Since, at the same time, the span of human life will have been lengthened, everything will turn out satisfactorily, since the relative periods of childhood, of maturity and of old age will remain the same. It will seem quite natural for a man of forty to end his studies brilliantly, for a hundred-year-old man to consider himself in the prime of life, and for a woman of sixty to act the young coquette. We should not forget that, in Balzac's time the maturing characteristics of The woman of thirty were those that we attribute today to a woman of forty-five; and that today children attend school or college for many more years than the children of the 18th or 19th Century. In England, in 1831, a child of the laboring class worked in factories from the time he was eight years old, and in 1931, school is obligatory up to the age of fifteen. It is quite probable that this cultural curve will continue to rise."

These are strange thoughts, but should they disturb us? I think not. If anyone had described exactly to the people of 1880 the life that we are leading today, doubtless they would have thought it terrifying. But many of the people living then are still alive; they have adapted themselves, without being conscious of it, to a mode of life that would formerly have seemed painful and extravagant to them. It will always be so. We do not know what those among us who are alive in 1957 will see, but they will, without a doubt, find life quite normal and monotonous, and will speculate with curiosity on another future the plan of which we today cannot even faintly conceive.