Reality Check by Brad Wieners and David Pescovitz, Hardwired, $16.95,
ISBN 1888869038 2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and
Technology by Joseph Coates, John B. Mahaffie and Andy Hines, Oakhill Press,
$27.95, ISBN 1886939098

DON your mirror-shades to scan Reality Check, an almanac of the
future according to Wired magazine. This McLuhanesque patchwork of
images and pithy prophecies promises to cut through the hype and fantasy that
afflict other futurist forecasts—but beware, you’ll crick your neck while
consulting the bits of text at right angles to the rest.

In his foreword, science fiction cyberguru Bruce Sterling hails Reality
Check for barging right in and making “all sorts of loud and irrevocable
mistakes [with] scarcely any hedging”. We’re assured of weird stuff, “today’s
sexiest ideas about the future”. Of course, chortles Sterling, a real text from
the year 2025 would be blisteringly surreal, “a slippery plastic tome full of
tedious, inexplicable graphs about the impact of remsnorkeling . . . on the
booming economy of sub-Saharan Africa”.

Oops, and here too is that very book, entitled 2025: Scenarios of US and
Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology. The 516 pages of
in-depth reporting, written as if in 2025, are duly accompanied by graphs and
pie charts. It’s the work of the president and two associates of Coates &
Jarratt, a think-tank and policy research company in Washington DC. Surely these
dudes cannot be as hip as the Wired bunch? Wrong.

2025 covers almost everything (genetics, agriculture, transport, energy, and
the rest) in imaginative, integrated detail, and earns full marks for constantly
profiling the “destitute” nations of the world. Futurology is a Western, First
World preoccupation, often biased towards business-as-usual (only better). The
book is certainly pitched at the American business community but it has a truly
global consciousness. It is conservative only in the sense that, for instance,
nanotechnology is coming along nicely by 2025, but is still some way from
revolutionising the world. The first pilot fusion plant is just a bit further in
the future. Nor do we yet have ambient temperature superconductors. Without such
constraints the book would inevitably become, pardon me, science fiction. Yet
compared with Reality Check, the pitch of 2025 is rather
radical.

Both sets of authors have polled experts in assorted fields. In the
Wired case the result is a bit of blether leading to a jokey soundbite and
a sense of nervously squinting through a peephole. 2025 impresses with
its broadband hindsight.

Consult Reality Check’s single page about engineering fetal
development—every other page is a photo of, say, a pixellated blue corn
cob, faithfully imitating the format of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the
Massage 30 years on. Half of the meagre text about gestation is quoted
directly from, or comments on, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written
65 years ago. Then we are told that incubators today sustain premature babies.
Gosh, really? 2025 offers instead a lot of sterling thought about
genetically engineered intervention, optimising desired characteristics and
complete control of human reproduction.

Admittedly, 2025 is po-faced. Its sample person in the “Days and
lifetimes” chapter, Ashton, uses an appearance consultant to advise on the
colour of his contact lenses to complement his computer-designed hairstyle,
and uses his exceptional three-star gourmet cooking skills to lay on an Angolan
feast, which unfortunately friend Marcus can only attend by VideoWindow.
Frankly, Ashton is a prat. But maybe the authors have their tongues firmly in
their cheeks, for there are sallies of wit. In blackly ironic vein, we learn of
Burma’s failed attempt to genetically engineer submission to authority.

Being a bit naughtier, Reality Check surveys virtual sex, which will
not be possible until 2036, given the need for a smart body-glove. Meanwhile,
people have to be satisfied just to “see and hear” a partner on the World Wide
Web, much as anyone can “dial up and have anal (sic) sex over the phone”. Do
they mean oral sex or aural sex—or am I being naive?

Reality Check’s bold “bottom lines” (printed mutely in faint blue on
purple) are generally subverted by disclaimers of not-yet, not-yet. This is
partly the fault of a timeline starting right now, as opposed to the inspired
2025 retrospective. Curiously enough, the prevailing mood is one of reluctance
to envisage basic change, and words of comfort. Oh, we already have genetic
engineering in the form of traditional methods of plant breeding, don’t we? Not
so—there’s a world of difference between mendeling with cabbages and
devising transgenics.

There are things that people do not wish to think about, and this has
sometimes skewed futurology. We prefer life to carry on as it is, by and large.
Back in 1966 a Rand Corporation “Delphi” poll of experts ruled out centralised,
possibly random wire-tapping as something that will never come to pass.
Given the growth of terrorism, and the Timothy McVeighs of the world (plus
computer advances, including speech recognition of keywords), wire-tapping is
probably happening right now.

Reality Check rejects solar power satellites, human cloning and
dial-a-mood behaviour control. In the year 2025, solar power beamed from Earth
orbit remains unrealised, but it is online to power the Moon base. Reality
Check’s rather shaky reasons for vetoing this technology are that the
receiving station on the ground might fail (so why not try building more than
one?), and the death-ray chestnut about microwave beams straying and
incinerating the neighbourhood (the slightest anomaly, and the beam would shut
down).

Cloning humans is anathema in Reality Check, and 2025
likewise notes a ban on human cloning in 2003 (events are already overtaking
this), although cloning of organs is permitted, and the principal obstacle to
human cloning is cost. Qualms about genetics are going to retard Europe
economically compared with the US, where a flurry of laws handcuffing genetic
tampering are repealed by 2010. The world envisaged by 2025 sees
widespread applications of genetic engineering, stemming from the genome mapping
project, which Reality Check grumps about.

As for mood control, by 2025 we shall have brain prostheses (though
not yet brain-computer interfaces). Behavioural engineers will deploy a battery
of soft and hard approaches to remould problem personalities, including hormone
therapies, biofeedback and conditioning by electrode or drug implant. Due to
public concern, few radical treatments are enforced by the courts. However,
voluntary personality makeovers are as common as cosmetic surgery. There are
plans to enhance the human norm.

The authors of 2025 believe that breakthroughs will often occur when
needed, a reasonable enough premise. They do not waste space on defining, for
instance, what virtual reality is—as happens on Reality Check’s
page about VR sunglasses (I should have thought that the target readership would
already know). Consequently, a lot is packed into the 2025 report. But
the index could be more helpful.

Keeping all the balls in the air without colliding is quite a trick. Not too
long after I began to fret that global warming means storming as much as
warming, a severe weather warning does clock in. But a four-line caveat about
chaotic systems and limits to forecasting sits oddly with a promise of long-term
forecasts that cover months, even seasons. Better technology will allow this,
just as it enables the restoration of rainforests—surprisingly easy.

Other outlooks in 2025 regarding famine and disasters are
realistically grim, with the UN supporting triage (no food aid if the mess is
caused by people, and no refugees). And in the silver-lining department the
millions of scavengers in Third World favelas, indeed, contribute to the
recycling of waste.

Finally, the Old Moore aspect. Of course, the future historical events in
2025 are imaginative instances rather than prophecies. So what can we
expect come the year 2000? Well, we can say bye-bye to the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia. And watch out for the stock market crash of 2007.

IS this really the final odyssey? Last seen dying in space as a victim of
HAL, astronaut Frank Poole is revived a thousand years later. In a brave new
world, he manages to contact Halman, the combined essence of old comrade Dave
Bowman and HAL, stored in the alien Great Wall on Europa.

Those superscience monoliths prove to be automatic devices without any
consciousness. Their controller is 450 light years away. A reaction to the
stream of data concerning humankind, sent to the stars in 2001, is long overdue.
Unfortunately, the response may be to erase Homo sapiens because of all
the savagery epitomised by the 20th century. Demonstrably, the monolith makers’
evolutionary experiment went wonky because our brains are mis-wired.

By 3001, thanks to Braincaps that rewire the brain, all is utopian sweetness
and light (if lacking pizzazz), but the distant evolution-angels cannot know
this. To protect humanity, Halman must disable the monoliths using noxious
computer viruses kept locked up on the Moon (along with such bygone horrors as
smallpox and nerve gas).

The monoliths fail to choke the human race, and evaporate. We can expect a
reaction to this incident in approximately 4001 . . .

Short chapters alternate between sense-of-wonder set pieces and
quasi-Platonic dialogues. Clarke is jaunty (“Over to Dave Bowman at Jupiter”)
and witty—naturally an era of Braincaps will also be the great epoch of the
wig-maker. He is full of schoolboyish enthusiasm (“When he woke up next morning,
they were already at Venus”) and thoroughly good-natured. But there is much deep
indignation, too, at our continuing barbarism. At fault is religion, a
psychopathology that is at odds with real civilisation. Clarke’s hopeful vision
is that we are now at a watershed between “insane” beliefs and lucid
enlightenment.

3001 is not just a page-turner, plugged in to the great icons of HAL
and the monoliths, but a book of wisdom too, pithy and provocative.

Meanwhile the neighbouring Tewa speaking tribes perform sacred dances to explain the cosmos, and a local pueblo lucratively operates a temple of chance: a bingo hall. Nearby is Chimayo, the Lourdes of America, supposedly a scene of miracles and also a brotherhood of flagellant penitents who have their own slant on the meaning of existence.

This is the terrain that George Johnson uses to explore a big enigma: whether the patterns that science finds are true discoveries, or fictions arising from the way our brains instinctively perceive patterns. Here’s a book in the spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to which it duly genuflects.

Heisenberg once said, regarding atoms, that “language can be used only as in poetry”, and for a while Johnson’s metaphors duly run riot. Airy cathedrals of science compete with looms of thought, and newly ground eyeglasses, and National Geographic captions about “stripes of fossilised time”. Fear not. Compression is the essence of science: finding the simplest rules to explain the prodigal jumble of the world. Myths and sacred dances also are compressions, ways of mapping the cosmos. We compress, therefore we are.

Johnson proceeds to compress with utter clarity, almost casually tap-dancing his way through particle physics, quantum theory, cosmology and evolutionary biology. “Anyone … has heard the litany: if its expansion rate were a little slower, the Universe would have collapsed in on itself…” How gracefully and in how few words he explains the valency of atoms. Fire in the Mind is a connoisseur’s gazetteer of past popular science books.

In science, simplicity has often led to awful complications in a struggle to keep an insight alive. Poor Ptolemy, forced to add all those epicycles to preserve the circularity of planetary orbits. He was too far out on one branch of explanation to climb back to the tree trunk and start again.

Might it be so with particle physics today? The simple model of the atom becomes hopelessly inadequate. Theory requires new particles. Equipment is built to detect them, and does so. But the experimental setup, and the way the data are filtered from noise, restrict the search space to what is being sought.

You will have seen the ambiguous design of two black silhouettes facing one another across white space. Suddenly the white space is an urn and the faces become meaningless background. Build a machine to detect faces, and it will never register an urn …

To fit the huge family of particles into a harmonious pattern Murray Gell-Mann (an admirer of Tewa culture, incidentally) must invent quarks as building blocks, which are forever unobservable. Soon quarks require properties such as “colour” and gluons to carry this quality. All can become simpler again if only particles are all basically loops vibrating at different frequencies in many-dimensional space; though alas then you need to double the number of particles. Is this a dose of epicycles?

Our understanding of the big Universe also relies on tenuous chains of inference, about brightnesses and distances of stars and galaxies. Galaxies rotate so quickly they should fly apart, unless they contain ten times more invisible matter than visible. After massive computer enhancement to separate presumed signal from noise, the famous cosmic ripples detected by the COBE satellite (a variation no bigger than 30 millionths of a degree) remain too small to explain the lumpy structure of the Universe unless you conjure up so much mysterious dark matter that 99 per cent of everything is invisible and the cosmos we peer at is mere froth on the dark tide produced by the big bang.

Are we being too clever by far? asks Johnson. Are we backing ourselves into a cul-de-sac, forced to make ever more extravagant assumptions?

Cosmologists turn for assistance to quantum theory, because the Universe must surely have sprung from an infinitely dense initial state where probability reigned. Yet objects in our large-scale world do not obey the same rules as the stuff they are made of. How can a system with one set of rules arise from a system with radically different rules? Are we in danger of explaining one mystery in terms of another mystery?

The latest thinking in New Mexico is that the Universe itself may be processing information as surely as it processes mass and energy. The environment itself can absorb excess information, forcing “decoherence”. Thus does the transition occur from possibilities to actuality, from the quantum probability domain to the large-scale world we inhabit. This happens naturally without any need for conscious observers, who seemed embarrassingly (or consolingly) unavoidable hitherto.

The origin of life is a chicken-egg problem. Without protein catalysts how do nucleotides develop the ability to assemble proteins? Life seems too good to be true, with order arising from randomness. Having arisen, why did life bother to evolve beyond the single-cell stage? Maybe life is as natural an extension of chemistry as crystallisation. Or maybe there are laws of complexity …

The Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos is demonstrating that orderly behaviour does emerge spontaneously. Its members work with computer simulations of stripped-down artificial chemistry and the branch of mathematics known as combinatorics. In Santa Fe the Alchemy project explores algorithmic chemistry using strings of symbols.

Even arrays of light bulbs wired at random begin to flash in regular cycles under the influence of the attractors of chaos theory. Let us regard light bulbs as representing a string of genes. There are only a handful of stable cycles. For a string of 100 000 genes, roughly the size of the human genome, the number of lawful patterns turns out to be almost the same as the number of different cell types in a human body. With only certain cells to use, natural selection would construct organisms likewise ruled by attractors, necessary patterns.

This could be why the eye evolved independently forty different times. Complex organisms would tend to arise from assemblages of simpler organisms. Evolution by natural selection might well have produced creatures quite different to those we know, but a range of similar forms would exist, including perhaps some intelligent creature programmed to perceive patterns.

Johnson’s last word goes to the Tewa, who classify the world rigorously according to their own lights, and who are probably hoaxing eager anthropologists when they divulge local place names such as “Loathsome Penis Mountain”. And he reminds us that Christian fundamentalists and penitents also have their own world views.

Vibrant and exhilarating and even inspirational though Fire in the Mind is, there’s also a wee self-mortifying streak to this book about “a Universe into which we never asked to be born”. The hubris-shunning conclusion is that the whole truth will always elude us. With a nod to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, we can never squeeze the immensity of creation “into our tiny heads”. Even if the Universe seems to obey mathematics, we are seeing only the shadows of our own minds. Consequently the pursuit of science is, at root, no less an act of faith than the behaviour of the Tewa or of the penitents.

Yet en route Johnson exhibits such a god’s-eye-view of the terrain. Imagine that this book could have been sent back a hundred years, to the time of Darwin and of James Clerk Maxwell mulling over electromagnetism and entropy. What is the corresponding succinct book from a hundred years ahead which might turn our present perspectives inside out?