Say hello to Life in the Future

I’d like to introduce you to Life in the Future, one of my all-time favourite books, which got a passing mention in my diary on 26th July 1986, 28 years ago today. It was published in 1976 and still graces my bookshelf.

My favourite bit of the book has always been the double-page spread above, illustrating a Delphic Study from the mid-60s in which a host of experts were asked when they thought specific technologies might become available. Their answers were collated and plotted on a timeline (starting in the 1970s and finishing with ‘Never’), with markers to show when 50% and 90% of them agreed a particular technology would be in use.

The predicted dates were only part of the fun for me. What really interested me was which technologies had been chosen. My favourites – truly children of their time – were:

• Two-way communication with extra-terrestrials (50% of the experts were expecting this by about 2025, while the rest pessimistically chose ‘Never.’)
• Automated language translators (should have been done and dusted by the early 70s if you believe the study)
• Effective, simple and inexpensive fertility control (predicted to be available by 1985)
• Economic regional weather control (1990-ish)
• The widely accepted use of non-narcotic drugs for changing personality characteristics (somewhere between the 80s and 90s)

Re-read rather ironically from my vantage point here in the far future – some way past the previously mythical 2000 AD – the book as a whole provides a fascinating insight into 70s thinking.  The influence of the  preceding few years is obvious: the new liberalism and free thinking of the 60s, the 70s energy crisis and the expansion of nuclear power (the accident at Three-Mile Island was just a few years away), the rise of the environmental movement, significant improvements in medical technology  (the first heart transplant was already old news by this point), the development and early use of packet switching telecommunications networks, and so on.

Longer-term hopes featured in the study included the feasibility of education by direct information-recording on the brain, the breeding of intelligent animals as a low-grade labour force, the control of gravity by modifying gravitational fields and economic ocean farming to produce at least 20% of the world’s food. Wonderful stuff.

Despite the boundless technological optimism on show, the experts had to draw the line somewhere. They baulked both at the use of telepathy and ESP in communications, and at the idea of induced long-term comas used as a form of time travel.

Before long, I’ll be reading Life in the Future on a date beyond the end point of the study, which was around 2020. Compiling a list of likely technological change over the next 60 years would be just as difficult today as it was back in the 60s – but it might be fun to try (suggestions below please!).

Finally, it’s worth noting that while the study was busying itself with telepathy, controlling gravity and alien contact, it missed a few rather important developments that we take for granted today:

• Instant access to a worldwide network of connected computers – from a device you hold in your hand
• A system allowing you to search all the world’s knowledge – anytime you want, and from pretty much anywhere
• In-vehicle video and audio navigation systems controlled by a global satellite network

…to name but three!

If you were taking part in a similar study in 2014, I’d love to know what key technology breakthroughs you’d expect between now and 2080. Who knows, if we compile a big enough list, the Internet could help us run a Delphic study of our own!

*Life in the Future was written by Michael Ross-Macdonald, Michael Hassell and Stuart McNeill. I can’t remember how I came by it (I wasn’t keeping a diary back then!), but it’s essentially a broad and very readable look at predicting the future and how people affect it by the way they organise themselves and live their lives. I realised as I got older that  it was written with a clear environmental slant which was very new at the time. I owe it a lot.

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A Latin lesson for the European Monetary Union

Diary date: 13th October, 1985

Before I returned to university for my second year of French and Swedish, my friend Adrian and I decided we had time to spend a month seeing the sights of Europe courtesy of an InterRail card. There’s enough material in my diary for those four weeks alone to keep followthehumming going for years – from the quaint way we tried to communicate with friends and family while we travelled, through to the miles we walked just trying to find a map. One very concrete souvenir of the trip was a small bag of leftover foreign coins and notes which has spent the intervening years living with my diaries in the bottom of my wardrobe – and which these days contains the cash remnants of just about every country I’ve ever visited.

It’s all a far cry from today’s European Monetary Union and its near-ubiquitous Euro. Holidays and business trips are now devoid of the complications and local colour once provided by Francs, Deutschmarks, Schillings, Guilders, Markka, Drachma, Lira, Pesetas and the rest.

But it turns out that monetary union in Europe isn’t a new idea. The most recent attempt at something similar was in the mid-1860’s, when France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland formed the Latin Monetary Union and agreed that their various currencies could be exchanged at a fixed rate. Silver and gold coins were minted according to strict regulations governing weight, fineness and denomination that made them interchangeable.

The club became larger a couple of years later when Spain and Greece joined in, and bigger still when Serbia, San Marino, Romania, Bulgaria, and (curiously) Venezuela were admitted in 1889.

It all sounds fine in principle, but as ever it wasn’t plain sailing. Arbitrageurs were needed to manipulate the market as the price of silver or gold fluctuated – a process which involved things like driving up the value of silver by removing coins from circulation or bringing additional gold to the mint to be turned into more coins.

The Union’s signatories didn’t help themselves either. Some members (mentioning no names, Greece and the Papal Treasury) started minting coins with less than the requisite quantity of silver, and then exchanging them for coins from other countries that had been minted in accordance with the regulations – all in the interests of a quick profit.  The tension between the changing price of silver relative to gold and the fixed exchange rate that operated within the Union eventually meant that it made sense to have silver minted into coins which could then be used to buy gold at a discounted rate. By then, the writing was well and truly on the wall.

By around 1878, the value of silver had declined so much that the minting of large silver coins was stopped altogether, meaning that the Union was, to all intents and purposes, on a Gold Standard.

In practical terms, the LMU lasted until 1914 and the chaos of the First World War, although it remained a legal entity until it was formally abandoned as late as 1927.

Just 28 years after my first European odyssey, my bag of coins feels genuinely anachronistic. Yet the lessons of the LMU certainly remain relevant in today’s turbulent financial markets. Questions of political and monetary union and the subsidisation of weaker economies are just as important today as they were at the tail-end of the nineteenth century.

Revisiting the Munich Massacre

Almost immediately after I left for university, my parents began the process of moving to Munich, where Dad was starting a new job. By this week in 1985, he was already living in Germany, so I made my first trip to see how he was getting on.

Then – as now – I was a fan of the Olympic Games, and more than anything else I wanted to visit Munich’s iconic Olympiapark, with its sweeping, transparent canopies and miles of exposed metal ropes. The park was as memorable as I expected, but the atmosphere of the place was also suffused with the aftermath of what had become known as the Munich Massacre.

On September 5th 1972, eleven days into a sporting spectacle which the Germans had subtitled, ‘the Happy Games,’ eight Palestinians belonging to the Black September movement broke into the Olympic village – just a stone’s throw from the Olympiapark – and took hostage nine Israeli athletes, coaches and officials. They immediately demanded the release of 234 prisoners held in Israeli jails plus the founders of the German Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. There followed a stalemate over some 18 hours in which events in the village were relayed live around the world – at one point even alerting the kidnappers, who were watching too, to the fact that a police rescue attempt was under way.

After a series of failed negotiations and offers from the German authorities, the Palestinians and their hostages were transferred by helicopter to the military base at nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, where they had asked for a plane to take them to Cairo. The Germans hastily planned a further armed assault involving snipers and a fake plane crew, coordinated via the airport’s control tower.

The rescue was a disaster. The police had underestimated the number of Palestinians based on earlier reports and found themselves short of snipers, the disguised plane crew decided at the last minute to abandon their mission, and the kidnappers realised almost immediately that an attack was planned. After a chaotic gun battle and a grenade explosion in one of the helicopters, all the hostages and five of the eight militants were dead.

Reporting on events as they unfolded for ABC in America, sports reporter Jim McKay’s description of the outcome eventually came to define the terrible events of that night:

We just got the final word … you know, when I was a kid, my father used to say, ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.’ Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.

In the aftermath, IOC President Avery Brundage took the controversial decision to allow the Games to continue, famously saying, “The Games must go on.”

The three surviving kidnappers were imprisoned pending trial, but released a few weeks later in exchange for the passengers of a hijacked Lufthansa jet – events which many have claimed were staged.

Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film, Munich, tells the story of the Israeli reaction to the massacre, Operation Wrath of God, which targeted members of both Black September and the PLO – including those believed to be involved in the events in Munich. Only one of the attackers – Jamal Al-Gashey – is still believed to be alive, living in hiding somewhere in Africa.

The events of the 1972 Games were a watershed for the Olympic movement in terms of heightening security concerns and complicating sporting politics. As late as the Games of London 2012, the IOC rejected a campaign for a minute’s silence to mark the 40th anniversary of Munich, with President Jacques Rogge stating that it would be “inappropriate.”

My visit to the Olympiapark in 1985 proved to be the first of many, but the stunning architecture and wonderful setting have always felt tarnished by the events of thirteen years earlier – events which originate in a conflict which sadly shows no sign of coming to a definitive end.