Horizon filmed. Arthur C. Clark. 1964

[ENG]

Horizon filmed him at the world's fair in new york. He's Arthur Clark.

Trying to predict the future is adiscouraging and hazardous occupation because the prophetinvariably falls between two stools.

If his predictions sound at all reasonable you can bequite sure that in 20 or most 50 years theprogress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculous.

The Conservative, on the other hand, if bysome miracle a prophet could describe the futureexactly as it was going to take placehis predictions would sound so absurd, so farfetched that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

This has proved to be true in the past and it willundoubtedly be true even more so of the century to come.

The only thing we can be sure of aboutthe future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

So if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable then I'll fail completely.

Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable.

Have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen?

Let's start by looking at the city of the future.

Some people think that it will belike this, and they're quite right.

In fact, everything you see now already exists.

All the materials, all the ideas.

These things could be put into practice immediately.But what about the city of the day after tomorrow?

Say the year 2000?

I think it will be completely different.

In fact, it may not even exist at all.

Oh, I'm not thinking of the atombomb and the next Stone Age.

I'm thinking of the incredible breakthroughwhich has been made possible bydevelopments in communications particularly the transistorand above all, the communications satellite.

These things will make possible a world in which wecan be in instant contact with each other wherever wemay be where we can contact our friends anywhere onEarth even if we don't know their actual physical location.

It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 yearsfrom now for a man to conduct his business from Tahitior Bali just as well as he could from London.

In fact, if it proves worthwhile almost anyexecutive skill any administrative skill even any physicalskill could be made independent of distance.

I am perfectly serious when I suggest thatone day we may have brain surgeons inEdinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.

When that time comes, the whole worldwill have shrunk to a point.

And the traditional role of the city as a meetingplace for man would have ceased to make any sense.

In fact, men will no longer commute.

They will communicate.

They won't have to travel for business anymore.

They'll only travel for pleasure.

I only hope that when that day comesand when the city is abolished the wholeworld isn't turned into one giant suburb.

In that world of the future wewill not be the only intelligent creatures.

One of the coming techniques willbe what we might call bioengineering.

The development of intelligent and useful servantsamong the other animals on this planet.

Particularly the great apes.

And in the oceans, the dolphins and whales.

You know, it's a scandal of which weshould be thoroughly ashamed that prehistoric man tamedall the domestic animals we have today.

We haven't added one in the last 5000 years.It's about time we did so.

And with our present knowledge of animal psychologyand genetics we could certainly solve the servantproblem with the help of the monkey kingdom.

Of course.

Eventually our super chimpanzees would start forming tradeunions and we right back where we started.

However, the most intelligent inhabitants of thatfuture world won't be men or monkeys.

They'll be machines, the remotedescendants of today's computers.

Now the present day electronicbrains are complete morons.

But this will not be true in another generation.

They will start to think and eventuallythey will completely outthink their makers.

Is this depressing?

I don't see why it should be.

We superseded the chromagne and neanderthal menand we presume we're an improvement.

I think we should regard it as aprivilege to be stepping stones to higher things.

I suspect that organic or biological evolution hasabout come to its end and we arenow at the beginning of inorganic or mechanicalevolution which will be thousands of times swifter.

But even if the future does belongto the robots, our bodies and ourbrains still have immense untapped potentialities.

For example, to cope with the informationexplosion we may develop a machine forrecording information directly onto the brain.

As today we can record a symphony on tape.

So we may 1 day be able tobecome instant experts learning Chinese overnight, for example.

Or we may be able to recall completely memories ofpast events so that we seem to relive them.

In fact, techniques are already known for doing thisin a rather limited way at the present.

Alternatively, we may prefer tototally erase past unpleasant memories.

Our bodies will also be moreefficient and they'll last longer.

After all, it's only in this century that apatient had a better than 50% chance of anyimprovement when he was treated by his doctors.

One of the great medical discoveries of the nearfuture will be a method of suspended animation sothat a man can sleep away down the centuriesand in this manner travel into the future.

This technique, which may possibly be based on deepfreezing, will one day be used to send intothe future people suffering from diseases or ailments beyondthe ability of present day medical science to cure.

Though I don't really know how onewill calculate the health insurance contributions topay for medical treatment 500 years hence.

Another use of suspended animation will befor the long range exploration of space.

In this way, us short lived creatureswill be able to travel enormous distances.

Although we may not of course, be so short lived inthe future because even immortality may be on the cards.

One day.

However, even without immortality we may be ableto make journeys lasting thousands of years.

And such journeys will be necessary ifwe ever wish to cross the enormousgulfs which separate us from the stars.

Distance is so great that even light traveling at 600 million mile every hour takes years to cross them.

But why should we attempt these immense voyages?

Well, because it seems fairly certain that at leastat this moment in time there are no otherintelligent creatures in our own solar system.

We'll have to go out to the stars to meet them.

For certainly out there among the hundred thousand millionother suns of our universe there must be manycivilizations perhaps far higher than our own.

The first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials will bethe greatest adventure in the future of man.

It may not happen for centuries,but one day it will come.

Meanwhile, near at home, there's plenty to do inthis solar system on the moon and planets.

Today we can just reach the moon.

Tomorrow, men will be living there.

100 years from now, some men will call it home.

At the moment, it's a very unattractive kindof place to imagine as a home.

And this is true of all the planets.

There's not one on which unprotected men could live oron which any form of life as we know itcould exist with the possible exception of Mars.

However, a hundred years from nowthings will be very different.

With the techniques which we are now acquiring itwill one day be possible to modify the environmentson at least some of the planets so thatmen can live there without spacesuits or airtight cities.

The technique for this hasbeen called planetary engineering.

And one astronomer has coined the very optimisticphrase the reconstruction of the solar system.

Looking as far into the technological futureas I dare, I'd like to describethe invention to end all inventions.

I call it the replicator, andit's simply a duplicating machine.

But it's a duplicating machine that canmake an exact copy of anything.

Now, we're already familiar with perfect copiesof printing of pictures and of sounds.

Yet the camera and the tape recorder would have seemedmiraculous to our ancestors and to a medieval monk who, perhaps in his whole life only saw a few dozenbooks each one patiently copied by hand.

Our present world, in which literallymillions of books exist would againhave seemed absolutely inconceivable.

Can we imagine a world in which objects can bemade as easily as today we can make books?

Well, don't ask me exactly how the replicator wouldwork if I knew, I'd patented it at once.

Confronted with such a device, our present societywould probably sink into a kind of gluttonousbarbarism because everybody would want unlimited quantities ofeverything since nothing would cost anything.

In fact, cynics may doubt if any human society couldsurvive an invention which would lead to unlimited abundance andthe final ending of The Curse of Adam.

And yet, you know, human beings are almost infinitely adaptable.

Look at the incredible changes we've experienced and survivedfrom the Stone Age to the present time.

And yet, even greater changes are still to come.

Because the future is not merelyan extension of the present.

With bigger and better machines and citiesand gadgets, it'll be fundamentally different.

And many of the things we take for grantedwill one day pass away as completely as old spinning wheels and sedan chairs and oil lamps.

And that is why the future is so endlessly fascinating.

Because try as we can, we'll never out guess it of eight.