IMAGINEERING 2050

The older we are, the more we remember; the younger we are, the more we imagine. How then can the young and the old together imagine our impending future? Say, waking up in the year 2050...?

Chances are it'll be a world without newspapers, post offices, land-line phones, books, checks, or privacy. But imagining what we won't have is easy. The footprints to those futures can already be seen in the sand. More to the point, what will be new about us? about how our bodies & brains will operate? about what will still make us us?

Using an imaginary trajectory from 2050 births to deaths, one guess may be as good as another:

* No Orwellian baby hatcheries in 2050, but surely babies-by-genetic-order. Planned parenthood between you and your obstetrician will now take on bold new meanings!

* Schools and instructors as we know them may be passe, considering we can now purchase digital chips to be be inserted into the brain for mastery of any of a hundred distinct disciplines!

* Hospitals and doctors may now service our bodies electronically, from wherever they are to wherever we are!

* Interpersonal communications may by now surpass the speed and spread of today's world-wide-web, via brain chips which will bring us everything our networks, Internets and tweets do now!

* Love and arts? Well, matters of the soul may be a little more challenging for souless technologies, but surely there will be attempts. Perhaps 3-dimentional screens in our homes by which we can program live performances of the fine arts; also appearances by those whose psychological resumes seem most compatible with our own psychological resumes!

But first, a reality check...! Quite likely most of the above is quite likely all wrong. The history of futurists (from the Delphic Oracle to Nostradamus to the 19th C Millerites) has proved embarrassingly inaccurate. One 2050 prediction, though, is likely to prevail. The human condition...! Whether it was spawned just outside the closed gates of Eden or just out of the Darwinian dusts generated by the Big Bang, it has remained stubbornly unchanged throughout our recorded history. The very same human traumas and triumphs featured on tomorrow's media will, most likely, be very much the same as on yesterday's papyrus scrolls.

And so the eternal battle of the eternal titans will probably carry right into 2050. The irresistible force of new technology meeting the unmovable object of old humanity. Any bets...?