This old world of ours goes cheerfully on its way doesn’t it, changing very little about itself, apart from a few unimportant issues imposed by a race of beings who think themselves very clever, but really have very little to offer these days in the way of dynamic progress!
Which is what made me think a bit, when I was lying in bed at two o’clock this morning, trying to get off to sleep.
What, I thought, might the human race come up with in the next couple of centuries, which would surprise, interest and perhaps even frighten us a little. Here are a few very silly ideas that came to me, before dawn also arrived and I had to get up and get on with life.
MEDICINE:
What if the medical profession and their allies the pharmacists came up with a brand new tablet, a tablet that held the cure to ALL illnesses caused by bacteria, viruses and suchlike, so you would still go to your doctor in the event of not feeling well, and once he had diagnosed what your trouble was, all he needed to do was to give you a prescription saying how many of the pills needed to be taken, over what period, in order to cure you.
Of course, things like broken bones, heart attacks or cuts and bruises would still need to be treated in the old-fashioned way, but what a difference a universal pill would make, in a busy world!
CARS:
Cars are another thing that could do with considerable revision, going way beyond what even the most modern, expensive vehicle can do today. I visualize a car that not only needs no driver, but doesn’t need any passengers at all.
A car that you can send around the local, (radically re-designed), shopping centre with a shopping list, and it will be able to find the appropriate businesses to handle what is required, talk to the proprietor’s computer at special lock-in points, and wait while the goods are collected, very much in the same way that Amazon collects customers goods today, and deliver them to your car, placing them in the boot.
In this system, the vehicle could also get itself services, fill up with fuel and change a set of tyres, all without human intervention!
AEROPLANES:
Even airlines could be included, with finely drawn force-fields circulating the globe, along which all international planes would fly, completely automatically, at 40,000 feet or higher, while smaller local and private aircraft would be restricted to the airspace below 25,000 feet, and would be flown manually, just as most planes are flown today.
The large commercial aircraft, at 40,000 feet and above would travel at Mach five, so a trip from London to Melbourne could be completed in just a few hours. I visualize that by the time all this came to fruition, scientists will have worked out a method of turning the vast amount of energy stored in a small piece of radioactive material into sufficient thrust to drive the planes, cleanly, safely and powerfully!
SPACE TRAVEL:
The one piece of the future that has me beat, with regard to visualizing progress, is space travel. In order to get anywhere beyond our own little group of planets, we would need to travel at greater than the speed of light, something the scientific world says is impossible, but a trick admirably solved during “Star Treck”, and the fact that they appear able to go anywhere in space with their ‘Star Drive’.
I believe that it would take several hundred years at the speeds we can accomplish now!
Of course I, and some of the greatest scientists MAY be wrong – I can clearly recall, when I was about 14, that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound, and only sixty or so before that, if you went out in the newly fangled ‘motor-car’, you had to employ someone walking in front of the vehicle carrying a red flag, to warn the public of ‘the awful danger of these things’!
Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to live long enough to see if any of this idiocy came to pass – I won’t hold my breath!
© 2024 Brian Lee
