Future Perfect

It also worth mentioning that Kahn and the Hudson Institute, as well as other think tanks past and present, were reacting to the enormous impact of Limits to Growth, one of the first attempts to use models and computers to try to track past trends and future possibilities. The Club of Rome, which was associated with these exercises, was perfectly respectable and headed by Fiat’s chief, Aurelio Peccei (1908-84). Nonetheless, plenty of conservative doubters attacked the Club and Limits, carefully picking out one or two of their scenarios to ridicule while ignoring the rest. Paul Ehrlich told me he had the same experience with The Population Bomb, which also offered scenarios rather than cast-iron predictions. Kahn was not so unprofessional as to commit the same egregious error.

As for all four types melding into one-it is no longer wishful thinking. I took the trouble to call the heroine in my novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen, Kate Schumpeter. For me she symbolised the way Kahn’s categories would have to merge this century if we are to survive. Kate is an i

Joseph Schumpeter was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. In a world where technology and i

Schumpeter used wonderfully colourful and evocative language. He argued that i

This eruption of a new kind of i

What Kahn did not foresee 30 years ago, I repeat, is that his four distinct types would soon morph into one on today’s world stage. The Australian Business Round Table was launched in 2006 by six magnificent CEOs (whose companies included Westpac, Visy Industries, I AG, Swiss Re, Origin Energy and BHP). Put them together with leaders such as Lord Oxburgh and Cathy Zoi (who now runs Al Gore’s office but promises to return to Australia) and you have the begi

I was born in January 1944. Hitler was still going strong. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, nor dropped on two Japanese cities. Martha Gellhorn was yet to write about the hitherto unsuspected (by the public at least) outrage of the concentration camps. I arrived in a world not dissimilar to hell. So I know, as you do, how bad things can get. We also know how good they can be, some of us.

Today, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, our bad things are bad in different ways. This is how our problem is posed by Martin Rees:

We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy: air transport, power generation, or the financial system. Indeed disaster could be caused by someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign.

Martin Rees is a calm, immensely courteous Welshman. He is the last person on Earth to be inclined to histrionics. He is also one of the most distinguished scientists alive, combining, somehow, the positions of President of the Royal Society of London, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, member of the House of Lords and professor of astrophysics (he had to give up being Astronomer Royal!). Yet this sensible man was willing to have a wager on oblivion. In his book Our Final Century (note, no question mark!), he wrote:

I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: ‘That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people.’

Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to. This forecast involved looking less than twenty years ahead. I believe the risk would be high even if there were a ‘freeze’ on new developments, and the potential perpetrators of such outrages or mega errors had continuing access only to present-day techniques. But of course, no subject is forging ahead faster than biotechnology, and its advances will intensify the risks and enhance their variety.

To Lord Rees’s nightmare add mad mullahs, myopically dim US presidents and a few million folk waiting and even wishing for Armageddon, and you have a mixture that even my contemporaries in 1944 might have found too dreadful to contemplate. At least back then you had some almost Utopian optimism about possible futures. One monster, Hitler, was about to be vanquished; another, Stalin, would last but another nine years. Little did we imagine that the end of the world would come, not through the agency of the Devil but by the actions of idiots. To misquote T.S. Eliot: ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a blunder.’ The whimper comes afterwards.

In his book Last and First Men, published in 1930, Olaf Stapledon wrote a two-billion-year history of the human race. In his tale we grow wings and take to the sky and move from Earth to the outer reaches of our solar system-though we do not leave it. Stapledon was a philosopher trained, like Richard Dawkins, at Balliol College in Oxford, though he later went west to the University of Liverpool to lecture. His narrative is not enlivened by winsome or wicked characters or personal vignettes, but proceeds, almost like a formal history, to leap through the centuries and mille