Editor's Letter: A vision of 2100

last updated 8 January 2015

I had a vision of the future in 1964, and it was mostly wrong. The theme of the New York World’s Fair that year was “Man’s Achievements in an Expanding Universe,’’ and for a 10-year-old, it was intoxicating stuff. In the Utopia vividly depicted in the fair’s exhibits, plastics and atomic power would create a brave new world, domed cities would sprout under seas and in outer space, cars would drive themselves, and people would zip around the sky on jetpacks. But in this foretelling of life in the 21st century, the Internet, personal computers, and wireless communication made no appearance. In 2011, a single smartphone is capable of more magic, really, than anything the futurists foresaw in 1964. Ah, but the fair was great fun, and in that spirit, we present as our Last Word this week physicist Michio Kaku’s vision of how the world will look in 2100.

Just don’t take it too seriously. A few years ago, University of Pennsylvania professor Philip Tetlock examined 27,451 predictions by 284 historians, scientists, and other learned soothsayers, and found they were wrong more than 50 percent of the time—worse than if they had merely flipped a coin. Even the smartest people, it seems, are prone to oversimplifying the world, and overestimating the scope of their knowledge. In reality, there are so many variables in human affairs and in the natural world that we can only see what’s directly ahead of us, and then only fuzzily; we don’t anticipate strokes of genius, “black swans” (see Briefing), or what Donald Rumsfeld called “the unknown unknowns.’’ The only prediction about the future we can count on is this: When it comes banging on the door, we will be surprised.