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The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
December 30, 2007
The World of Tomorrow
By JIM RASENBERGER
ON Jan. 1, 1908 -- New Year's Day one century ago -- The New York World greeted readers with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America. The title of the article was simply "1808 -- 1908 -- 2008." The World began by marveling at how far America had come since 1808, then turned to the question of the future: "What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?"
The essay's visions were not timid. "We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves," the newspaper went on. "We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?"
Predictions about the future were a staple of New York journalism in the early 20th century. Newspapers, including this one, frequently solicited prominent citizens for their thoughts on the future of the world, of America and, most urgent, of New York.
The city was vaulting into the 20th century with a haste that almost demanded prediction-making. As the population grew by 130,000 a year, New York's infrastructure exploded.
Within the 12 months of 1908 alone, New Yorkers would see the cantilevers of the Queensboro Bridge joined and the cables of the Manhattan Bridge spun. They would see one tunnel open under the East River and another tunnel open under the Hudson. They would see the tallest inhabited building in the world, the 612-foot Singer Building, completed on lower Broadway, only to be immediately overtaken by the steel skeleton of the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.
What next? New Yorkers were besotted with the possibilities. Architects and visionaries imagined a "cosmopolis of the future" with thousand-foot towers connected by webs of tall bridges and served by aircraft. Meanwhile, the very air seemed to buzz with the infant technology of wireless communication.
"When the expectations of wireless experts are realized, everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be," one magazine predicted in 1908. Equally farsighted was a prediction made by Dr. Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute. The same New Year's Day that The World was conjuring gyroscopic trains, Dr. Flexner declared that human organ transplants would someday be common.
The point of such predictions was not necessarily that they were accurate but that people cared enough about the future to bother thinking about it. With that in mind, 10 knowledgeable New Yorkers, from the Nobel laureate Paul Nurse (Simon Flexner's successor) to a 12-year-old girl named Kate, were asked to imagine the city a century from now.
Whether their visions turn out to be right or wrong, whether they are bleak or tongue-in-cheek, all are generous efforts to wonder about the lives of New Yorkers of 2108, as those New Yorkers of 1908 once wondered about ours.
KEN PERLIN
Inventor; professor of computer science at New York University
In the same way we now have enhancements like pacemakers, it's reasonable to suppose that in a hundred years everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy, when the next subway will arrive, how to hook up with friends. We'll be able to see a virtual reality superimposed over the physical grid.
This city is all about intensity of purpose and connections, and technology will only make it more efficient and more fluid. And in a city that is so multicultural, communication will be easier. A hundred years from now, you and I could be having a conversation in two languages and translation would be automatic. I could look at a newspaper written in any language and have the translation superimposed on my vision
the singularity? grow up.
Dude, there's no shortage of energy and I say that as a fully paid up peak oil convert.
We're surrounded by energy. Once natural oil production starts to slide (and I can believe that'll happen in 0-5 years, if not before) we can and probably will replace it with coal-to-liquids technology, which is crap for global warming but does solve the problem of powering our food trucks.
It's an open question what will happen after that. Our investment in petroleum based propulsion is gigantic. It's lockin on a far bigger scale than Windows ever was. Even relatively minor changes like ethanol have problems with things like pipeline incompatability. Bigger changes like going to all-electric cars are thrown around without thinking through the costs.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised at all if in 2108 we're still using cars powered by petroleum. Not petroleum that we suck out of the ground with hi-tech straws of course. That'll probably end in the next 50 years. Probably, either petroleum manufactured from biomass or extracted directly from the air and water (CO from the air, H from electrolysis, CO + H == syngas, input to the fischer-trope process). Petrol is amazingly energy dense, easy to transport and we have very hundreds of millions (billions?) of vehicles deployed that use it already ..... carbon-neutral renewable petroleum? What's not to like?
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends ...because we all know that trends continue indefinitely, that nothing unforeseen halts, or reverses them, and that none of these are self-limiting.
None of these points is really arguable.
True, but only if you refuse to have a rational argument.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer