Credit: Emrah Elmasli
Personal jet packs! Weekend trips to Mars! Domed cities beneath the sea! No more time-consuming food, just neat nutrition pills!
That was the future, or part of it, expected by the popular imagination; fuelled by science-fiction comics, movies, and lurid pulp stories reaching back to the 1930s. So when the 21st century began, and we were still stuck here in suburban gridlock, watching attractive airheads getting kicked off the island and bored nobodies doing nothing for hours a day on Big Brother, everyone became very cynical about the future. How dull it was! Meanwhile, the new future, the real future, looked like a nightmare of greenhouse scorchers and drought, or shocking, unexpected flooding. Space shuttles fell out of the sky in blazing ruin. Clones were expected any day, but many pious people feared they would have no souls. Darwin had gone out of fashion in the heartland of Western power, the United States. And astrologers now outnumbered astronomers.
It is not so surprising that the future has not turned out like the comic books. After all, nobody expects 21st century law enforcement to be run by masked avengers wearing capes and driving in jet-propelled Batmobiles. Real astronauts don't do their work repairing the Hubble space telescope in satin tights and brass bikinis, with glass bubbles over their heads, despite decades of comics portraying them this way.
The real future crept up on us, in the form of mobile phones (a surprise technology actually predicted in comics such as Dick Tracy and the 1960s television program Star Trek); portable laptops at affordable prices with vastly more grunt than the computers used to send men to the Moon; and computer-generated movies that portray wild 1940s science-fiction horror and space soap-opera scenes in exceptional, believable detail thanks to just such computers. And of course, DVDs, commuter cars built around microelectronics, café lattes, Pilates exercises, and airport bookstores clogged with vapid self-help manuals.
In other words, yesterday's future - our present day - is a blend of the predictable and the only slightly surprising. Still, a hundred and fifty years ago, the claim that people would do away with horses in the street, and spend their holidays flying through the air while packed like hens would have seemed mad. The real future of 50 years hence is likely to be just that wrenchingly strange.
And the reason for that strangeness - strictly unpredictable in detail from where we sit here and now - is an accelerating rate of change. It's driving certain key technologies forward in a wild rush, especially computing power.
Taking this insight literally leads to a very perplexing forecast: the singularity, as it's been called, or the spike. It's an ever-soaring curve on the graph of change, dragging us upward through a series of drastic dislocations in work and play; the very shape of our minds and bodies; the world we inhabit.
Here's a jolting change greater than anything we've seen so far in history: by the middle of this century it's possible, even probable, that the relentless ageing of our bodies will be halted by advances in biological understanding plus remarkable new medical interventions. However slowly these health improvements start out, they will carry their beneficiaries forward, step-by-step, year after year, to an era where everyone who chooses has the option of rejuvenation and indefinitely extended youth.
Until now, as the playwright Tom Stoppard has noted wryly, "age is a very high price to pay for maturity." The end result of the Human Genome Project and its successors will see the abolition of that terrible and once inevitable price. After all, the egg cells from which each of us grew were as old as our mother, yet those comparatively old cells later matured and built brand spanking new babies. Is there any reason why we can't learn the secrets of the egg cells that ensure healthy youngsters, and then apply those lessons to keep all our adult cells, and the tissues they comprise, healthy and youthful?
There might be moral objections to eternal youth. Just as blustering attempts were once made to prohibit anaesthetics during childbirth, since its pain was imagined to be a punishment imposed by God, so the debilities of age and the finality of death could be considered a necessary part of life, imposed by the deity's wisdom. It's illuminating to recall how many other natural conditions we duck by using technology such as glasses, central heating, dental anaesthetics and tampons. It seems that the changes we're told God wants us to avoid are often those that haven't happened yet. Once we get used to them, once they become part of our lives, moralists discover belatedly that God really doesn't mind after all.
But the singularity will not stop at physical immortality (if that convergence of technologies isn't blocked by war, political caution, or the ruination of the planet by unsustainable industrial and agricultural approaches).
As machines get smarter, they won't just take over the burdens of toil, they will enhance us as well … literally. The promise of virtual reality may have stalled as we wait for computer power to double and redouble every year or so - a proliferation that gives us a thousand times as much power every decade, and a million times after two decades, a billion after three. Two or three decades hence, a benign version of the world of The Matrix is feasible. Augmented by billions of nanomachines smaller than brain cells, we could have the opportunity to link our thoughts and emotions directly, one person to another, in a kind of machine telepathy. We might roam through rich imaginary spaces and landscapes that make today's supposedly awesome special-effects movies seem as convincing as a child's crayon drawings.
Some might choose to upload their personalities into a totally constructed reality, perhaps even migrate there, adventurous denizens of a wholly new frontier. Living that way, we might be able to copy ourselves numerous times, our variant selves remaining linked in an electronic version of the way nature now links our twin brain hemispheres. One copy, or more, might remain safely archived for back-up, others might roam the depths of space in cheap, tiny starships designed to carry our nano-selves at nearly the speed of light into the deep night - even at the cost of losing their connection to the core self, at least until they return home.
But these are merely my projections beyond the opaque wall of the singularity, a place we can go only in imagination - for now. Even so, what we dream today will be the merest shadow of tomorrow's reality. Let's hope the under-funded research programs working toward extended youthful lifespan succeed in time for us, personally, to share in that great adventure.
Damien Broderick is a novelist, futurist and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Cosmos.
