WASHINGTON -- The trouble with the future, someone once said, is that there are so many of them.In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer best known for "2001: A Space Odyssey," predicted that artificial satellites in geosynchronous orbits would one day be used to relay radio messages around the world. Communications experts scoffed. In 1945 the idea of such an artificial moon was still science fiction. It would be another 12 years before the Soviets would shock the world with the launching of Sputnik.
It was a brilliant insight, but it's not at all clear that satellite communications as envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke would have been practical. The satellites he envisioned were huge affairs, with living quarters for a crew whose principal task was to replace vacuum tubes as they burned out.
But just two years after he made his prediction, the transistor was invented. Today, there are nearly 200 communications satellites; it's a $15 billion-a-year business and growing. No larger than a Volkswagen, each satellite flawlessly relays vastly more information than the huge space stations proposed by Clarke -- and they have no need for a crew. Arthur C. Clarke foresaw communications satellites, but not microelectronics.
Science is a wild card. The further we try to project into the future, the more certain it is that some unforeseen, perhaps unforeseeable discovery will shuffle the deck before we get there. Even though science has made incredible progress in this century, plenty of wild cards remain uncovered. Sometimes, as in the case of microelectronics, science provides a future far beyond anything we could have imagined. But science is just as likely to impose limits on our dreams.
In 1618, Robert Fludd, an English physician, dreamed of easing the burden on farmers. For centuries, water wheels had been used in Europe to grind flour, but many areas lacked suitable streams for a mill, which meant farmers were often forced to transport their grain great distances. Fludd's solution: have the water wheel drive a pump as well as grind flour. The water that had turned the wheel would be pumped back up into a reservoir that fed the millrace. The reservoir could run the mill indefinitely. Fludd's gristmill would be, in sum, a perpetual motion machine.
The idea failed, of course, but his failure led to one of the greatest scientific insights in history, the conservation of energy embodied in the laws of thermodynamics. In the nearly 400 years since Fludd's disappointment, hundreds of inventors around the world have tried to beat the laws of thermodynamics and failed.
In frustration, and perhaps embarrassment, many inventors resorted to fraud, constructing complex devices with cleverly concealed sources of energy. Each failure, and each fraud, once it was exposed, established the laws of thermodynamics more firmly. There are no perpetual motion machines in our future. Science may not enable us to foresee the future, but it does allow us to rule some futures out.
You might suppose, therefore, that people who make a business of predicting the future would immerse themselves in science. In fact, they are more likely to immerse themselves in astrology. But daily horoscope writers and tabloid psychics are rather harmless. Their modest claims to foresee the future rarely go much beyond predicting marital problems for Hollywood celebrities.
Nor am I much troubled by Madame Zelda, whose sign hangs in the window above the deli across from my office. It simply says, "Readings." Zelda will read tarot cards, tea leaves, palms -- whatever you feel comfortable with -- and she will give you the most accurate prediction possible within the limitations of that technology. But those who consult fortune tellers and psychics are probably beyond help anyway.
What concerns me are the professional "futurists," -- for instance, the late Herman Kahn, who prided himself on developing elaborate doomsday scenarios and on "thinking the unthinkable."
People who are otherwise intelligent are inclined to take such futurists very seriously. The further ahead these "experts" project their minds, the deeper their insights are thought to be. If they think far enough into the future, they're called "visionaries."
Futurists would rather not predict what will happen next year. They prefer to think further ahead -- 20 years, or a century, or a millennium. Some spend their entire working lives cranking out predictions of what things will be like after they are safely retired. Things like colonies on Mars. That possibility violates no laws of physics, but we got a glimpse of Mars last summer, and I can tell you the prospect of a colony there doesn't look very promising.
You may wonder how futurists persuade anyone to take them seriously. Well, they do it the same way that Madame Zelda does it. Futurists tell people what they want to hear -- predictions that resonate with their own hopes, or fears, or religious convictions -- and they make it interesting.
Dennis Gabor, the British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1971 for holography, once suggested that if we can't predict the future, perhaps we can invent it. He proposed that a group of very smart people be asked to prepare a list of possible futures. It would then be up to society to decide democratically which of these futures most closely corresponds to the sort of world we want to live in. We could then design policies intended to get us there. S ociety, however, needs to know whether the future we choose is actually achievable. Putting humans on the moon was difficult but achievable. Dr. Fludd's perpetual motion gristmill had a laudable objective, but it was impossible.
Science has a way of getting to the future without consulting futurists. The historian Arnold Toynbee once explained his phenomenal productivity: "I learn each day," he said, "what I need to know to do tomorrow's work."
Science advances in much the same way. With each hard-won insight, the scientist pauses just long enough to plot a new course, designed to take advantage of what has just been learned. If you focus on too distant a goal, you may find a crevasse blocking your way that didn't appear on the map. Better to follow the contours of the terrain. In this journey, the futurists are simply irrelevant.
Robert L. Park, is a professor of phys ics at the University of Maryland, is author of the forthcoming book "Voodoo Science."
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