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By Bud Poliquin
Contributing Editor

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Let's say a couple of people, as they sat by a candle's flickering light around their cabbage and mead, decided to play-a game of  "Pretend" fully one thousand years ago. And lets say they decided to make believe it was 2000.

Now, you must remember that Loif Eriksson, the Norse explorer, is just about to sail a boat staffed with Vikings upon a North American shore. And that .. a remarkable invention called the "horse shoe" is on the verge of making travel a whole lot easier over the world's rutted roads. And that human sacrifice is passing for old-time religion in South and Central America. And that 80 percent of most folks will travel fewer than 20 miles from the huts in which they'll be born over the course of their lifetimes.

OK. As they sit on the doorstop of the 11th century, those are the realities for our two fanciful friends, neither of  whom, by the way, is expected to survive much past the age of 30. And so. they play their game of "Pretend" .. . and probably dream about a glorious future filled with such wonders as preserved fruit, teeth that don't hurt and bathroom stalls without bark.

Certainly, they'd fall short of envisioning the Internet, flights to Mars and the cloning of a sheep for the simple reason that it is difficult to imagine things that can barely be conceived. And yet. with the year 2000 just around the bend, there are those among us who are already gazing one thousand years ahead. To the millennium after this coming millennium. To the year 3000.

They are called futurists, or ocean-deep thinkers who look at what may happen to humankind if present trends continue, decide if this bodes to be desirable and, if it's not, work to change it. In short, if you mix Jules Verne with the Wizard of Oz, add the professor from "Back to the Future" to H.G. Wells, and stir in some big-time physics, science, anthropology and engineering ... if you do all of that — and include intellect, creativity, open-mindedness and an ability to envision a world-gone-mad scenario in which we could become to machines what potted plants are to us — you've got yourself a full-blown futurist.
 

RAPID CHANGE

Even futurists — optimistic or pessimistic, though they may be — can see only so far, however. Like our two imaginary villagers from the year 1000. Those who'd play "Pretend" in the year 2000 would surely bump into serious cerebral boundaries if they dared ponder the year 3000. 

"There may not be a future for futurists because of all the rapid change," said Frank Ogden, a 79-year-old 
Canadian futurist known as "Dr. Tomorrow." "Things are changing so rapidly that to talk about a thousand years down the road would only be a wild guess. A truck driver could give you as good a prediction as anybody else.

"Don't forget that when I was in high school, if you wrote a letter to England, it would go by ship and you'd be lucky to get an answer — over the two trips, across the Atlantic.— in three months. Today, you can go from Boston to Bombay in a second, and who would ever have imagined that only a few short years ago?  So, now my idea of long-range planning is lunch."

Still, futurists, and those who are fascinated by them, abound. Which explains the 30,000 dues-paying, magazine-subscribing, ideas-sharing members of the World Future Society, whose headquarters are located in suburban Baltimore. And it also accounts for the "Humanity 3000" program, a series of seminars and symposia promoted by Foundation For The Future, a major-league think tank just east of Seattle.

Indeed, there are theorists whose agenda is the future just about everywhere. And the stuff they see through their squints can boggle the minds of those who remain fascinated by dry cleaning, microwave popcorn and The Clapper.

Bioengineering . . . nanotechnology ... eugenics ... photovoltaics .. . closed-environment agriculture . . . 
vaccinology . .. biomimicry ... microelectromechanics.  They and other jaw-dropping disciplines are the vehicles that could transport us, en route to the year 3000, to a potentially astonishing life experience.

Moreover, it's going to make these days of laser surgery, cell phones and cable-TV look like the Dark Ages ... and you and your neighbors look like Druids.

Past imperfect"In the year 3000, people — if there are people then, and it's my bet that there won't be a human race a thousand years from now — will look back on us as being very stupid, incredibly shortlived and very much prone to disease and disaster." said Warren Wagar. a futurist and a professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"They'll know that we fought all those wars over land and resources, they'll think about our old concepts like capitalism and socialism . .. and they'll shake their heads.

"If we do get to the year 3000 and haven't destroyed ourselves in nuclear, bacteriological and radiological wars ... and haven't destroyed the environment . . . and haven't created machines that will turn around and eventually destroy us ... if we do survive to that point, all notions of work and wealth and government and nationalism would be totally changed."

For openers, most futurists believe that advances in genetics and replication and the virtually certain elimination of  all illness will render humans, so many of whom will become near-androids, immortal sooner than later.

And before you wonder what the world would be like if, say, Marilyn Manson or Latrell Sprewell or Linda Tripp could somehow live forever, be advised that in the not-so-distant future only "designer babies" — none of whom would have warts, bad-hair days or personalities that could wrinkle pants — will be born.

According to the evolutionary blueprint, these "designer babies" will ultimately watch as robots and computers and automatons do all of their labor — that is, feed the "designer babies" and their progeny, clothe them, bathe them and mow their lawns.

Ultimately, these machines will grow our food. create our "natural" materials and, after being injected into our brains and veins, tend to our minds and bodies. Then. according to Wagar, "work" would consist almost solely of  making ourselves better and more intelligent and more receptive to the thoughts and ideas of others.

Among those "others." of course, will be the hopefully chummy extraterrestrials we may meet when we head off to colonize some of those billion-plus planets . . . way .. . out. . . there.

"Outer space is a thousand-year horizon." said Michael Marien, a futurist from LaFayette with a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Syracuse University's Maxwell School.

"It's likely there will be space settlement and space colonies according to the conventional wisdom of today. There will be interplanetary travel, and we'll find some way to conquer the immense distances so we can get ourselves beyond our galaxy."

Improving humans

And what if those extraterrestrials land in Clinton Square first? Well, if they'll wait a century or two or three, they'll likely encounter some oddities ... at least by the standards of the year 2000.

For instance, Ogden sees teenagers not dyeing their hair green, but growing broccoli from their heads and then eating it for lunch. And Wagar sees biogenetically-engineered armies of Albert Einsteins and George Washington Carvers and Marie Curies and Pablo Picassos.

And Marien sees folks, positively mutated by biology, living on the floors of the oceans. And so on and so forth.

And guess what? All of this — complete with the inevitable and accompanying moral and ethical debates — may be closer than you think.

"Supposedly, they already have a chimpboy in Italy." said Gene Stephens, a futurist from Columbia. S.C. "People will ask. 'Well, why would you want a chimpboy?' And I'd respond. 'For one thing, he'd make a helluva telephone lineman.' The point is, we're right on the verge of being capable of doing things like this — creating humanoids, or human beings with animal traits, or animals with human traits — but we won't for the simple reason that human beings can't accept it."

It is, clearly, a chore, this idea of embracing the heretofore unthinkable. Which brings us back to our two fanciful friends, the ones for whom horse shoes meant progress, playing "Pretend" on the doorstep of the 11th century.

There were things about the year 2000 (the Concorde, for example ... never mind. Tupper-ware) that they couldn't possibly have foreseen one thousand years ago. And now there are things about the year 3000 that we can't possibly begin to imagine right now.

"We are on the brink of controlling our own destiny." said Graham T.T. Molitor. a Maryland-based futurist and author who is the legal counsel of the World Future Society and the president of  Foundation For The Future.

"And that is both terribly exciting and terribly important. We keep advancing and we keep peeling back the skin of the onion . . . and as we do. we leam more and more. And you know what? In the process, we're becoming more and more Creator-like."
 

Only God can make a tree? The futurists will tell you. "Not anymore."

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