Original subtitles

horizon filmed him at the world's fair

in new york he's arthur clark

trying to predict the future is a

discouraging and hazardous occupation

because the prophet invariably falls

between two stools

if his predictions sound at all

reasonable you can be quite sure that in

twenty or most fifty years

the

progress of science and technology has

made him seem ridiculously conservative

on the other hand if by some miracle a

prophet could describe the future

exactly as it was going to take place

his predictions would sound so absurd

so far fetched that everybody would love

him to scorn

this has proved to be true in the past

and it will undoubtedly be true even

more so of the century to come

the only thing we can be sure of about

the future is that it will be absolutely

fantastic

so

if what i say now seems to you to be

very reasonable

then i'll fail completely

only if what i tell you appears

absolutely unbelievable having any

chance of visualizing the future as it

really will happen

let's start by looking at the city of

the future

some people think that it will be like

this

and they're quite right

in fact everything you see now already

exists

all the materials all the ideas

these things can be put into practice

immediately

but what about the city of the day after

tomorrow

say the year 2000

i think it will be completely different

in fact it may not even exist at all

oh i'm not thinking of the atom bomb and

the next stone age

i'm thinking of the

incredible breakthrough

which has been made possible by

development communications

particularly the transistor and above

all the communication satellite

these things will make possible

a world in which we can be in instant

contact with each other wherever we may

be

where we can contact our friends

anywhere on earth even if we don't know

their actual physical location

it will be possible in that age perhaps

only fifty years from now

for a man to conduct his business from

tahiti or bali

just as well as he could from london

in fact if it proves worthwhile almost

any executive skill

any administrative skill even any

physical skill

could be made independent of distance

i am perfectly serious when i suggest

that one day

we may have brain surgeons in edinburgh

operating on patients in new zealand

when that time comes

the whole world will have shrunk to a

point

and the

traditional role of the city as a

meeting place for man

would have

ceased to make any sense

in fact men will no longer commute

they will communicate

they won't have to travel for business

anymore they'll only travel for pleasure

i only hope that when that day comes and

when the city is abolished the whole

world isn't turned into one giant suburb

in that world of the future we will not

be the only intelligent creatures

one of the coming techniques

will be what we might call

bioengineering

the development of intelligent and

useful

servants among the other animals on this

planet particularly the great apes and

in the oceans the dolphins and whales

you know it's a scandal which we should

be thoroughly ashamed that prehistoric

man

tamed all the domestic animals we have

today we haven't added one in the last 5

000 years

it's about time we did so and with our

present knowledge of animal psychology

and genetics we could certainly

solve the servant problem

with the help of the

monkey kingdom

of course eventually our super

chimpanzees would start forming trade

unions and we

right back where we started

however the most intelligent inhabitants

of that future world won't be men

or monkeys they'll be machines

the remote descendants of today's

computers

now the present day electronic brains

are complete morons

but this will not be true in another

generation

they will start to think and eventually

they will completely out think their

makers

is this depressing i don't see why it

should be

we superseded the cro-magnon and

neanderthal men and we presume we're an

improvement

i think we should regard it as a

privilege to be stepping stones to

higher things

i suspect that organic or biological

evolution has about come to its end and

we're now at the beginning of inorganic

or mechanical evolution which will be

thousands of times swifter

but even if the future does belong to

the robots our bodies and our brains

still have immense untap potentialities

for example to cope with the information

explosion we may develop a machine for

recording information directly onto the

brain

as today we can record a symphony on

tape

so we may one day be able to become

instant experts

uh learning chinese overnight for

example

or we may be able to recall completely

memories of past events so that we seem

to relive them

in fact techniques already known for

doing this in a rather limited way at

the present

alternatively we may prefer to totally

erase

past unpleasant memories

our bodies will also be more efficient

and they'll last longer

after all it's only in this century that

a patient had a better than 50

chance of any improvement when he was

treated by his doctors

one of the great medical discoveries of

the near future

will be a method of suspended animation

so that a man can sleep away down the

centuries and in this manner travel into

the future

this technique which may possibly be

based on deep freezing

will one day be used to send into the

future people suffering from diseases or

ailments beyond the ability of

present-day medical science to cure

though i don't really know how one will

calculate the health insurance

contributions to pay for medical

treatment

500 years hence

another use of suspended animation will

be for the long-range exploration of

space

in this way us short-lived creatures

will be able to travel

enormous distances

although

we may not of course be so short-lived

in the future because even immortality

may be on the cards one day

however even without immortality we may

be able to make journeys lasting

thousands of years and such journeys

will be necessary if you ever

wish to cross the enormous gulfs which

separate from us from the stars

distance is so great that even light

traveling at 600 million miles every

hour takes years to cross them

but why should we attempt these immense

voyages

well because it seems very certain that

at least at this moment in time there

are no other intelligent creatures in

our own solar system

we'll have to go out to the stars to

meet them for certainly out there among

the 100 000

other sons of our universe there must be

many civilizations

perhaps far higher than our own

the first contact with intelligent

extraterrestrials will be the greatest

adventure in the future of man

it may not happen for centuries

but one day it will come

meanwhile near at home

there's plenty to do in this solar

system on the morning planets

today we can just reach the moon

tomorrow men will be living there

a hundred years from now

some men will call it home

at the moment it's a very unattractive

kind of place to imagine as a home and

this is true of all the planets

there's not one on which unprotected men

could live

or in which any form of life as we know

it could exist

with a possible exception of mars

however a hundred years from now things

will be very different

with the techniques which we are now

acquiring it will one day be possible to

modify

the environments on at least some of the

planets so that men can live there

without spacesuits or airtight cities

the technique for this has been called

planetary engineering and one astronomer

has coined the

very

optimistic phrase the reconstruction of

the solar system looking as far into the

technological future as i dare

i'd like to describe the invention to

end all inventions

i call it the replicator and it's simply

a duplicating machine

but it's a duplicating machine that can

make an exact copy of anything

now we're already familiar with perfect

copies of printing of pictures and of

sounds

yet the camera and the tape recorder

would have seemed miraculous to our

ancestors

and to a medieval monk

who perhaps in his whole life only saw a

few dozen books each one

patiently copied by hand our present

world in which literally millions of

books exist would again have seemed

absolutely inconceivable

can we imagine a world in which objects

can be made as easily as today we can

make books

well don't ask me exactly how the

replicator would work

if i knew

i'd patented it once

confronted with such a device our

present society would probably sink into

a kind of gluttonous

barbarism because everybody would want

unlimited quantities of everything since

nothing would cost anything

in fact cynics may doubt of any human

society

could survive an invention which would

lead to unlimited abundance and the

final ending of the curse of adam

and yet you know human beings are almost

infinitely adaptable

look at the incredible changes we've

experienced and survived from the stone

age to the present time

and yet even greater changes are still

to come

because the future is not merely

an extension of the present with bigger

and better machines and cities and

gadgets

it'll be fundamentally different

and many of the things we take for

granted will one day pass away as

completely as or spinning wheels and

sedan chairs

and oil lamps

and that is why the future is so

endlessly fascinating because try as we

can

we'll never outguess it

you