Entering Tomorrow with Willy Ley
I don’t know if Willy Ley wrote the book you see below, but he wrote a book about the first men to travel to the moon that sticks with me today. His problem was that he was way too scientific and far too apolitical to imagine what would really happen!
Willy thought that the world would actually make sense. He had a vision of a scientific expedition of about 50 people in a rocket who would set up a temporary colony on the moon to study the environment as scientists. He had no idea that it would actually be the result of a political race for bragging rights and dominance. When you think of it, Willy probably knew science better than he knew people and their motivations. Silly Willy.
Futurists have always had this problem. They look at the engineering and the science and assume humanity will fall as much in love with it as they have. But science is only a small motivation for human beings overall and seldom turns the crank of the government gears. But, adventure does. And records do. And images do, like the way the world adopted a wild-haired genius named Albert Einstein. But not science, not really.
Yet, something so human that it generated a technological miracle never imagined by the futurists I read as a child happened on the first Moon landing forty years ago this coming July. No one had anything I can remember even remotely like it in anything I read. The first step on the Moon was seen live around the world on TV sets in everyone’s living room! Unbelievable!
And that is probably why the futurists who will come out of the woodwork with predictions for the beginning of this New Year will probably be wrong, too. They will miss the fact that human communication is the driving force behind so much of the future. The fact that I am publishing this piece from my living room for anyone in the world to read is something they never imagined.
Happy New Year! Happy future.
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Tags: Predictions, Science, The Future
