1/3 cpredict
Something about all those zeroes about to flip over on the calendar makes people want to tell the world what awaits it in the next century, and the next millennium.
Before they rush into print, they might pause to consider how spectacularly wrong their counterparts of a century ago would have been even in their most carefully wrought predictions of the turbulent 20th century. And find something safer to write about.
My favorite example of how predictions go wrong is the first moon landing in 1968. Travel to the moon is an old idea, from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in the 16th century to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865. Verne got a great many things right, because the physics involved was well understood. But neither he nor anyone else foresaw that when the Eagle landed in July 1969, a billion people would be watching on television.
Getting even one thread straight, or nearly so, is difficult; anticipating how different threads will weave together, impossible.
Science was particularly full of surprises, not least for scientists. Physics had two unanticipated new branches, nuclear and quantum. Biology had a new field, genetics, and an old field, medicine, that was unrecognizably transformed.
Genetics has its roots in the 19th century; the monk Gregor Mendel published the results of his research on plant hybridization in the 1860s. But his work was largely unknown to other biologists, and even after his results were rediscovered, no one could figure out what to do with them until 1953, when Francis H. Crick and James D. Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.
Given a mechanism, the tinkerers could get to work on it. The most ambitious tinkerers are clicking through the 3 billion pairs of human DNA, on their way to a complete map of the human genome. A brash outsider says he can finish the job years sooner. Meanwhile there are transgenic plants that are easier and cheaper to grow, valuable chemicals produced by genetically engineered bacteria and tests for genetic susceptibility to (or immunity from) disease.
How could we have guessed?
In medicine, a confident Victorian might have claimed that advanced measures for public health meant plague no longer rode with the horsemen of apocalypse. Alas, it is not so. Twenty million dead of influenza in the 1918 pandemic after World War I, my father's mother among them. Thirty million now infected with HIV, with unknown millions yet to come. Most of them will die of AIDS.
We are no longer helpless against such plagues, but neither can we expect to be invulnerable.
Against lesser plagues, medicine has made enormous progress. The physician and essayist Lewis Thomas recalls that as a child he sometimes went with his father to visit patients. For many illnesses, the doctor's black bag brought comfort and reassurance, but held no cure.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1926, but it was tricky to extract the drug and only the exigencies of war brought this first antibiotic into regular use. Other drugs moved into civilian use after the war as well. I had rheumatic fever as a child, around 1947, and was treated with ''miracle'' sulfa drugs that probably prevented crippling heart disease.
An optimist might have hoped for reduced infant mortality, but predict it would drop from well above 100 per 1,000 live births to 7.2? Or that life expectancy at birth would exceed the Biblical span?
The staggering expansion of computer power accelerated progress in biology in medicine in ways no 19th-century futurist could have guessed. If he knew anything at all of calculating machines, it was only the impractical ''difference engine,'' designed in the 1820s by Charles Babbage to improve the accuracy of tables of logarithms, but never completed.
A computer museum has built one of Babbage's elegant, gear-driven engines, and it works just fine. But it also weighs three tons, takes up most of a room, and costs a fortune. In fact, Microsoft's chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, helped to finance the project provided the museum would build another one for him.
Gears weren't good enough. Nor vacuum tubes. Imagine a 233-megabyte gadget made of vacuum tubes randomly going pffft? You wouldn't have one on your desk. Computing couldn't take off without transistors, and no one foresaw those.
Would historians have fared better than scientists? A clear-sighted student of European conflicts might grimly have assumed the 20th century would see another pan-European war. After all, the 19th century began with Napoleon's conquests.
But two such wars, one circling the globe? And ended with a nuclear bomb? A meaningless term, before Einstein told the world that matter could be changed into energy.
And most improbable of all after centuries of European wars, a placid European peace among the chief combatants, busily engaged now in relinquishing their national currencies for a common one, the euro.
An astute observer would have predicted that two great despotisms, in Russia and China, were tottering toward their ends, if anyone was paying attention to such distant and exotic lands; might even have guessed that czars and emperors would yield to republican government. Who would have thought, though, that those succeeding republics would both fall to a deeper tyranny forged from the theories of an obscure German economist called Karl Marx?
Daily life was no more amenable to prediction than the discoveries of science or the twists and turns of history. If someone had said that by 1999, no more than 2 percent of Americans would be farming, he'd have been scoffed at. What would the other 98 percent eat? And what would they do?
Even when an innovation was known, its implications weren't recognized. The automobile is a 19th-century invention. At a Packard Club car show in Harrisburg, Penn., in 1971, I had a chance to ride in the very first Packard, built in November 1899.
But it took a while before people fully understood that cars needed more and better roads. In 1903, another Packard named ''Old Pacific'' completed the first transcontinental trip by automobile. The drivers had to lift the machine bodily out of muddy ruts as deep as it was high. With a big boost from bicylists, America set out to build long-distance highways. And gas stations. And motels. And shopping centers and strip malls and suburbs.
Love these things or loathe them, in 1900 nobody saw them coming.
Worriers did predict, however, that by mid-century America's cities would be filling up with horse manure, a fate we were spared by the ''horseless carriage.''
It's not merely that people were wrong. It's that they couldn't have been right, knowing only what they did. And the rate of change is greater now than a century ago, while the possibilities for interdisciplinary advances multiply.
The only safe prediction is for continued unpredictability.