

Source: Hubblesite.org

It is a fascinating thing to look at predictions of the future that come from the past. And revealing too – because there is a hidden quality to many of these predictions which speaks to the very core of the limitations of the mind, and the ability of time and possibility to change and surprise us.H. G. Well’s brilliant War Of The Worlds was written in 1898. In that piece the weapons of war that invading aliens use are imagined as enormous tripods, equipped with poison gas and death rays.A modern (and perhaps somewhat less worthy) reimagining of that scenario, the 1996 film Independence Day, gives the aliens huge carrier ships that release fighter aircraft, and have city- destroying powers.

It seems a simple update, almost. But there’s something else to see here. In 1898, what was the most effective weapon of war?

The answer is, more than anything else, armed, armed and mounted cavalry. And if you look at Wells’ imagining of ultra-advanced alien technology, it’s the technology of his time, extrapolated forward in a linear way.

Why do the tripods have legs? Why not fly? Because horses have legs, and the tripods are a futuristic imagining of an advanced race’s cavalry.

The cutting edge of the present often constrains our imagination of the future. We are always keen to extrapolate in linear terms.

Independence Day? Huge ships carrying fighter aircraft? City-destroying weapons? It’s just contemporary military technology extrapolated forward. And the linearity is fully present.

This linearity both characterises and confounds predictions of the future, both the future of technology, and humanity itself. But understanding why that linearity doesn’t happen in reality allows a new dynamic to be seen. Because there is another process, something hidden from us, that overwhelms and subsumes the predictions we make.

Far greater than changes in raw speed, or scale, or power are changes in kind. Changes in terms. Not just a bigger and faster version of what we have, but something fundamentally different in nature. And these changes, although they are utterly unpredictable, are not – in themselves – random.

This is the unseen frontier, and here’s just one example from history. When Johannes Gutenberg put his final touches to his off-beat adaptation of the wine press, the first book he printed was the Bible in Latin.

In his time that was the book on which all of European society was based. And not just that book, but one accepted translation, and one accepted interpretation of that translation, officially sanctioned, rigid, controlled, and made safe and tame for those in power.

While a brilliant inventor, the revolutionary shattering of that iron consensus was not on Gutenberg’s mind. His was a linear goal – the same book, but more of it. Just a linear augmentation to the existing machine.