If imagination were everything
Flying cars, androids you can’t tell apart from humans, colonised planets... here are things we should have had by now
We should by now have had cars that could levitate and drive themselves, androids that could march and make basic decisions, at least one or two colonised planets, and some mind-reading capability. It’s not like we’ve failed on all fronts, but stock markets and hedge funds do seem to have engaged most of our attention for the last half century. The space race became more of a lazy game of tag. Man hasn’t ven- tured any further than the moon. For better or worse, there are still no man-made structures out there – unless you count space junk.
We have a lifelike robot called Sophia, but she can only say what she’s told to. Most of our other humanoids can do one thing, but no more–talk but not walk, move but not do stairs, and still need prompting.
As for mind-reading, we have a truth serum and Twitter. The truth serum seems decidedly the less harmful of the two. Here’s a look, then, at where we thought we’d be in key areas, and the ‘futuristic’ things we have achieved, as 2020 dawns.
SCIENCE & TECH
Synthetic food: The world’s first labgrown burger (made from stem cells) was eaten in London six years ago. The first lab-grown food product on the market will possibly be a burger patty. But even that’s a few years away, at least. Currently, lab meat is too expensive to produce commercially. Meanwhile, The Good Food Institute, along with Maharashtra’s Institute Of Chemical Technology, will establish a facility for labgrown meat in Mumbai ‘by 2020’.
Self-driving cars: The 2010s were all big noise and bold predictions. Elon Musk said cars would be driverless by 2017. General Motors said they’d be here by now. Google got into the game with Waymo in 2016. Has yours arrived? There’s a delay. Ford’s date is 2021, but everyone’s cautious now. After an Uber test vehicle fatally knocked down a pedestrian in the US, programmes have been put on hold. Robotics companies estimate that self-driven vehicles, carrying human passengers, navigating traffic and weather and making decisions, may be at least 10 years away.
Solar cities: In 2016, the year India got its first solar city in Diu, the government announced its plan to make Delhi one by 2020. This meant generating 1,000 MW of power by 2020 and taking it further to 2,000 MW by 2025. That first deadline is here, the target far from met. But there’s good news. India’s solar power capacities are increasing in record amounts. We are just under 38 GW. Schools, hospitals, even airports are going solar, lowering dependence on polluting fossil fuels. But India’s Paris climate agreement goals are 100 GW of solar capacity by 2022. We’re unlikely to reach that goal in time.
HEALTH / MEDICINE
Artificial organs: We’ve made a 3D-printed heart, at Tel Aviv University, Israel. It’s the size of a cherry or the heart of a rabbit; a patient’s own cells were used, so it’s not really ‘artificial’. And stem cell engineering is still working out challenges like vasculature, the network of blood vessels that feeds any organ.
A cure for cancer: There’s a bit of a sad twist here. As researchers innovate to find ways to prolong life, and minimise side-effects of treatment, the incidence of cancer is growing. Our big worry today is that chemicals and artificial substances
in our food, water, air and environment could raise the incidence further. Eradicating diseases like leprosy,
polio: The numbers are falling. But even moving into 2020, attempts to eradicate diseases we were sure would be gone by now – like leprosy and polio – have, essentially, failed. Cases of vaccine-derived polio virus (VDPV) are surfacing steadily across Asia and Africa. In order for a disease to be declared eradicated, even in one country, that country must go three years with no reported cases. Since being declared poliofree in 2014, India has recorded 50 cases of VDPV. According to the WHO, we are also home to 66% of leprosy patients in the world.
THINGS WE HAVE ACHIEVED Tourist rockets are being tested:
Three private companies are in the race to help tourists escape Earth’s atmosphere – Space X, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, owned by Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos respectively. Each has successfully tested unmanned craft. SpaceX has also tested a reusable rocket, which would slash eventual ticket prices. So far, seven ‘space’ tourists have left the planet, going as far as the International Space Station, just beyond Earth’s atmosphere, aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. ‘Smart’ pills are here, in a limited
capacity: These capsule-sized ingestibles fitted with microsensors can share diagnostic information with your smartphone. The first was sanctioned for human use in 2017. Digital oncology has led to such chemotherapy drugs too. Bots are talking, entertaining our
kids: They may not be humanoid, but we’re already fairly dependent on them. Online, they help respond to email, search for a job, shop, bank and create playlists. AI home assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant are helping manage our schedules, even entertaining the children. We’ve created superbugs we can’t kill: The discovery of penicillin was a turning point for our species. But over the past century, we’ve been so overmedicated, particularly with antibiotics either prescribed, self-prescribed or ingested via meat from medicated livestock, that the bugs they once killed have become resistant. In 2017, WHO released a priority list of 12 antibiotic-resistant bacteria to guide global research on antibiotics. These list strains of gonorrhea, pneumonia and salmonella. In India, we’re fighting a pitched battle with drug- and multidrug-resistant TB. We’ve shrunk the ice-caps and
raised ocean temperatures: Rising temperatures have been accompanied by rising sea levels, which in turn have led to the dystopian phenomenon of climate refugee. The term was first thrown up in 1976, by Lester Brown, a US-based environmental analyst.