Rummaging through a heap of old files last week, and looking for something completely different, I came across a talk that I gave, under duress, more than 20 years ago.

It was an early morning talk, hence the title: "Predicting the Future: Ten Impossible Things Before Breakfast." I borrowed from the White Queen in Alice's trip through the looking glass, who believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, but I wanted to go her better. I say that the talk was given under duress because, although I like to write about the outer limits of science and technology, I don't consider myself in any sense a "futurist," whatever that means. I have more than enough trouble making sense of the present.

However, I owed a favor, and they called me because the scheduled breakfast speaker had reported sick with one day's notice. So there I was, in northern Virginia in 1979, standing up and making predictions exactly as though I knew what I was talking about.

I justified each of my ten guesses, which I do not propose to do here because it would take me far beyond the word limits of these columns. However, since I am not a futurist, I propose to violate a basic tenet of the Futurists' and Psychics' Guild, and evaluate the accuracy of my past pronouncements.

1  -  "Radioactive waste will form a useful and harmless energy source 40 years from now." I have written on the same thing much more recently. We may still be 40 years away from putting this into practice, but I stick with the idea.

2  -  "The mechanics of the aging process will be understood within 15 years, and 50 years from now the rejuvenation of humans will be conceivable." I was clearly too optimistic on the first half of this prediction. I knew about the Hayflick limit, from Leonard Hayflick's work in the 1960's, which discovered a practical limit on the number of times a body cell can copy itself. However, I knew nothing of telomeres, special pieces of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes that seem to play a vital role in aging. I still look for human rejuvenation in the next 30 years, and hope for it for personal reasons a good deal sooner than that.

3  -  "Within 30 years we will see the synthesis of edible products from basic elements." Wrong. Not so much perhaps because we couldn't do it if we wanted to, but because no one appears to be interested. Nature is so good at the job, it hardly seems worth the attempt to do better.

4  -  "Within 50 years we will have materials ten times as strong as anything we can now make." At the time I wrote, the forms of carbon known as fullerenes, including the best-known example, buckyballs, had not been discovered. (That didn't happen until 1985.) Fullerenes look as though they will lead to ultra-strong materials. I will claim this one as a hit, and even suggest that 50 years (30 years now) may be too conservative.

5  -  "Within 25 years we will understand and be able to control the immune reaction." Well, we have a few years left, but I believe that I was optimistic. Allow me another 20 years, though, and I will stand by my statement.

6  -  "Within 50 years we will build the first self-replicating computer; within 70 years we will build a computer that can be said to have self-awareness." The jury is still out on this, so at the moment it's neither a hit nor a miss. The pace of computer development is so fast that long-term extrapolation from today's capabilities lacks credibility.

7  -  "Within 20 years we will be able to slow the human metabolism indefinitely and then revive the subject to normal functioning." This, unfortunately, is not the case. Heart surgery is routinely performed at reduced body temperature, but we are a long way from the suspended animation that I had in mind.

8  -  "Within 30 years we will understand the subnucleon world well enough to begin to think of applications." I don't believe this any more. What I had in mind was based on something we now believe to be a physical impossibility. I knew that, according to standard theory, particles like protons and neutrons were made up of smaller objects known as quarks. I assumed that we would one day be able to produce, and later use, beams and assemblies of quarks, just as we can now produce and use beams of neutrons and protons. Unfortunately, it appears that the quark can exist only as quark combinations, and never as an individual particle. My prediction, like so many predictions, was based on a misunderstanding of Nature (this can include human nature).

9  -  "One hundred years from now we will know how to manipulate gravity. Two hundred years from now we will be able to generate gravitational fields." True or false? Your guess is as good as mine. A century or two in science is an awful long time. An understanding of gravity, and in particular its relationship to quantum theory, remains an outstanding problem of physics.

10  -  "One hundred and twenty years from now we will have evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature." Why did I choose 120 years, and not 100? I have no idea. Maybe to distinguish this from the previous prophecy. In any event, this prediction was based on my feeling that no matter how much we feel we understand the physics of the universe, we have a long way to go. Of the four forces we now recognize as basic, only gravity and electromagnetism were known 150 years ago. The weak force and the strong force have been part of physics for less than half that time. It should not be too much to ask for another fundamental discovery about the physics of the universe in the next century. Again, it is too soon to comment on the truth or falsehood of this prediction.

As you can see, I didn't do very well as a seer. What would I say today if somebody asked me to stand up and make ten new predictions for the next century?

I would say that my confidence has gone, and I can offer no more than five. In compensation for that, I am willing to offer five other things that I believe we definitely will not see in the next 200 years. Tune in to the Non-Psychics Hotline of my next column to find those predictions.

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