CBS NEWS/60 MINUTES’ MIKE WALLACE CHALLENGES THE WORLD’S GREATEST MINDS TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

Posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

By ahedgehog

As the press release for Mike’s book “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today” puts it: what will our lives by like in half a century? How advanced will technology have become? How will the world be better and how will it be worse?

These are just some of the intriguing questions legendary CBS newsman Mike Wallace puts to 60 of some of the world’s brightest, imaginative and forward-thinking individuals in the world —including more than 15 winners of the Nobel and other equivalent prizes in the many sciences the Nobels do not cover. 2006 Heineken Prize winner for Environmental Sciences, Stuart Pimm, is one of them.

“Of course, we expect literally incredible advances in science, technology, and medicine!” Pimm explains. “But whether my great grandchildren will enjoy the natural world that has meant so much to me is a different matter.”

Pimm is certain about one thing: family gatherings. “I expect that sometime during the year, my kids will gather with their families and, of course, watch traditional movies — or whatever has replaced them.”

Pimm picks The Wizard of Oz — by mid-century over a 100 years old — and writes two letters to explain a couple of Dorothy’s lines.

“Hey, kids, this is your great-grandfather. You were born after I died, so I could not know you, but I think about you almost every day. I’m that funny-looking man in photographs next to grandmother in Africa. What did you think of the movie?

There’s one part I know you will not understand. It’s when Dorothy worries about wild animals—“Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!” I know you’ve seen these animals in zoos — they were probably asleep. They haven’t been wild animals since before you were born. There was a time when they were wild. And there were wild places, places where I could travel for days and see only wild things.”

Whatever our technological advances, whether there will be wild things — especially lions and tigers and bears — is not clear, Pimm explains. Lions have been driven to extinction over much of Africa and only a few remain in India. Tigers have suffered massive declines across Asia. And whether polar bears will survive in a world that will melt their icy homes is also uncertain.

“I wanted to tell my great grandkids what a world was like with tigers and large whales and peoples living in the rainforest” Pimm writes. But Pimm is an optimist. While his first letter talks about what we might lose in the next century, the second assumes that conservation professionals, like himself, succeed. “My great grandchildren could have fantastic experience of nature.” So having passed on two letters to be read 50 years from now, Pimm hopes they get the second short one, where he writes

“…have grandmother tell you about how people at the start of this century thought we might lose wild places and the species that lived there. I was one of them. Seems silly now, doesn’t it? There’s a line or two about it in your history book somewhere, but it won’t be on the test.”

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