Page:The impact of science on society.pdf/38
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000
By the year 2000 we'll be flying on supersonic transports or, more likely, hypersonic transports. We'll have put the genetic code to work and begun to engineer out congenital birth defects and inherited diseases. We'll have made a real start toward the prevention and conquest of both heart disease and cancer. The normal life span should be 85 to 90 years, and anybody suggesting mandatory retirement at age 65 will face unthinkable punishment. However, these advances require that this country correct its inadequacy in science and technology. We are living off the past and ignoring the future. Other industrial countries now turn out more engineers and scientists than we do. The United States needs a manned space station—it may be the most worthwhile investment in future technology and science that we can make. We should also start planning for a manned Mars mission. Of course, it would be so expensive that no single nation could afford it, which is probably good. It would then become an International Mars Mission and would involve at least the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and very possibly Russia. Such a joint mission could pave the way for world disarmament.
As a society, we walk a tightrope between limbo and extinction. We're on a threshold of survival, in a society threatened as never before to find the way, with less and less margin for error. The decades ahead to the year 2000 and beyond, as were the decades just past, can be either interrogative, presumptuous, or insane. And we have to create our own flight plan, because this Earth didn't come with one telling us how to get to the future safely. The winds of change are blowing across this land. We're a nation that can't afford many more crash landings, yet we keep putting untrained pilots in the cockpit and thinking we'll all somehow come out all right. No way. No longer.