What's the big idea?
Old science books often have exotic drawings of what the future is going to look like. From time to time an idea gets further than an illustration and becomes a serious suggestion. After that, someone might give some money to the project and build it. When I was still in primary school one of these ideas was a tunnel from England to France. Just after I finished university it was open (the rail link to London is still under construction though).
Now there are more grand ideas on the way. One of them has just been approved although I'm not sure where they plan to get the money for it. The Panama canal is too small for some of today's ships, so it is going to be widened. This won't be a simple job. They have to build new locks to lift the ships. Most of the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific is across a lake, but the canals connecting them to the locks must also be dug wider. This will take a lot of people a lot of time. It will also take a lot of money.
On a larger scale, there are serious plans for a tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean. The designers want to put an underwater tube between Britain and America with a maglev train running along it. Maglev trains are the ones that float on magnets. They are more expensive than conventional trains, but they can go much faster. Somehow I can't imagine anyone building this, but that's what I thought about the channel tunnel in the seventies.
We almost have the technology for this next one. A lift from the earth into space might sound like an April Fool's trick, but we already know it's possible and how long it will take to build. First you tie a small but strong cable between earth and an asteroid (find one and tow it into geostationary orbit). Then you send a machine up and down gradually adding more layers of cable to make it stronger. Once it is there, it stays up by itself (because one end of the cable is in orbit) so the asteroid can be pushed out of the way. After that you can start fitting a lift to it. It would probably take between a couple of days and a week to lift something into the cosmos, but it wouldn't need rockets and it could carry heavier loads. Construction begins some time next century, perhaps.
What about some of the technology we already have? I wonder what people in the twenties or thirties would have thought of the internet? New technologies then included the videophone (which nobody wants to use even today) and the zeppelin. The rest is history.
Glossary
grand ideas = ambitious ideas
a tube rura
conventional konwencjonalny
geostationary orbit = an orbit where something stays exactly over the same point on the earth's surface
gradually stopniowo
a load ładunek
These expressions are all to do with things in the future. Which of the words in the list completes them?
board
drawing
dream
forthcoming
pipe
projected
- This project is still on the __________ __________. We haven't decided what it will finally look like.
- He had a great idea for a new business when he was at school, but it was a __________ __________ and he never did anything about it.
- This dotted line on the map shows a __________ motorway. They will start building it next year.
- The trailers are advertisements for __________ films.
KEY
1) drawing board 2) pipe dream 3) projected motorway 4) forthcoming films
Did you know?
Some more predictions that did not come true include: a single world government by the 21st century, the death of democracy in Europe by the 1950s, and that all the major questions of science would be answered by the 1960s.
The name for someone whose job is to write about how our life will be different in the future is a 'futurologist'. I think another name is 'overpaid journalist'.