Our Special Place in History

As we enter the 21st century, can we say with certainty we live in the most important time mankind has ever known?

By Jonathan Margolis

SO HERE WE ARE, at the threshold of the year 2001, the real beginning of the 21st century. At last, we are truly in the future we always promised ourselves.

And as we look around at our world, so incomprehensibly comfortable, well-fed, educated and secure, compared with that of even 50 years ago, it's hardly surprising we feel pretty pleased with ourselves just for being alive at such a momentous time.

Yet without wanting to spoil the party, it's only fair to point out that every generation has thought it was around at a special time.

And every civilization has been convinced its technology, the ultimate expression of its genius, has reached terminal velocity.

First century Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus was so impressed by his world he declared: "Inventions have reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development." U.S. Patent Office commissioner Charles Duell proposed in 1899 to save money by closing down his department because there could not possibly be anything left to invent. And in the late 1940s, Thomas J. Watson of IBM made the less-than-canny judgment: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

But even knowing how wrong people in the past have been about the future, it's still difficult for us to avoid a feeling of historical destiny I call the Arrogance of the Present.

Try thinking we're just an ordinary generation as you next use your pocket computer to access the vast shared consciousness that is the World Wide Web, or as you read about the latest advance in genetic engineering, or -- most baffling of all to someone from just a few decades ago -- as you rub shoulders on equal terms with men and women of every race.

The funny thing about the turn of the 21st century is that we might, just might, be right about our era's importance. Our Arrogance of the Present may be justified. Several human-created features of 2001, after all, make today significantly different from any other time.

The most obvious is the extraordinary extension of human longevity in the past few decades. The average life span globally has leapt from 36.2 years in 1900 to 65.4 in 1995, and it's expected to reach 72.5 by 2025.

But that's nothing. Medical science is on the brink of making death infinitely avoidable -- a lifestyle option, no less. This alone makes our era unprecedented. But the changes it will wreak are not just physical, with the prospect of all of us living to be several times great-grandparents. The spiritual consequences of effectively eternal life are immense, too. If death isn't inevitable, might religion, so much of which is rooted in fear of death, disappear? And with it, could morals become redundant and what seemed to be the most joyous development in history end up leading us instead to a time of spiritual emptiness and misery?

It has happened before that a technologically brilliant civilization (the Romans) has seen its advances wasted (as Europe plunged into the Dark Ages). But such a descent is not inevitable. There's ample evidence that our knowledge of historical disasters will help us avoid such upsets again. And in 2001, there's so much else to be optimistic about.

Like the second significant development: With medicine and genetic engineering, we seem to have won sovereignty over evolution.

It's not just that we've stumbled onto the ability to blow our planet to smithereens and bring progress to a halt. We seem as a species oddly resistant to all-out self-destruction, with even the maddest regimes stopping short.

More interestingly, we can change human intelligence and talents as well as merely extending life span. We may even start re-creating creatures that evolution made obsolete. And that represents a final taming of nature far more intriguing than that represented by bombs and pollution.

A bad thing? It depends. Environmentalists don't like it. But for optimists like science fiction writer James Halperin, it's not at all ominous: "Nature is abominably cruel," he says. "What is so good about nature? ... I'm kind of sick of it now. It's outlived its usefulness."

The third stupendous leap forward, unimaginable just 100 years ago, is social. It's the transformation of the role of women and the almost universal belief in racial equality.

Fourth, in what may be the most awesome discovery ever made, we're on the point of solving the most perplexing problem of human existence and discovering what consciousness actually is. We may never quite manage to replicate the human mind in computers, but unraveling the mysteries of the mind will be an incredible breakthrough.

Alongside such awe-inspiring scientific advances, we've also learned to read the future (not guess it, like Nostradamus) more accurately than ever.

Not that good futurology is entirely new. In libraries you can find plenty of visionaries like Joseph Glanvill, chaplain to King Charles II, who in 1661 predicted such advances as air travel, spaceflight and hair restoration -- or economist John Maynard Keynes, who in 1900 made a fair stab at forecasting e-commerce. But today's most important futurology is the least glamorous. It concerns not robots or laptops with emotions, but global warming. It's a frightening reflection of how we have abused science to mistreat our planet. Yet, working out years ahead of time what will happen and trying to forestall it is an amazing first.

So, just as we should beware, as 2001 dawns, of thinking we're all that special just because we have the Internet, Prozac and equal opportunities -- we must think twice before assuming our Arrogance of the Present is misplaced just because it always has been in the past.

For there's every sign, unless I'm laboring under the oldest of illusions, that we 2001-model humans really are a bit special.

Jonathan Margolis is the author of the new book A Brief History of Tomorrow: The Future, Past and Present (Bloomsbury USA, $24.95).

Cover illustration by Heidi Merscher for USA WEEKEND; cover story illustration by Bryan Leister for USA WEEKEND