A Brief History of the Future: "Tomorrows" (Futurific Studios, Untold, DreamCrew, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on PBS last night (May 8) for two of their usual Wednesday night science documentaries, “Tomorrows” – the last episode in their six-part mini-series called A Brief History of the Future – and a NOVA show called “Why Bridges Collapse.” I couldn’t find this show listed under NOVA’s imdb.com page but fortunately there was a separate listing on its own. Though previous installments of A Brief History of the Future had featured some interesting interviewees, including French President François Macron (whom I’d already read another interview with in the current issue of the British magazine The Economist) and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, as the show progressed I got more irritated by it and I don’t think I missed much by skipping the previous episodes. My irritation started with the on-air host, “renowned futurist” Ari Wallach (that alone set my spider-sense off since it’s weird to hear someone described as a “renowned” anything when I’ve never heard of him before), who had the golly-gee-whillikers attitude of previous PBS science-show hosts, only he had it worse than most. It got even worse when Wallach proclaimed that the aim of the show was not to showcase utopian futures or dystopian ones, but what he called “protopian” ones in which we get together and work to build a positive future for ourselves and our planet even though we know in advance we won’t achieve perfection. There were some interesting guests on the program, but I think if my 70 years on this planet have taught me anything, it’s that the natural tendency of human “civilization” is to enrich the already rich even further while simultaneously driving everyone else to the bare minimum needed for their survival. Every technological advance in human history has been used in precisely this fashion, and while on occasion the have-nots have been able through activism and revolution to claw back at least some of the value their labor has produced, for the most part the principle that the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer has been a constant of human history. So it was hard for me to watch a show enthusiastically presenting some quite interesting people doing compelling things and not realize that in the end, all their efforts will be pressed into the service of the ultra-rich as they always have been throughout human history.

Among the more interesting people being interviewed were Sam Teicher, a drop-dead gorgeous young man who works for a company he co-founded called Coral Vita (the last name is pronounced “VEE-tuh,” not “VYE-tuh” as I’d have assumed) in Freeport, The Bahamas. He’s worked on a project to regrow coral reefs after ocean pollution has brought them to within an inch of their destruction. What a lot of people don’t realize is that coral itself is alive. It’s not just a passive substance that accumulates underwater to form reefs. It’s not only a life form but a life form whose continued well-being is crucial to much of the ocean’s ecosystem, including the livelihoods of millions of actual humans who depend for their livelihood on fish and other life forms that are nurtured and protected by the coral. Teicher and his colleagues are shown literally re-culturing the reefs by planting CD-sized discs containing coral they’ve hand-grown in their labs and hoping these will grow to replace and extend the original coral that’s been killed off by pollution. Of course for this to work, the pollution that killed off the coral in the first place will have to stop – and there are few, if any, signs that that is happening. Another person I found particularly interesting was Raya Bidshahri, a woman who runs a so-called “School for Humanity” in Dubai which is yet another attempt to reject the traditional top-down educational model conceived during the Industrial Revolution to train people destined to work in factories. Her basic goal was the same A. S. Neill articulated in the 1950’s when he founded the Summerhill school in Britain: allow students to pick their own courses of study and follow wherever their curiosity leads them.

If anything, modern-day models of education have become even more top-down and authoritarian than the ones Neill was rebelling against; it’s clear today’s ruling classes regard independent thought per se as a threat to their continued power and authority, and are reworking the educational system to suppress it as much as possible. The regime of standardized testing, in which entire schools are judged as “succeeding” or “failing” based on how well their students do on these tests, has only increased the authoritarian tendencies of top-down industrial-era schooling. In George Orwell’s 1984 (the book I would name as the biggest single influence on my own political thinking) he argued that scientific and technological advancement depends on allowing individual freedom of thought, and a highly regimented, stratified society would basically stop advancing technologically because it would deliberately and consciously stifle that kind of freedom of thought. The “Tomorrows” episode of A Brief History of the Future (one wonders if the overall series title was a reference to Stephen Hawking’s book on relativity, A Brief History of Time) also featured Jon Goldstein of the Environmental Defense Fund, who’s working on a project called “MethaneSat” to orbit a satellite that would monitor the world’s releases of methane gas (he stressed how unusual it is for a non-profit corporation to be launching a satellite and one wonders how they’re going to get it in space; I hope they’re not depending on one of Elon Musk’s terrible and unreliable rockets!). And they also featured a segment on a woman named Ella Finer, a trustee of an organization called “Longplayer” that has created a piece of music that will literally last 1,000 years (take that, Wagner, Satie and Scriabin!). It’s a series of Tibetan singing bowls installed inside an abandoned lighthouse where the passing winds will “play” the drum bowls. They installed this at the end of the 20th century (incidentally I was amused at a passage in Ari Wallach’s narration that referred to us as being at the outset of the 21st century; by my math, the 21st century is already almost one-quarter over!) and plan to keep it going until December 31, 2999.

I’d dearly like to share Ari Wallach’s optimism about the human future, but I daresay that given the way human politics are evolving (or devolving), including the near-certainty of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in this year’s election and his pledge to “drill, baby, drill” and reverse all President Biden’s attempts to encourage the transition to electric cars (as Trump told Time magazine interviewer Eric Cortellessa, he doesn’t like electric cars because “[t]hey don't go far. They have problems. They don't work in the cold. They don't work in the heat. There's a lot of problems”) and all other attempts to use government power to encourage a transition to renewable energy, there’s not likely to be a human future for more than 100 to 200 years. Though one of the most interesting segments in “Tomorrows” is about Angelica Kaspatza with ON, a corporation in Iceland that is using geothermal power to produce electricity, that’s something you can get away with in Iceland, which sits on one of the most seismically and volcanically active pieces of Earth. Today Iceland has become one of the few countries in the world that gets virtually all its electric power from renewables, including 60 percent from geothermal – but once again, they have the resources to do that. Iceland is to geothermal what Saudi Arabia is to petroleum, and though there was a brief discussion about the possibility of using old, no-longer-producing oil wells to create artificial geothermal power, that’s not likely to happen given that the leaders of the U.S. (once Trump gets back in) and other authoritarian countries like China, Russia, India, Turkey and Hungary are still jonesing on fossil fuels and either avoiding the renewable transition altogether or, like China, working to monopolize the technology so once Americans get through their thick little skulls that we’re going to have to transition to renewables, China will own all the technology we need to do so and will charge us through the nose for it.