Y2K 25th anniversary

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
New frontiers for Jeeves

By Blaine Harden

In the swelling ranks of the superwealthy, where the number of American families worth more than $10 million has jumped fourfold, to 275,000, over the last decade, demand for servants has risen to levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties, before household appliances brought factory-floor efficiency to the home.

The “essentials” for a well-staffed home now include a maid, a launderer, a chef, a chauffeur and nannies for each child. The most prized servant occupies a new category altogether, the household manager, who pays bills, returns gifts, oversees home repairs, researches appliance purchases, coordinates moves among various houses and manages other staff. In Manhattan, the minimum annual cost to staff a home this way is $500,000, according to Keith Greenhouse, president of the Pavillion Agency, which places domestic help.

And yet, to exploit the advances of the future, the rich are going to need still more categories of what they just can’t seem to get enough of: good help.

Even “smart” appliances in the most up-to-date Park Avenue penthouse will need to be told a few things. A computerized refrigerator capable of ordering groceries may not know, for instance, that the family it provisions is in Tuscany instead of consuming its daily ration of skim milk and bran on the terrace. Tomorrow’s Jeeves will not only have to know a family’s tastes and whereabouts but also have the technical skill to slap down an appliance that’s not with the program. A complete retinue might line up like this:

Techster
In a wired household, which could mean multiple homes in different countries all talking to one another over an intranet, life is all but unlivable without someone paid to wield a mighty mouse over it all.

For this servant, recruited from the likes of M.I.T. with a hefty options package, “downstairs” would bear a passing resemblance to an air-traffic control center. He or she would integrate a good English butler’s intuition and discretion with the household’s networked appliances, entertainment systems and security devices. The techster will not be expected to pitch in if a nanny gets sick, except to access www.marypoppins.com for a substitute.

Medster
With the resources to be very, very old and very healthy, the rich will need an in-house health care coordinator who can preside over the customization of medications, assist with reproduction and have an inside track on what clinical trials might merit judicious string-pulling. This domestic would also keep daily tabs on the bodily functions and medical data of the family, adjusting dosages, menus and workout programs with input from the nutritionist, chef, trainer and esthetician.

Monetician
It takes time and considerable concentration to dispose of serious money, either through consumption or by giving it away to worthy (and tax-deductible) causes. To spend just $1 million a year, for example, requires finding about $20,000 worth of services and stuff to buy every week. The monetician, a certified public accountant who ideally would have experience on Wall Street, in the nonprofit world and as a personal shopper, would coordinate with analysts, appraisers, decorators, stylists and charitable causes. The need will most likely be especially acute among the newly rich who are occasionally subject to sticker shock.

Ecotist
Multiple homes with great lawns, gardens, forests, oceanfronts and seagoing vessels demand ecosystems management. The ecotist would help the rich re-landscape their estates to match global-warming trends that might raise sea levels and shrink acreage.

In coordinating the work of the family’s landscape architects, gardeners and chauffeurs, the ecotist would use his expertise in environmental law to monitor the effect of the chemicals used in lawn, garden and boat care. He would check to make sure that household waste was disposed of in ways that do not invite federal prosecution. He would also coordinate exterior security systems with the techster, seeking a balance between the family’s need for privacy and the public-relations cost of inflicting serious bodily harm on lost hikers.

There is a silver lining in all this for the nonrich, especially if they have a knack for technology and a yearning to hang out in a very big house. Domestic service, at least at the high end, will most likely become more challenging, more lucrative and more secure. The mistress of the house, it seems likely, would be hesitant to fire a techster if she knows that he could program the refrigerator to seek revenge.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Biology –
On the playing field, the best is yet to come

By Frank Litsky

Ever since Greek sports statisticians employed the ancient equivalent of timing devices and tape measures more than two millenniums ago, people have been fascinated by what athletes can achieve and what they may do in the future.

Can someone hit more home runs in a season than Mark McGwire or pass for more yards than Dan Marino? Yes and yes, maybe not tomorrow, or next year, but sooner or later almost every record will fall. It’s just the nature of things, the improvement of the breed and much else.

When Brutus Hamilton was the track coach at the University of California at Berkeley in 1934, he made a list of “ultimates of human effort” for 27 track and field events – lofty goals that he thought athletes could eventually attain. He predicted that an athlete would run a mile in 4 minutes 1 second, high jump 6 feet 11 1/4 inches and put the shot 57 feet 1 inch.

Colleagues laughed. No one could ever do those things, they said. But they did. When he drew up new targets over the years, they were surpassed, too. If Brutus were alive today, he would be astonished that one man has run a mile in 3 minutes 43.13 seconds, one has high-jumped 8 feet 1/2 inch and one has put the shot 75 feet 10 1/4 inches.

The carnage in the record books will continue. With each generation, humans are generally taller, heavier and stronger. Diet is better. Sports medicine is smarter. Diet supplements help. Training is more scientific and more intense. Coaches understand the body better. More good athletes from remote nations enter sports that were not open to them.

But it’s not just better bodies; it’s technology, too. Better running tracks lead to faster times. Pole vaulters use stronger poles.

As someone who has covered athletics for more than half a century, I am looking for more marks to tumble. Some predictions:

BASEBALL: Sooner or later, Hank Aaron’s record of 755 lifetime home runs will fall. If any records are safe, they may be Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and Cy Young’s 511 pitching victories.

FOOTBALL: Someone will better Walter Payton’s 16,726 career rushing yards.

BASKETBALL: In this era of lower scoring, Wilt Chamberlain’s record of 100 points in one game (“One lucky night,” he said) could last.

HOCKEY: Some people say no one will break Gretzky’s records. Someone will.

WEIGHT LIFTING: The surest bet for wholesale records. Because drug use was rampant in recent years, officials have thrown out the whole record book by creating new weight classes, and that means all new records.

In the 1960s television program, Batman and Robin, chasing bad guys, ran a 3-minute mile. In a quarter-century, a man without Bat-speed may run a mile in 3 minutes 34 seconds; a woman may do it in 4 minutes 4 seconds. A quarter-century later, they will be even faster.

Where will it all end, or will it end? As Roger Bannister, who in 1954 ran history’s first mile in under four minutes, told me years ago: “I don’t know how fast someone will eventually run the mile, but there must be a limit. No one will do it in nothing flat.”

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Come out, come out, wherever you are –
Left the light on, but nobody came

By Malcolm W. Browne

In 1939, the physicist Enrico Fermi posed his famous paradox: If life is common in our galaxy, why have we never seen extraterrestrial visitors on Earth?

Since then, and particularly since 1960, scientists have searched the cosmic radio spectrum for signals of intelligence, landed robotic laboratories on Mars to look for hints of biological activity, probed meteorite fragments for chemical or geological evidence of life and tried to invent chemical pathways analogous to those from which life arises.

So far, all efforts have failed to show the existence of life anywhere except on Earth.

To find just one extraterrestrial microorganism (or better, a bug-eyed Martian humanoid) would be sensational. But I think the human race must reconcile itself to the strong possibility that it is alone in the galaxy – perhaps even in the universe. I would bet that the 21st century will pass without anyone finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life, intelligent or not.

There have been many false alarms in the past, like the discovery of “canals” on Mars, which proved to be illusions imagined by the American astronomer Percival Lowell. There will be many more. And many investigators will take comfort from the Copernican Principle, the assumption that no particular place or time is likely to be special and that inhabited planets like Earth must therefore be common.

But one of the faults of statistical estimates of extraterrestrial life is that it is impossible to extrapolate anything from a single data point. And that’s all we have: Earth.

The environmental conditions favoring the creation of life may not be nearly as common as was postulated in 1961 by Frank Drake, one of the main instigators of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Drake Equation, as it came to be known, incorporated estimates of the rate at which stars are born in the galaxy, the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of those planets on which life originates and so forth. By that calculation, there should be about 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy capable of interstellar communication.

But in the 39 years since radio telescopes began searching, nothing has turned up.

Certainly, sending signals across tens, hundreds or thousands of light years poses staggering difficulties. But a more fundamental reason for our failure to find extraterrestrial life could be that we are, indeed, alone.

Many astronomers have suggested that the conditions for life can exist only on a rocky planet with lots of liquid water and other possibly rare assets like a reliable sun producing steady radiation over a long period; a Jupiter-size planet in the outer solar system to sweep up asteroids and other objects that would otherwise continuously bombard an Earthlike planet; and an exceptionally large moon like ours, to cushion the disruptive gravitational influences of other planets. These and other conditions may be so unlikely as to rule out all life except that inhabiting a unique fluke – Earth.

We have already searched for signals from nearby stars like Alpha Centauri and found nothing.

Lots of reasons can be adduced to explain these failures, but the simplest explanation – and so the one favored by Occam’s razor – is that there is nothing out there to find. In any case, I’m not holding my breath.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
The human touch will only inflate college bills

By Edward Wyatt

When Mozart was alive, it took two to three months for a craftsman to make a watch and about 18 minutes for an ensemble to perform “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Today, it takes two minutes for a machine to make a watch. But a performance of Mozart’s familiar composition still takes musicians more than a quarter-hour.

That illustration, says William Baumol, an economist at New York University, explains why the cost of college tuition will most likely outpace inflation well into the new century, and perhaps forever.

While gains in productivity have made many goods less expensive, products and services that rely heavily on human labor – like education, health care and symphonic performance – are rising in cost. People are demanding ever-higher pay, and no one has figured out a way to cut months or years from a course of college study.

Even so, for all the complaints about tuition bills, the percentage of income used by affluent Americans to pay for a private, four-year college education has barely increased. That is because the top 20 percent of the nation’s households, in terms of income, have gotten richer over the last quarter-century. According to the College Board, for families making an average of $149,000, the college bill amounts to about 14 percent of their annual income, up from 12 percent. However, for the 20 percent of households with the lowest incomes – an average of $13,000 annually – the costs of private schooling have doubled, to 162 percent of income from 84 percent 25 years ago.

Of course, few students at private colleges actually pay the posted tuition price, depending instead on various forms of financial aid. David Breneman, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, attributes that fact to an oversupply of spaces at private colleges. The excess supply, however, may dry up over the next 20 years as the college-age population rises by 22 percent, far faster than the overall population.

Technology may help keep costs in check, as lectures broadcast over the Internet force colleges to trim overhead and compete on price.

But Thomas Kane, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, says the earnings gap between high school and college graduates will keep enrollments high; prices will thus continue to rise.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Technology –
Praying for a century that is not the American one

By John F. Burns

For some in the ancient world, where civilizations crumbled into dust 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus, the arrival of a new millennium doesn’t captivate the imagination quite as it does elsewhere. Instead of seeing the last 2,000 years as a ladder for mankind’s ascent, they view much of the last two millenniums, and especially the 20th century, as a chronicle of moral decay.

This view finds a natural home among conservative followers of Islam. In the face of a growing challenge from movements that offer a more tolerant vision of Islam, hard-liners remain implacably opposed to accommodation with “Western values” in matters of morality, social customs and criminal justice. For the 21st century, some would turn back the clock to the eye-for-an-eye, do-as-the-prophet-said values of Islam’s origins in the seventh century A.D.

Among those who hold such views in Iran, few are more fervent than Gholam-Reza Hassani, a high-ranking cleric who is wedded to the social and political precepts that have been imposed on Iranians since the Islamic revolution in 1979. Like many of Iran’s mullahs, Mr. Hassani sees the 20th century – “the American century,” as he refers to it, with heavy sarcasm – as a tale of decadence as much as of technological advance.

After years as a political prisoner under the shah, Mr. Hassani became an acolyte of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s absolute ruler for 10 years until his death in 1989. In 1983, at the height of anti-leftist purges, Mr. Hassani led Islamic guards to the hiding place of his eldest son, Rashid, a 25-year-old Marxist, and assented eagerly as a firing squad executed him. It was an event, he says, that proved his loyalty to Islam.

The execution tied the mullah, at least in his own mind, to the beginning of biblical time, when God challenged Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. “Abraham didn’t sacrifice his son, but I did,” Mr. Hassani said with a quick chuckle. “Even today, I don’t regret it.” And what of the reaction of Rashid’s mother, one of two living wives who have borne the cleric five sons and seven daughters? “I really don’t know,” he said. “If she has any thoughts about it, she has kept them to herself, and I haven’t asked.”

If this seems unbearably harsh in Western terms, it is at least consistent with the view of the world that the 72-year-old cleric put forth during a three-hour conversation at his villa in Urmia, where the signature artwork is a machine gun suspended above his desk. He spoke with deep hostility for the United States, a country he said he respected for its technology but despised for its materialist culture, its “godlessness” and its pervasive “evil” influence.

In the 21st century, Mr. Hassani said, the United States will find the tide running against it. “The Koran says all injustice will vanish from the earth,” he said. “And so it will be for America, because it is a country that has lost its soul. Its power will disappear, as the power of all oppressors has before it. Look at the Egyptian pharaohs. They were once as powerful as America is today, but where are they today?”

Ask almost any Iranian who is the most conservative voice of Islam in the country, and they identify Mr. Hassani, the top cleric in this city on the ancient Silk Road to China that nestles in the hills of northwestern Iran. Each Friday, the Muslim holy day, he thunders from his pulpit in the Masjid-e-Jame mosque against everything he views as threatening to Islam and its rule in Iran.

But in a broader sense, Hojatolislam Hassani – the title places him in the second rank of mullahs, below an ayatollah – stands for something that extends beyond Iran and the Islamic world: a deep-rooted anxiety about the pace of change that causes many people, especially in poorer countries, to take refuge in the certainties of ancient beliefs, and in a prideful reassertion of national identity and culture. In this, there is often deep resentment toward richer nations, and a fear that the future they have charted is one in which poorer nations and peoples will be even less able to compete.

Like many others who blame the United States for the world’s ills, Mr. Hassani likes to emphasize his familiarity with American ingenuity. He owned a computer until recently, he said, but sold it because it “needed upgrading.” With pride, he noted that he uses a mobile telephone. In this, at least, he distanced himself from the Taliban, Afghanistan’s Islamic rulers, who have set vigilantes prowling for television sets, video recorders, radios, even hair dryers, then summoned crowds to watch these ‘‘satanic instruments’’ being hanged from trees.

Told of this, Mr. Hassani was incredulous. “You mean they actually hang television sets?” he said. “That is wrong; they should not refuse to learn what is going on in the world, good or bad. That is pure stupidity.”

The core of the problem in the modern world, in Mr. Hassani’s view, is that spiritual development has receded as technological progress has advanced. “Do you want to know why we shout ‘Death to America!’?” he said. “It is because America has not heeded our prophet’s teachings. It has not matched its advances in science and technology with growth in moral and spiritual terms. Of course, there are decent people in America, many of them, but there is no vice that is not among them.”

The issue that seemed to obsess Mr. Hassani above all others was sex. “Look at Clinton!” he said, referring to the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “Even he has said he is not a clean man.” Then he offered his remedy: the adoption of strict Islamic codes for adultery. For a wife who commits adultery and has no mitigating circumstances to plead – like a husband who travels frequently, or is “handicapped” or a drunkard – the proper punishment, he said, is stoning to death, a punishment still inflicted in rural parts of Iran.

As his unconcern about his wife’s grief over their son’s execution suggested, women, in Mr. Hassani’s world, cannot hope for equal rights with men. At no point in his discussion of sexual misdemeanors, for example, did he even mention that men are equally liable for punishment under Islamic adultery codes, nor that they face stoning, when it occurs, alongside the women judged with them – the difference being that the women are usually buried to their shoulders before rocks are thrown, the men left standing, their full bodies exposed.

But if the cleric’s prescriptions for the next millennium had an unrelenting grimness about them, it took only the few minutes on the streets outside his home to be reminded that even in Iran, men like Mr. Hassani face an uphill battle. The rush of modernity is visible on every side in Urmia, with Internet cafes and travel agencies offering cheap excursion fares to the United States.

Iran, which gave the world its first Islamic revolution of the modern era, has also engendered the most powerful democratic movement in the Islamic world, led by men who have rejected ancient Islamic verities for the teachings of Locke, Jefferson and Rousseau. Judging by recent elections in which Iran’s 65 million people have given that movement landslide victories, the tide at the dawn of the 21st century, in Iran at least, seems to be running strongly away from Mr. Hassani and toward the more open and tolerant future he abhors.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Biology –
A genetic future both tantalizing and disturbing: Will longer lives be different lives? and better ones?

By Pam Belluck

It was an exciting day in the life of a 2-month-old – or at least it was exciting for her mother.

We were at the pediatrician’s for my daughter Arielle’s two-month checkup, and the doctor was going over developmental milestones. Is she smiling? (Especially in the morning.) Cooing? (Like crazy.) Holding her head up? (More each day.)

She’s not likely to be rolling over yet, the doctor said. But after he left the room, Arielle rolled over right there on the examination table.

I had an attack of new mother’s hubris. Not only had Arielle demonstrated what I decided was precocious athletic ability, but her height measured 25 inches – off the charts for a 2-month-old, the doctor said. Maybe I should give the Women’s National Basketball Association a heads up.

Then again, what’s the rush? Science could make it possible for Arielle’s generation to live 120, 150, even 200 years. Born on the cusp of the millennium, on 9-9-99, my daughter could not only live through the 21st century but also see the 22nd.

Cuddling my wriggling, cooing baby, I wonder how this will affect her life and the world in which she will be living.

What if people can take a pill or alter their genes so that they can look and feel 60 at age 110? Will my daughter be going to college and “finding herself” at 35? Having children in her 50’s? Six entirely separate careers? Four husbands? A weekly racquetball game at 112? Think of the extraordinary opportunity to do more and see more.

It’s not so far-fetched, the experts say.

Scientists have used genetic alterations to create worms and fruit flies that live twice as long as normal – and do not deteriorate with old age. They have discovered gene mutations that extend the life span of mice. They have found that restricting food calories of rats allows them to live longer. And they are making progress toward medical advances that may successfully treat cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease.

All this is going to come together in the 21st century, said Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research. “Your daughter has a very strong chance of living in three centuries,” he said.

I have realized how time races by with a baby. Seeing her grow and change each day is indescribably exciting. But it is also poignant because as she ages, it is as though some of her infinite possibilities are slipping away. As I play piano for her, talk to her in French and Chinese, take her for walks, there is a desire to make every day count for her. I wonder if that feeling would seem less intense if parents knew that their children had decades longer to live.

There is a theory that life gains its value from knowing that we have a limited time on earth. What happens to our notion of what it means to be human, which is so bound up with the idea that we grow steadily older and frailer and then die? Many scientists think the genetic and medical steps needed to extend life will essentially work by halting much of the deterioration that comes with aging; if so, people will be healthy for most of their old age.

“It could separate us from our history,” said Dr. Gregory Stock, director of the program on medicine, technology and society at the medical school of the University of California at Los Angeles, who organized a conference on increased life span last March. “There’s all this thinking in religion and other disciplines, there’s been a discussion and a learning process of what human life is about, how we deal with mortality. That all changes when you talk about extending human life span.”

The extra years could alter every phase of life, from childhood to grandparenthood and beyond. Dr. Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, wonders about family relationships. “Will marriages survive 80 years?” he asked. “Will we invent other forms of relationships to supplement marriage? Forms of friendship?”

More people would probably end up having several families, said Dr. Richard Suzman, associate director for behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. “There would be a higher proportion of stepchildren, who historically have had somewhat weaker family bonds,” Dr. Suzman said, “and they would have multiple obligations and maybe more geographic distance from parts of their family.”

Dr. Murray noted that in my grandparents’ time people often spent nearly a third of their lives living with their parents. Today, we might live less than a quarter of our lives with our parents. And my daughter might spend only a sixth of her life with my husband and me. Will her generation be more distant from their parents? Or will it be closer, because we have a good chance of being healthy long enough to see our children become old themselves?

We just held a naming ceremony for Arielle, a Jewish ritual in which we celebrate the people after whom she is named – my mother’s parents, who died in 1982 and 1983. We culled stories about my grandparents from memories, and from a meandering audio tape of my grandmother and a scratchy videotape of my grandfather. There was, for example, the tale about how they met at a dance in the 1920s, and how, to induce him to call her, she dropped her handkerchief in his car. Imagine if they could be here to tell their story themselves.

What kind of career advice should I give my daughter? Will everyone be expected to have five master’s degrees? Will young people find the choicest jobs taken by 80-year-olds? Or will my daughter’s generation make radical career shifts and take long sabbaticals – say, a decade off to hike the Himalayas?

And what will society be like?

Dr. Stock said that early methods of extending life would be expensive, meaning some could not afford to live longer. That could engender an unprecedented kind of class warfare – and even starker separation between richer and poorer nations.

“Our mortality is basically an anchor that keeps us all moored in the same harbor,” he said. “If you start differentially allowing people, through expensive treatments, various ways to cheat death, that inevitably causes an enormous question. If only the wealthy can afford it, how do you deal with the distribution of it? I think there would be enormous pressure in liberal democracies to route public funds to pay for it.”

There might be other kinds of societal divisions. How will public money – Social Security and Medicare, for example – be spent, and will that spending breed resentment among the young? The pattern of inheritance will be disrupted, Dr. Suzman said, and people may not have adequate savings for a longer life.

Some foresee culture clashes, saying that the many elderly people might want to preserve the world as they know it. “An increasingly bitter conflict could arise,” Dr. Stock said. “Often changes don’t really occur until the previous generation dies out, so you can see all sorts of deep divisions that normally work themselves out over time not working themselves out.”

There is no telling what else could happen. After all, in the 20th century, life expectancy increased 30 years with improvements in public health and sanitation. That probably helped galvanize such social groundswells as the women’s movement because women lived so much longer after rearing children.

If people, by seeing it firsthand, had a better sense of history, would there be fewer wars? And think of the energy and creativity that could come from a world in which people had more vital years to contribute.

“You’ll be able to take more chances,” Dr. Stock said.

He then left me with a challenge of sorts: “Growing up with all those things, your daughter will deal with it just fine. The real question is, how will you deal with it?”

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Power –
As the ‘American Century’ extends its run…

By R. W. Apple Jr.

It was Henry Luce, as every red-blooded Yankee knows, who christened the 20th the American Century. He proved to be right, but that was not necessarily obvious throughout the 100 years.

At the start, the United States largely absented itself from the world stage. The collapse of world capitalism, a system then as now closely identified with the United States, raised grave doubts in the 1930s, and the rise of Japan undermined American economic confidence for anxious moments in the 1980s.

In the geopolitical sphere, the outcomes of the great struggles against fascism and communism did not seem nearly as inevitable before the fact as they seem now.

Those ups and downs are worth remembering as we sit on the cusp of the 21st century, having just crossed President Clinton’s bridge from the old millennium to the new. Today, America bestrides the world. In strategic terms, it is the only superpower. Its economy is the most powerful. Its language, its popular culture (from jeans to burgers to films) and its preferred model of free-market democracy make new converts daily.

We have come to see this as the culmination of a naturally occurring process, not unlike the Marxists who saw the rise of communism as the preordained consequence of a scientific process. We, or most of us, expect United States dominance to continue for the foreseeable future. We expect several more American Decades, if not an American Century, version 2.0.

“Our technological leadership and the size of our economy give us every chance to maintain our position,” said Lloyd Cutler, Washington wise man, superlawyer and adviser to Democratic presidents. “We are the only country in the world that can settle its debts in its own currency. When times are tense and money seeks a safe harbor, it comes to America.”

The American capacity for continual self-renewal – as contrasted, for example, with Japan’s rigidity – bodes well for the future. It is related, many believe, to the nation’s openness to immigration, and to the physical and social mobility, as contrasted with much of Europe, that encourages entrepreneurship and makes bootstrap success an everyday phenomenon.

But much, as always, depends upon the quality of leadership.

“The greatest threat to our world role is us,” said David Abshire, a veteran of Republican administrations who runs the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Our political system has clearly gone wrong. With continued dominance by money and single-issue lobbies, will we be able to attract talented people to public office? Will we hit a period like the one after Lincoln’s assassination and have a series of second-rate presidents?”

Critics of the United States, like John Gray, the English scholar, already see signs of frailty, such as the fraying of family life and the resort to “mass incarceration” as a means of controlling crime. It remains to be seen, others suggest, whether Americans can retain a sense of social cohesion as the economy becomes ever more driven by technology, threatening to divide the haves ever more sharply from the have-nots just as major states like California and Texas head toward white-minority status.

In terms of its relationship with other countries, the United States may be more secure than any nation in history, largely because of geography, the nuclear deterrent and the relative weakness of potential adversaries. China has not even begun to resolve the contradictions between its economic and political systems. Russia is a mess. A unified, coherent Europe remains a dream, and even if it comes closer to reality, it is not likely to confront the United States. Try to beat Boeing with Airbuses, certainly; build a unified defense force, perhaps. But turn sharply away from shared values? Not likely.

That is not to say, however, that United States power will continue unchallenged, particularly if Washington, with its heavy hand, tries to assert or expand American hegemony – if it gives in to the inevitable temptation of the big guy to play the bully. The refusal until recently of the United States to pay its United Nations dues; American insistence that its troops will never serve under a foreign commander; and American second thoughts about a ballistic missile defense system and the nuclear test ban treaty – all of these developments and more have begun to produce European calls for action to rein in the United States.

The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, said recently, “We cannot accept either a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper-power.” The Germans and Russians have made similar criticisms of the United States lately.

“The more the United States tries to run the world, the more the United States will alienate its friends and unite its rivals,” Samuel Huntington of Harvard University wrote in the quarterly Foreign Affairs. “The world’s only superpower is automatically a threat to other major powers.”

Richard N. Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, argues that an erosion in American power is inevitable. Any attempt to dominate, he said, inevitably “would lack domestic support and stimulate international resistance, which in turn would make the costs of hegemony all the greater and its benefits all the smaller.”

But what, as a practical matter, could other nations do about it? Form alliances, for one thing, and that is what many scholars expect to happen in the decades to come.

Ronald Steel of the University of Southern California expects to see a multipolar world, with the United States, “probably the European Union and maybe some sort of Asian combination, like Japan and China,” competing on the world stage. The challenge for American policy, of course, will be to see that the competition is not destructive.

But there is a larger challenge. Achieving a balance of power among groups of states, like that which prevailed in the 19th century, will not be enough in the 21st. Power is more diffuse, wielded not only by nations but by terrorists like Osama bin Laden; supranational bodies like the World Trade Organization, which excited such animosity during the trade talks in Seattle; the worldwide stock and bond markets and the global mass media.

A commission headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman has been studying the possibilities of trouble caused by failures of leadership, terrorist attacks or assaults against what they called “an increasingly integrated and complex but highly vulnerable international economic system.” In a first report issued in September, the commission concluded: “For many years to come Americans will become increasingly less secure, and much less secure than they now believe themselves to be.”

The same thing said 100 years ago, whether by Americans or the Britons who then ruled the waves, might have evoked laughter. But then who could have predicted the calamity of 1914 and the vast consequences that flowed from it?

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Identity –
A direct line to God in an impersonal era

By Laurie Goodstein

The Pentecostal movement was born in Los Angeles in 1906 on forlorn Azusa Street, inside an abandoned church previously used as a stable and still reeking of horses. Led by a half-blind black preacher from Louisiana named William J. Seymour, a band of whites, blacks and Hispanics defied the strictures of segregated worship, gathered together and prayed for a sign from the Holy Spirit.

Their prayers were answered in ways that few could have imagined when they began babbling in strange tongues, falling in faints, weeping and embracing. Word spread that the Holy Spirit had visited Azusa Street, and people flocked there, some to mock, some to succumb to the preaching and dancing, saxophones and tambourines, and to exclaim that they had experienced miraculous healings of body and soul.

In the 94 years since, Pentecostal worship has caught on among almost half a billion people, nearly 1 in 4 Christians worldwide. This momentum is likely to continue in the next century because it turns out that Pentecostalism is a form of religion made for the world the way it is today: a world on the move, of immigrants and refugees, of people adrift and yearning for a bit of respect and a sign of hope from God.

“The main attraction,” said Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School who has studied worldwide Pentecostalism, “seems to be that it holds out the possibility of a very direct experience of the holy, the sacred and the transcendent.” To Professor Cox, it is “Everyman’s mysticism.”

Estimates are that more than 200 million people belong to Pentecostal denominations and that more than 300 million others can be classified as “charismatics” and “third wavers” – people who stay in mainstream Protestant or Catholic churches that have adopted Pentecostal practices like healings, speaking in tongues, casting out demons and laying on of hands upon the sick. Pentecostalism is most potent in the developing world and in places where only a century ago Christianity was regarded as a foreign intruder: in Africa and in Asia, especially South Korea and China. In other parts of the world it is encroaching on the dominant Christian traditions. In Latin and Central America, Pentecostalists are winning millions of converts from Roman Catholicism, and in Russia and other former communist countries, Pentecostalists are challenging the monopoly of Orthodox Christianity.

The movement has spread fastest among displaced people and immigrants. In cities like Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi, disoriented immigrants from the countryside find that Pentecostal congregations offer a social network and connections to jobs and housing. In the United States, it is growing fastest among newcomers from Central and South America. “In many countries, rapid changes brought about by urbanization and technology have shaken people loose of their traditional religious moorings,” Professor Cox said. “And this is a highly available, very portable religion which is uncannily suited to urban life and appeals to people who are cut off from their previous religious expressions.”

Tessie DeVore, the editor of Vida Cristiana, a Pentecostal magazine for Spanish speakers, discovered Pentecostalism after moving from Puerto Rico, where she was brought up a Roman Catholic, to attend college in Alabama. While there, she learned that her mother had cancer, and she says that the only person who really offered her comfort was the wife of one of her professors, who prayed with her and invited her to a Bible study and then to a Pentecostal church. Mrs. DeVore says she soon found herself at a service speaking in tongues.

“It felt natural, like it was something I should have been doing all the time, like walking,” she said. “I said, ‘O.K., God, if this is you, I want it all. I may not understand all of it, but I trust you.’”

Every church member is expected to be an active missionary, and this helps Pentecostalism grow. Like the professor’s wife who reached out to Mrs. DeVore, members and new converts introduce friends and neighbors to the church. Pentecostalism thrives on ministry by lay people and is not dependent on clergy to spread the gospel.

Back on Azusa Street 94 years ago, William Seymour envisioned a multiracial church that would eventually unite all of Christianity. Instead, the movement splintered into myriad denominations, like the white Assemblies of God and the black Church of God in Christ.

But that splintering held a key to Pentecostalism’s staying power: there is no single denomination or creed, no Pentecostal pope. Pentecostalism has thrived because it is decentralized and easily blends with the religious practices of its host cultures. Pentecostal churches in South Korea incorporate shamanism; in Guatemala, Indian healing rituals; and in Africa, ancestor worship – provoking debate in the movement about how malleable a church should be.

This is, in part, why Pentecostalists are of many denominations and why some identify with none at all. They worship in tiny storefront churches, in homes and in megachurches. The largest church in the world is Pentecostal – the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, which holds six Sunday services to accommodate its 730,000 members in a chapel the size of Fenway Park.

But ask Pentecostalists about the pull of their faith and their churches, and they talk most about hope. The growth of the movement itself is to them proof that the world is in the midst of a religious revival, a fulfillment of God’s promise.

“God is really stepping up the spiritual heat all around the globe,” Mrs. DeVore said recently during a break in a multiracial crusade led by an Argentine preacher and attended by thousands in Winter Park, Fla. “We are right around the corner from one of the greatest revivals the world has ever seen.”

Stephen E. Strang, founder of Strang Communications, a family of Pentecostal publications, said, “At the beginning of this century you had zero Pentecostals in the world, and today you have who knows how many hundreds of millions.

“I’m a Christian and I believe in the Holy Spirit,” he said. “And I believe this is a fulfillment of prophecy.”

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Biology –
Science invades the pantry

By Barnaby J. Feder

So far, most of the inventions of agricultural biotechnology have been new weapons for farmers in their fight against insects and weeds. A few make processes like making cheese more efficient. One big seller, a cow hormone produced in genetically altered bacteria, increases milk production.

But many consumers think that there may be unacceptable health and environmental risks in biotechnology. The food industry is under pressure to show that it can produce not just more food, but also food so obviously improved that the benefits to consumers clearly outweigh any risks.

Researchers say an impressive array of such products will become available in just a few years. Some will be the result of the kind of biotechnology that makes consumers most nervous – namely, moving genes between organisms that would never mate naturally. Others will be created through traditional breeding and food production.

Rice

THE ALTERATION: Enriched with beta carotene, which the body converts into vitamin A.

HOW IT’S DONE: Three genes – two from the daffodil and one from a bacterium – are inserted into the rice.

THE BENEFITS: Would reduce the one million deaths of children and millions of cases of blindness that are attributed to vitamin A deficiency in developing countries each year.

WHEN AVAILABLE: In 2003, to farmers.

THE RESEARCHERS: The Institute of Plant Sciences in Zurich and the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, the Philippines, which will coordinate breeding and distribution.

Milk

THE ALTERATION: Elimination of the most common allergen.

HOW IT’S DONE: Exposure to an enzyme during processing breaks down beta lactoglobulin, the allergenic protein that occurs naturally in milk.

THE BENEFITS: Would help the 1 in 20 children with this allergy avoid vomiting and diarrhea; would reduce the risk of occasional deaths from the allergy.

WHEN AVAILABLE: In 2005, to consumers.

THE RESEARCHERS: Basic research led by Bob B. Buchanan at the University of California at Berkeley.

Produce

THE ALTERATION: Adding vaccines for diseases like hepatitis B.

HOW IT’S DONE: Viral genes are inserted into the seeds.

THE BENEFITS: Would replace injections with a cheaper, more convenient means of distributing vaccines.

WHEN AVAILABLE: In 2005, probably first in powdered potatoes and tomatoes.

THE RESEARCHERS: Initial research by Charles J. Arntzen and Hugh Mason of Cornell University’s Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research Inc.

Eggs

THE ALTERATION: Enriched with appetite-reducing antibodies.

HOW IT’S DONE: Hens are immunized to stimulate the production of antibodies that activate peptides in the human digestive system associated with feeling full.

THE BENEFITS: Healthier, cheaper weight-reduction regimens.

WHEN AVAILABLE: In 2005, to consumers

THE RESEARCHER: Initial research by Mark E. Cook at the University of Wisconsin.

Corn

THE ALTERATION: Conversion to polyester.

HOW IT’S DONE: Bacterial genes are inserted into yeast so that the end product in the fermentation of corn sugar is trimethylene glycol, a building block of high-performance polyesters

THE BENEFITS: A biodegradable, easily recyclable polyester that is too expensive to make with current technology.

WHEN AVAILABLE: In 2004, for use in upholstery, carpeting and clothing.

THE RESEARCHERS: Scientists at the DuPont Company.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Power –
On empty battlefields, the shadows of cyberwarriors

By Steven Lee Myers

As commandant of the Army War College, Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr. regularly leads students, politicians, foreign officers and other visitors on tours through the landmarks of the battlefield here: Devil’s Den, Little Round Top, Cemetery Ridge. Though the Battle of Gettysburg was fought 136 years ago, General Scales thinks it still offers lessons on the art of war. At the same time, it is getting harder and harder to see them.

Technology has depersonalized modern warfare, making the brutality and concentrated carnage of Gettysburg – where 51,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or left missing in action in just three days of head-to-head fighting – almost unthinkable. Paradoxically, that same technology has made killing easier than ever.

Now, the very idea of war, and those who fight it, is being transformed at a pace unfathomable even a few years ago. “You’re trying to conjure up a kind of war we have never fought before,” said General Scales, who is widely viewed as one of the Army’s leading visionaries.

With laser-guided missiles and long-range weapons allowing battles to be fought at greater distances with greater firepower, the likelihood of vast armies arrayed against each other has essentially vanished. Most military strategists think that the Persian Gulf war – in which the United States assembled a coalition of 500,000 troops to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 – was a last gasp of the old way, despite all the high-technology weaponry that the war introduced to the world. In the last 18 months, the Clinton administration has struck Sudan and Afghanistan, launched raids against Iraq and, with NATO, waged war over Kosovo, all without putting a single American soldier on the ground.

The military lessons of Gettysburg – protecting your flank, holding the high ground – will be irrelevant in a future in which front lines no longer exist. With satellites providing instantaneous information and bombs and missiles able to strike from afar, massing troops or seizing high ground simply makes a riper target for jets flying thousands of feet overhead.

This is more than the triumph of air power. New technologies are transforming the battlefield of the future on the ground, too. The Marine Corps is already testing small, insect-like robots that can act as sensors on the battlefield, probing deep into the enemy’s territory without the risks that reconnaissance squads face. Over the next couple of decades, the Army plans to create “digitized” units tied into a global communications network using satellites, unmanned drones and sensors on the ground.

Imagine front-line troops able to send and receive orders, target coordinates and intelligence reports through eyepieces and microcomputers built into their belts or buttons. “If you think of the soldier on the battlefield as a pawn, we can make them all knights,” said Ellison C. Urban, deputy director of the Army office trying to develop these microsystems.

It took 90,000 Union troops to defend the few square miles around Gettysburg. Today, the Army could hold them with 700 to 800 soldiers, maybe even 100. Some analysts envision in the future an “empty battlefield,” where armies wrestle for control of territory without ever seeing the enemy.

With its vast superiority in weapons, the United States may not be fighting armies at all, but thugs, terrorists and mobs in limited conflicts or “operations other than war” like peacekeeping and drug interdiction.

Charles C. Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, says this will blur not only the front lines but also the divisions between society and its military. The American military will rely more heavily on civilian contractors while facing social pressures to integrate women and gay men and lesbians. He calls it the Postmodern Military.

Soldiers will need technical prowess more than raw physical strength. They will be older, more mature, infinitely better trained. “The days of the 18-year-old infantryman are over,” General Scales said.

Instead, soldiers will be a professional cadre – and an ever-smaller minority in a military dominated by people sitting in front of computer screens.

Some see danger in this. “It has always been seen that the professional military class is antithetical to a free society,” said John Hillen, a former Army tank commander who is now a military affairs analyst.

Taken to an extreme, the trends in technology raise the question of whether the military will need boot-on-the-ground combat troops at all. Is it possible to defend the nation’s security without ever having to ask its young people to die for the cause?

For politicians, the idea will be enticing, but most military analysts warn against an overreliance on technology. For General Scales, this may be the lasting lesson of Gettysburg: wars are still fought and won by individuals, acting with courage, leadership and initiative. Huva Wass de Czege, a retired brigadier general, put it another way. War, he said, is a moral question, forcing a country to decide whether it is prepared to sacrifice its people for its interests. “If it’s just a machine against a machine,” he said, “what’s the point?”

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
Audis and cell phones, poverty and fear

By Roger Cohen

Luciana Maria Dos Santos lives on the south side of the world’s third-largest city in Favela 19, or Slum 19, a collection of shacks traversed by a stream that doubles as the sewage system. Her waterfront property consists of a shanty with a corrugated-iron roof; rats are not infrequent visitors. Despite the limited space, she has managed to squeeze in 2,638 discarded cans.

At night Ms. Dos Santos, 19, heads out past the glittering high-rises, the sleeping bodies under bridges, the buildings that surge and subside with a giddy symmetry in this city that is now a 3,100-square-mile ocean of concrete. Her destination is the clubs whose environs offer lucrative garbage. Over 10 days, she collects more than 2,000 beverage cans; they will earn her $30 from a scrap dealer. “It’s not pleasant work,” she says. “But the alternative is crime or crack.”

That alternative is increasingly compelling in Sao Paulo, the fastest-growing metropolis of the 20th century, vortex of the urban problems of the 21st. Drugs and murder are on the rise as a new millennium dawns. The number of murders in the greater Sao Paulo area reached 8,312 in 1998, compared with 628 in New York City.

The violence has some of its roots in the same despair that pushes Ms. Dos Santos to her recycling. What the rich discard the growing number of poor gather. Such adaptability is not new; it is merely more desperate. Brazil’s economic capital has always been ready to recycle itself – from the quaint coffee-trading center of 1900 with a population of 240,000 to the megalopolis of 17 million inhabitants today.

This explosion was part of the migration from rural areas throughout Latin America. About 33 percent of the continent’s people lived in cities in 1940, and more than 72 percent do today. United Nations studies suggest that for the first time more than half of humanity will live in urban areas by the first years of the 21st century.

They will not be residing on the Champs-Elysees. By 2025, about 4.4 billion of those people, or 80 percent of the world’s urban population, are expected to live in the megacities of developing countries like Brazil and India. Just how livable those billions of existences will be is the question pressingly posed by Sao Paulo today.

Insecurity of a new kind is rampant. It is whispered in the anxious expressions of executives and visible in the barbed-wire fences around some of their homes. What has caused this unease? The world today has been described as post-communist, postmodern, post-just-about-everything. But if we seem to know where we came from, we are by no means so sure of where we are. Radical transition is clear enough: but to what? The sustained impact over a full decade of the new global economy in a city like Sao Paulo seems to offer some troubling clues.

An immigrant city like New York, Sao Paulo has always been a freewheeling place of outrageous contrasts. Wealth has co-existed with abject poverty. Still, today’s electronic economy has placed Sao Paulo’s social fabric under a new strain. “For the first time, large swaths of society seem as disposable as paper napkins,” said Leda Aschermann, a social worker. “They have no further use.”

The city, third in size behind Tokyo and Mexico City, is lurching into a new century marked by a combustible juxtaposition: a marginalized majority beside a networked minority with access to a hypermobile virtual universe generating great riches. The static majority is marooned in a physical world where the unemployment rate has more than doubled, to 19 percent, since 1990. This seems to be one paradigm of modern society, or at least the developing areas where most of humanity lives: a city splinters into several cities and its fabric, woven from shared experience, is cut. Vastly different amounts of money were always made, but at least the money was made on the same streets. No longer.

An advertising campaign for imported Audis says the cars “go as fast as e-mail.” For millions of this city’s inhabitants, this is a foreign language. The Internet and German cars are apparitions of another world. And it is in this gulf where danger resides. Put simply, the disconnected could overwhelm the connected, the suffering territorialists could crush the dot-com globalists. “I see the possibility of a terrible mess here,” said Norman Gall, a sociologist.

Today, creative energy and destructive violence seem about evenly balanced. Sao Paulo’s restlessness produced the city’s maxim, Sao Paulo nao para – Sao Paulo never stops. The Avenida Paulista, heart of the city, remains a street that concentrates more purposefulness than any other in Latin America. People here are not out for a stroll; they are going places. The two best hospitals in town are the Einstein and the Sirio-Libanes: Jews and Arabs do fine together here, as do the Japanese, Italians, Germans and others who created the city’s thrilling kaleidoscope.

Part of that thrill comes from the money and ideas generated here. Lagos, Nigeria, is full of disorder. So is seething Calcutta. But Sao Paulo, unlike these cities, is not merely huge. It is a global city, plugged into the transnational networks where power increasingly lies as the century begins.

Any large corporation with an interest in Latin America has to be here, because the economy of Sao Paulo state is bigger than that of Argentina and because this city has the critical mass of bankers, lawyers, accountants and others capable of managing data moving across borders. Call them the heedless modern saboteurs of the nation-state. Their meetings are necessary for the information economy, which is one reason why the lure of big cities seems likely to persist despite the opportunities for decentralization offered by the Internet.

Sao Paulo is not New York or London or Tokyo; but it is in the tier of about 30 world cities just below, places that will be at the nexus of the world’s affairs into the 21st century. So it is natural that the city have what Saskia Sassen of the University of Chicago calls an urban glamour zone. Indeed, it has several. These zones are familiar because they are interchangeable across the world. The fragrant malls, the Armani emporiums, the world-class restaurants, the Range Rover dealerships. The temples of a globalized mankind that lunches on sushi and dines on cassoulet.

Such palaces of consumption are packed with cell-phone-clutching Paulistas spending to the hectic rhythm of Internet time. This new elite is relatively large, certainly much larger than the coterie of coffee barons who ran the city a century ago. Perhaps 20 percent of the population has seldom, if ever, had it so good.

“The global tide certainly raises all yachts,” Ms. Sassen said. “You now have an immodest middle class of enormous dynamic potential. But the tide also sinks a lot of ordinary boats. This brings serious problems of disintegration that threaten the whole notion of the city.”

What is that notion? Ever since humanity invented agriculture and became sedentary, collections of people linked first in villages and finally in megalopolises have been centers of vitality. They have propelled civilization through scientific and economic advances. Sao Paulo, with its superb universities, has been conspicuous in this regard, galvanizing Brazilian development as the city moved from coffee to automaking to Internet industries. But today it seems in danger of sliding backward as the cohesion essential to any community collapses.

Already it is clear that, to avoid contact with the widespread urban wreckage, the affluent are privatizing their needs. Private schools. Private hospitals. Private, guarded condominiums where their children can play – “protected, comfortable jails,” as John Arnstein, a Brazilian banker, put it.

Yet what Sao Paulo seems to need is not this retreat to fortress privacy but public investment on a huge scale. It needs an extended subway system to alleviate the perennially clogged traffic. It needs schools to get more than 3,000 vagrant children off the streets. And it needs street lighting and sewers for the spreading favelas.

But Celso Pitta, the mayor of Sao Paulo, says the city is heavily in debt. Waste and fraud are rampant. Money is squandered on police forces whose activities are often duplicated and on over-invoiced public works.

An advantage of the open global economic system is that such waste becomes untenable. Markets demand fiscal discipline. But markets are skeptical of intense public-sector investment, and international capital is so volatile that Brazil is obliged to keep interest rates at levels that multiply debts like Sao Paulo’s. This drains investments from social needs.

“The danger now is that the only equalizer in Sao Paulo will be the revolver,” said Jorge Wilheim, an urban planner.

The man battling the spread of guns – 19,898 were seized by the city’s police in 1998 – is Marcio Vinicio Petrelluzzi, the secretary of public security for Sao Paulo state. He has a vision of the Paulista apocalypse. The slums on the periphery, already housing upward of two million people, spread southward toward the dams that provide the city’s water supply. The water is infected by open sewage. As population density increases and the soil grows more impermeable, the annual flooding of the Rio Tiete gets worse. Sick, waterlogged, tempted by the goods that globalization places before them, the urban poor rise up. “Chaos takes over,” Mr. Petrelluzzi says.

It has not happened yet; it may never. Indeed, there are encouraging signs. The city has stopped growing so fast as industries leave and other parts of Brazil develop. Population is expected to increase to 20 million from 17 million by 2015. But Bombay’s projected growth over the same period is to 26.2 million from 15.1 million; Lagos to 24.6 million from 10 million.

A new movement of what Marco Antonio Ramos de Almeida of BankBoston calls “entrepreneurial citizenship” is growing. The private sector is realizing it has a stake in Sao Paulo’s future and is putting money into urban improvements. New enterprises like Universo On Line, or UOL, are springing up. Started four years ago, it is already the biggest Internet company in Latin America, with 1,000 employees.

But the UOL jobs do not keep pace with jobs lost in old industries. And their qualifications are different. In his shanty, Geraldo Agostino da Cruz, 17, says drug trafficking is his principal job prospect. “The rich find it easy to make money,” he says. “Why is it so difficult for us?”

His bruised eyes in a youthful face tell a story evident in the developing world’s megacities: the new globalism has not yet demonstrated that the resources it accumulates can be distributed in a way that builds broad avenues of civility through the earth’s spreading urban jungle.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Technology –
Will dust survive? And other nagging questions

By Henry Fountain

In the next century, will those bodies that have been frozen in liquid nitrogen be brought back to life?

Bad news for Walt Disney if, as legend has it, he sits in a vat of liquid nitrogen somewhere, hovering 77 degrees above absolute zero.

“I can stretch my imagination to see how we’d freeze whole organisms in the future,” said Locksley E. McGann, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Alberta medical school. “But thawing out those frozen now, I don’t see it.”

Dr. McGann is president of the Society for Cryobiology, the field that studies the effects of very low temperatures on living tissue. Cryonics is the common term for the practice of freezing a body in the hope that future technology – tiny machines, working molecule by molecule, perhaps – will be able to repair and reanimate it.

The problem is that the damage to tissues caused by freezing is enormous. “It’s like a car being hit by a Mack truck,” Dr. McGann said. “The cell’s pretty well had it.” Repairing such damage is a daunting task.

Only single cells, embryos and small, simple structures like a heart valve can now be frozen and thawed successfully. But scientists should be able to freeze increasingly complex tissues, eventually making storage of hearts and perhaps other organs possible, Dr. McGann said.

“Figure that if you can freeze a heart, you are maybe halfway toward being able to freeze a kidney,” he said. “And if you follow that path, it might be reasonable in the future to freeze a whole body.”

But by then, biosynthetic tissues and other advances in transplantation may make freezing moot. “The reasons to do it may not be there anymore,” he said.

In the next century, will humans live elsewhere?

Before people can transform the landscape of Mars or set up shop out near Alpha Centauri, they first have to get there safely. For Paul O. Wieland, an environmental systems engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, that means designing and building systems that are more efficient and reliable.

“If something goes wrong and you’re halfway there, you’re in big trouble,” said Mr. Wieland, whose handbook, “Designing for Human Presence in Space,” is a bible for engineers.

“Systems have to be more reliable and capable of being maintained,” he said. “There are some technical challenges to that that are being worked on.”

Marshall engineers are testing a laboratory module for the international space station. “The software is one of the biggest problems at this point,” Mr. Wieland said. “It’s causing us trouble now because we’re trying to make it real easy for the astronauts so they can spend their time doing productive work.”

Dr. Wieland noted that the technical knowledge existed to send people back to the moon or to Mars and that the ability to establish permanent settlements was increasing as research progresses. He is optimistic about the chances that humans will live elsewhere.

“I’d say we pretty much have to,” he said. “We don’t have much more room here.”

In the next century, will household dust still exist?

As long as there’s friction, as long as a shoe hitting a carpet kicks up a fiber or two, dust will exist. But dust mites, those tiny creatures that dwell in mattresses, carpets and elsewhere in the home and produce allergens that are a big contributor to asthma, are a different story. There is hope that they may be eliminated, or at least reduced.

One strategy, says Glen Needham, a professor of entomology at Ohio State University who studies mites, is integrated pest management, the use of multiple tactics to control a pest population. “It’s normally used for a field crop,” he said. “But it’s no different in the home.”

Mites flourish in humid conditions, so reducing humidity is one tactic. So is the use of insecticides, although Mr. Needham acknowledged that it was difficult to overcome resistance to pesticide use in the home.

Biological controls pose problems as well, he added. “A homeowner probably isn’t going to feel good about releasing a thousand predator spider mites to kill dust mites,” he said. “He’s going to say, ‘I’m not sure I want that going on beneath my mattress cover tonight.’”

Even the best pest program probably wouldn’t eliminate mites in older homes, Mr. Needham said. But a mite-free existence may be possible in the future in new homes that are designed to reduce humidity and where the furnishings are impregnated with pesticides before they are installed.

“A lot of asthmatics are chemophobes,” he said. “You tell them you’re going to put a pesticide in your home, and they’re not even going to want to listen to the facts. But if you put a carpet in there that’s already treated, that might be easier.”

In the next century, what will clothes be made of?

In the future, no one may care if textiles are natural or synthetic. What will be important is the technology that is incorporated into them.

“The information component of clothing will increase dramatically,” said Joe Cunning, director of the National Textile Center, a research consortium of six universities. So-called smart clothing, now only in its infancy, will become a large segment of the industry. “The fibers themselves will carry information about your health and well-being,” Mr. Cunning said – for example, through sensors that monitor things like heartbeat and blood sugar.

New hues and new design possibilities will emerge, he added, through the inclusion of small inorganic compounds in fibers that can produce color when excited by a laser. A shirt could be colored at the last minute, just off the rack, Mr. Cunning said.

More than anything else, though, the current trend toward increased comfort will accelerate, and the result will be activewear “carried to an extreme,” he said.

Another big issue that will eventually be solved is fit, Mr. Cunning said. Already, body scanning and other technologies are making it possible to create that oxymoron, mass-produced custom clothing. Eventually, Mr. Cunning said, there will be breakthroughs in the technology of patterning, cutting and manufacturing. “We will have clothes that fit everybody, not just a few.”

In the next century, where will people go when they want to be alone?

“Maybe we’ll have enough open space,” said James Boyd, an economist with Resources for the Future, a research organization in Washington. “It hinges a lot on demographics.”

There are encouraging signs in the developed world of lower birthrates, he said, so some of the population-driven pressure on space may ease. But immigration and other factors could ratchet the pressure up again.

Information technology, for example, is going to lead to an increase in “footloose” employees, who can choose to work anywhere. “That’s good for individuals but probably not good for open space,” Mr. Boyd said. “It tends to make us spread out.”

And the movement to restrict growth, a politically powerful one in many communities, can add to the overall problem. “The more land you lock up in that community, development pressure sort of squirts out somewhere else,” Mr. Boyd said.

The real salvation for rural space, he noted, may be urban space.

“We’ll never lose cities,” Mr. Boyd said. “People will always want good Chinese food and theater and never go too far away from that.” And the more economic and demographic forces lead to concentrations of population, the less pressure there will be on open space.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
Manifestoes to give city a new edge; people’s banking network

By David Cay Johnston

SARAH LUDWIG, executive director, Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project

Poor neighborhoods often have no bank, just check-cashing businesses that charge high fees. That forces the poor to carry cash, making them vulnerable to robbery. “We can solve this costly problem by using the Internet to create the people’s bank,” Ms. Ludwig says.

The nonprofit bank would encourage direct deposits of checks. The poor would have access to their accounts at kiosks in community gathering spots. Individuals could pay bills electronically, shop online and obtain mortgages.

Governments could cover the cost of each transaction out of the money saved from other services – like the police, courts and prisons now needed to deal with bandits.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
Manifestoes to give city a new edge; ‘The Metropolitarium’

By Dan Barry

New York has a history of addressing the holes in its psychic and physical landscapes, from Central Park, which brought a sense of space, to the Brooklyn Bridge, which brought a sense of connection. Following that tradition, Mr. Burns sees the need for a sprawling destination dedicated to education.

As he envisions it, a public-private partnership would convert an entire block – its size alone securing its lasting place in the city’s life – into a “metropolitarium” that would feature elaborate gangways, multidimensional displays reflecting the changing spectacle of the metropolis and a series of “razzle-dazzle” activities and events.

The commitment of resources would bring education to the fore, both physically and metaphorically. Says Mr. Burns: “The city periodically needs these large-scale gestures to shift the paradigm.”

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Technology: Quantum computers and cars smarter than you are –
Giving the globe a networked skin

By Seth Schiesel

In the 20th century, scientists at Bell Laboratories invented modern marvels like the transistor and the laser, but that is ancient history to the engineers working there today for Lucent Technologies Inc. In fact, they do not really have much use for the present.

In a windowless office at Bell Labs’ headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., Gerald Butters, chief of Lucent’s optical networking group, gestures dismissively at his magazine-thin laptop computer and the network cord dangling beside it.

“Look,” he says, “to get onto the network today, I’ve got a skinny wire here and I’m limited by the speed of the modem and I’m limited by the network to something surely less than the processor speed in this computing unit.”

In the Bell Labs vision, that wire will soon disappear. For that matter, the laptop computer may disappear as well. In their place will emerge a world in which the ability to connect – with wires or without – to a global network at lightning speeds will become almost ubiquitous. For when you think about it, which is what Bell Labs spends billions doing, the communications revolution so far has been limited to a mere handful of devices – the phone, the fax, the modem, the television.

Moreover, consumers are generally stuck with only the services that big carriers want to offer. If caller ID is not sold in your area by the local phone company, well, too bad. Want to set up an eight-way conference call for the whole family? It’s not generally possible at home. Want your e-mail automatically forwarded to a fax at your hotel? Good luck.

The upshot is that for the last few decades, more technology has meant more complexity – learning a new computer, understanding voice mail instructions, programming a VCR.

The challenge that Bell Labs has set for the next few decades is to make ever more capable communications systems as easy to use as they are powerful, to make the technology sufficiently advanced that it becomes transparent.

One big part of that is making the global communications network ubiquitous, rather than something that is accessed from a computer at a desk, or a phone jack in the wall. Bell Labs’ world is one covered by a skin of communications.

Take the changing role of fiber-optic cable. For almost two decades, optical fibers have been widely used to transmit torrents of data between fixed points employing pulses of light rather than pulses of electricity.

Now, Bell Labs engineers are trying to perfect a concept largely articulated by British Telecommunications P.L.C.: small wireless communications devices – essentially antennas – attached to fiber-optic lines every few hundred feet. Anyone within range of these transmitters could wirelessly tap into the fibers’ vast capacity with their camera, or their video unit, or their living room remote control as easily as people use cell phones today.

With thousands of miles of optical fiber being deployed around the globe every day, if not every hour, according to many analysts, the industrial world could soon be encased in a literal web of communications.

But such a web is of little use if people still must link to the network with clunky, largely fixed devices like today’s computers and telephones.

That is why Bell Labs is developing new devices and new ways of interacting with them.

In Holmdel, N.J., for instance, researchers at Bell Labs have developed what they call the world’s smallest camera. It is on a microchip the size of a fingernail. Coupled with a lens and some supporting circuitry, an entire camera unit could be sewn into a lapel, perhaps as a security device. Were you mugged? The offender’s picture could be on its way to the police within moments.

Similarly small circuitry, coupled with the power of ubiquitous high-speed wireless connections, could allow doctors to continually monitor the health of chronically ill people, using wireless biomonitors in a wristwatch.

All of this is meant to facilitate communication with people. Currently, communicating with someone who is not in the same room requires linking a set of electronic codes – home phone numbers, work phone numbers, cellular numbers, fax numbers, pager numbers and e-mail addresses – with the time to find the right code for the right moment.

In a few years, you may be able to tell your watch, “Call Bob,” and not have to worry about where Bob is or what sorts of devices he has handy. Using technologies like those being developed at Bell Labs, the network will handle those chores – finding Bob, if Bob wants to be found.

Sound like science fiction? That’s what many would have called the Internet just a decade ago.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Technology –
In a speedy world, software’s a snail

By Steve Lohr

Software is the DNA of the high-technology age, the mediator between man and machine, conveying our questions or orders to the computers that surround us. No small irony, then, that the task of making software remains a remarkably painstaking endeavor of step-by-step iteration, more handcraftsmanship than machine magic.

Everything else in the digital realm seems to race ahead at dizzying speeds. Faster, cheaper and better is the way of computing for the most part, as microchips double in power every 18 months, disks for storing data improve even more rapidly and high-speed Internet links quickly become more available and affordable.

Software has not made such strides. Instead, says Jim Gray, a database pioneer, it is “the only thing in cyberspace that is getting more expensive and less reliable.”

This productivity paradox threatens to become a drag on progress in many fields but especially on the development of electronic commerce as an engine of economic growth. Each feature or function in a software program can take twice as much programming time today as it did in 1992, says Howard Rubin, a computer scientist at Hunter College. The Internet adds to the difficulty because each piece of software must run smoothly with an ever wider variety of software. The interaction of lines of software code multiplies the problem, especially as programs become larger.

Over the years, new tools and techniques like object-oriented programming, which divides code into reusable modules – think Lego blocks – have brought steady progress in software engineering. But the advances pale next to those in hardware.

Experts split into two camps over bridging the divide. The “evolutionaries” say incremental improvements are the best that programmers can hope for; the revolutionaries stalk Big Bang-style breakthroughs.

In the evolutionary camp, the leading voice is Frederick P. Brooks Jr., who headed the team that built the operating system for I.B.M.’s 360 mainframe in the 1960s. There is “no silver bullet” to the software productivity problem, Mr. Brooks insists. “Complexity is the business we are in, and complexity is what limits us.”

Charles Simonyi, a senior researcher at Microsoft regarded as “the father of Word,” the most-used word-processing program, is a Big Bang hunter. For five years, he has been working on what he calls “intentional programming,” and his goal is to transform the craft of code writing.

Mr. Simonyi is working on a programming supertool for capturing the mental shorthand of abstraction – what people want the computer to do – in modules of code that can used with any programming language.

“I want to liberate the abstractions from these closed programming languages and let programmers put their cleverness in an independent delivery vehicle,” he said.

With the advent of the personal computer industry, software and hardware became separate markets for the first time, increasing supply and spurring innovation. Mr. Simonyi wants to do the same thing for the brainiest bits of software: separate the abstract intentions, the innovation, from the repetitive drudge work of programming.

If the revolutionaries fail, expect more problems of the Year 2000 type, as the intentions of human programmers are lost in translation on literal-minded computers. But if they succeed, computers will suddenly become more like humans, for better or worse.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Identity –
Party like it’s 1999? That’s so, like, ‘stalg

By Phil Patton

To: Marcy

From: Britanny

Videotex, 6/6/2025 (a transcript)

WELL, I’m just back from Tiffany’s big bash. It’s been 25 years since we finished high school and Tiffany says, “Let’s forget the reunion and just have a party and hang.” And her big idea was: do the whole 90’s theme. So ‘stalg!

It was my first trip back to Terra in 10 years, and Tiffany had all kinds of neat stuff I hadn’t seen. The induction table, of course, that heats up the food on the plates. And you can look down and see different scenes. Sky. Forest. Brook. I go, Neat, but spare me the underwater Caribbean view if you serve sushi.

When we sat down, there was this cute little Pikachu scooting around that I find out is the saltshaker, and Jigglypuff is the pepper. And every time I dribbled something, a little Tasmanian Devil crumbot zipped by and there was this whishy sound. And then who arrives but that Tracy, who I still hate, and the first thing she says, like she was still the snotty head cheerleader, was, “So where have you been? I thought you’d left the planet?” Not even knowing, you know? And I’m like, Well, du-uh, exactly.

Snapped her righteously!

I have to admit she had a point. We really are out of it on the Big Can. But living here is all right. I know they make fun of us, but we laugh at them, too. We call them Aussies, ‘cause they’re down under. Actually it’s more 90’s on the Can – or Oneilia, as absolutely nobody calls it, after the nutty professor who first scoped out the Lagrange points here as the neatest spot for the big space station – than anywhere on Terra. They had to give it that cute look to get people here. Hired the same team that did that old theme park or whatever it was, Celebration, to make it as Terran as possible.

When we graduated in ‘99, no one thought it would happen so quickly. You wrote in my yearbook “Onward and upward,” but I don’t think you meant actually. I suppose it was basically cheap ion engines and Club Med sending up all those honeymooners – remember those “moon” ads? – that got it going. And after the debt bust of the Noughties, when NASA hooked up with MasterCard and the others, it just made sense to sign on if you were maxed out like Tony and me.

Anyway, back to the party. This is the best: Tracy has on this outfit from Sony-Hilfiger of old 90’s TV shows, with great scenes from “Dawson’s Creek” and “Friends” in two-inch boxes all over her, woven into the fabric. She acted so superior, like, asking me, Would I wear that on the Can, and raving about Jnco and Fubu, her gene-ious (pun!) kids. So I lean over and whisper to Mandy, “Well, it’s bright but it’s still checks.” And on her figure, which, let me testify, hasn’t exactly stayed trim, checks are definitely disindicated.

By the way, Tiffany had even matched the holos to the 90’s thing. I hadn’t seen much of them before this trip but now it seems you can’t go anywhere on Terra without a holographic celeb chatting away with the latest downloaded dish. Funny how you just don’t see the real celebs anymore, in ads and stuff, since Amazon started personal vidmail, telling people what the boss or whoever was buying. As Bezos (that single-name thing is so over) says, it taps the greatest marketing force in history, the green-eyed monster of jealousy.

So she had a Martha, who said how the centerpiece was made, and a Version 2.0 Oprah and a Geraldo. But the really funny one was the Alan Greenspan, who had to license himself after they turned over monetary policy to the computers that run the derivatives.

The food was themed, of course, though it was all customized, since our diet cards got plugged into the Nutrifab. Wraps and frappes, Tiffany announces. The only true innovations of the 90’s.

Well, to get back to the dress. We’re eating this stuff I haven’t seen in years and I’m talking to Mandy, when somebody spills piquant sauce. The crumbot goes whirring across the table, crashes, and there’s this little burst of sparks. A blue arc leaps across the table toward Tracy and her dress starts cycling through all these images faster and faster until it’s like a fog and then it dissolves. She sat there basically in the raw with this, like, droopy fishnet of melted fibes hanging off her.

Justified the shuttle fare, to see that, but I was happy to get back home, I can tell you, and see Terra come up in the morning the normal way again.

Kiss-kiss,
B.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Identity –
The Artist Formerly Known as Spectator

By Ann Powers

Imagine yourself as a member of an empty orchestra. The music, ever changing within a basic set of themes, wafts forth from instruments held by invisible hands, but the chairs are open for you to occupy and add your part.

“Empty orchestra” is the fancy term for karaoke, a fad that trendsetters would just as soon forget. Yet despite the corniness of singing along to instrumental versions of pop hits, or maybe partly because of it, it defines the paradigm we are moving toward. When we dive into popular culture, we increasingly expect to leave a mark, or at least determine the shape of our own good times. Technology will enable that impulse to such an extent that the already decayed lines between artist and appreciator, or individually rendered masterpiece and commonly created work-in-progress, will vanish in a flurry of interactivity.

That, of course, is the hipper term for the trend toward actively shaping the entertainment experience, rather than just sitting back and enjoying it. A survey of trade publications, Web magazines and other popular-culture beacons suggests that interactivity is not only the moment’s craze but also the basic structure that culture is following into the new century.

Internet culture is the most technologically enriched aspect of our hunger for the ancient spirit of carnival, once manifested within the holy festival and the bawdy circus. We are not going back, though, to a time before mass culture colored consciousness. Rather, we are developing a parodoxical hybrid of the mass-produced and the local, as audience members enter directly into the fantasies presented them.

We love talk radio and television, in which audience members bond with or berate the hosts and guests. MTV’s most popular program is the viewer-dictated “Total Request Live.” The Beastie Boys let fans create their own greatest-hits packages by downloading selections from 150 posted on the rappers’ Web site. Films are still sit-back experiences, but “The Blair Witch Project” created a participatory aura with its use of cheap video, its open-ended plot and its invitation to viewers to speculate on its mysteries using the Internet.

The dominance of the crowd increased over the last century, with mass communication uniting locals into audiences of millions. In the next era, those millions will step, one by one, into their own spotlights. Global mass culture may be burying home-grown character beneath identical Disney Worlds, but the human impulse to personalize is infinitely adaptable.

Technology is already allowing people to make concrete their long-held feeling about mass art, which is that it is folk art with a bigger frame. Already they are using video cameras and hip-hop samplers to create pop hits. More space within mass culture will soon be devoted to these homemade efforts. Internet radio will allow individuals to create instant remixes and sound collages and transmit them worldwide. The often tacky efforts of cable-access auteurs will be integrated into professionally produced cable network shows, completely closing the gap between fiction and reality, which is already perilously thin on television.

These changes within “low” culture will be mirrored on high. As art becomes more like a game, the idea of great works – and the institutions that support them – may fade. People will go into art spaces (not “museums,” which will survive mainly as archives) and add strokes to computer-generated “paintings” and installations directed by imagination-leaders, formerly called artists. They will join in global choruses led by interdenominational monks. As for the solitary pursuit of reading and writing, it will face competition from the community journals and real-time oral histories that students and autodidacts alike will create together.

This folksy vision isn’t meant to overshadow the pervasive influence of megacorporations on popular culture. Mergers will continue to narrow the field at its top end, but those media empires won’t be able to absorb all the rogue artist-entrepreneurs that interactive technology will enable. Instead, the companies will make deals, perhaps providing production and distribution support while allowing the artists to direct some of culture’s content.

We may even learn to embrace anonymity, as the old folk practice of not signing works evolves into a sport of multiple identities. The shape-shifting now taking place online, in cyberpickup joints and clubhouses, could move into the physical world, as theater is rejuvenated by becoming an improvisational game. David Cronenberg’s latest science fiction film, “Existenz,” imagines a virtual realm so real it could make you bleed; perhaps we’re headed for a physical realm so fired by imagination that we’ll sometimes experience our own flesh and blood as chimeras.

To some, such an age may sound like a nightmare. Those already horrified by today’s spectacles will further lament the decimation of individual will within the personal sphere. But when a singer takes the microphone at karaoke, isn’t she herself magnified? Amplified, so she can hear herself better? That’s what we’ll be aiming for as we enter our empty orchestras.

[NormanStewart]

VISIONS: Cities –
Manifestoes to give city a new edge

By Tom Kuntz

For anyone who thinks New York City institutions never die, there is one word: vaudeville. Vaudeville bombed with the advent of radio and television, proving that even dancing girls and the old soft shoe can’t save an institution whose time has passed.

On the other hand, it is only in the last 100 years that the city got the New York Public Library, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim and the subway.

Institutions come and go in New York, a city long emblematic of humanity’s perpetual reinvention. It stands to reason: as social needs and aspirations change, so do the public and private entities set up to handle them.

With that in mind, a range of influential New Yorkers were asked about the institutions that ought to be established in the 21st century.