Jim Regan - Site Reviews
The Chronicle of the Future
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And yet for some people, receiving the news instantly still isn't fast enough, so London's Sunday Times has created The Chronicle of the Future - which not only contains the news of the next 50 years, but presents it in the past tense.
As you might suspect, The Chronicle is a pre-millennium exercise, in which a "panel of experts" (is there any other kind?) from such fields as science, history, politics and the media make their predictions about the next 50 years and present them in the form of news stories.
The home page separates the predictions into five decades, each represented by a Chronicle magazine cover featuring such stories as the rise of President Chelsea Clinton and the cloning of Bill Gates. Visitors can either click on the cover for a brief introduction to the decade, or move directly to individual years via pull-down menu. (Stories can also be accessed by a topic based menu at the bottom of the home page.)
Once chosen, each year offers four to six 'feature' stories, as well as a column of short items. Subjects range from the hopeful (Christopher Reeve walking, the three western religions uniting in Jerusalem) to the sadly inevitable (a man suing his parents for not having genetic tests done at the time of his conception).
There are also stories with elements of 'logical evolution', (The War Channel) social comeuppance, (pregnant man, men banned from Wimbledon) 'here we go again', (fusion power, end of tooth decay) and the highly unlikely (a tracking system that uses global positioning to locate lost socks). All the stories are brief -- this is not intended as a an exhaustive exploration of future trends -- but visitors who wish to take a more serious look at some possible issues of the future can take part in the Chronicle's Online Debates. Topics include war vs. peace, genetic enhancement, and, with ever increasing life expectancy, whether anyone would really want to live 'forever'.
For a personal perspective, there are excerpts from Pheobe's Diary, as she and the millennium mature together, while the Chronicle Update presents current, genuine, stories of a millennial nature.
Despite the participation of the assorted experts, the site primarily exists as an amusement and a catalyst for thought and discussion. In terms of the eventual accuracy of the predictions, it might have been interesting to also convene a decidedly non-expert panel, then see whose forecasts were nearer the mark as the years passed. (After all, experts in the '30's predicted that by now we'd be flying into rooftop airports, walking on air-conditioned sidewalks and enhancing our health by sleeping in beds that emitted Ultra Violet Rays.)
But perhaps the greatest service rendered by the Chronicle will be to warn us now about the dangers that the future holds - biological warfare, the consequences of Global Warming, and of course, Bill Gates clones.
The Chronicle of the Future can be found at http://www.chronicle-future.co.uk/.
Jim Regan provides 'Today's Links' to the e-Monitor. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.