In his book "The Dilbert Future", Scott Adams attempts to predict the future of technology and office relations. Some of his predictions are downright creepy such as the prediction that large companies such as telephone companies would form confusopolies to intentionally confuse customers rather than compete on price. It's true, just try picking through the range of price plans from O2. Other predictions though are, for the moment, just for entertainment value. My favourite chapter is, naturally, "Life will not be like Star Trek". Of course Adams is right. If the future really were like Star Trek then "nobody would be able to convince me that I should be anywhere other than on the holodeck getting a hot oil massage from Cindy Crawford and her simulated twin sister".
Having sat through Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith for the second time in a week, I can't help but think that life in the future will not be like Star Wars either. It's not for the obvious reason of living with some "hokey" religion but rather the unbelieveable way in which techonology seems to have evolved in the Star Wars universe.
I have to give credit where it's due and fair play to George Lucas, the opening battle scene in Revenge of the Sith is incredibly impressive but it demonstrates an unrealistic projection of our current technological state. Lucas' vision of the future is one which seems to be influenced by one too many bad WWII movies. He's not alone in this, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers suffers the same problem, although Heinlein at least has the excuse that Starship Troopers was written in 1959.
The reason why neither of these two visions will come to pass stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution in general and technological evolution in particular. In Revenge of the Sith Lucas depicts massive battle fleets of reasonably equally matched cruisers. Lucas seems to think that advances in technology will suddenly stop at some point in the future and worlds will just start building more and more of everything. The six movies span almost forty years and yet the Death Star is the only major technological or strategic development in that time. You only have to look at the evolution of military technology during a similar war-ridden period on Earth to see why Lucas got it so wrong.
At the end of WWII, the North American P-51 Mustang was the pinnacle of battlefield technology. It had a top speed of 703km/hr and a range of 2.755 km. Forty years later, the B1-B Lancer was in service with a top speed of 1340km/hr and a range of 11,998 km. It's the same story with tanks, compare the M4 Sherman with the M1 Abrams.
It's not just the technology that has evolved in the last 65 years since WWII, it's also the way we fight. The development of the cruise missile, stealth aircraft, the airborne laser, the Aegis weapons system, UAVs and UCAVs have all served to change the face of modern combat. To really see the difference watch a WWII movie, anyone will do and then read "The Bear and the Dragon" by Tom Clancy or play Modern Warfare. The difference is amazing. Nowadays we fight smart, not hard and research programmes such as the Future Force Warrior programme shows that this trend is in no danger of stopping. We have moved from trench warfare to small unit tactics and now we're beginning to see the early stages of one man armies. If you want a reasonable prediction of the future of modern combat, don't watch Star Wars, watch Universal Soldier instead.
As I've already said, this prognostication predicament is suffered by Robert Heinlein as well, although in the case of Starship Troopers it's excusable. Released in 1959, Starship Troopers imagines a massive future war between humanity and an arachnoid species referred to only as "The Bugs". Told through the eyes of Juan "Johnnie" Rico, the story is practically a war novel with the veneer of science fiction. There are imaginations of futuristic technology such as power armour but the tactics are no different to those found in the Korean War. It has to be said that technology prediction was not Heinlein's strong suit. In one of his other novels, Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein envisions a wonderfully detailed vision of a future earth with just one minor drawback, the most advanced communications technology of the time is essentially a telex machine.
Predicting the future, at least in a science-fiction context, is possible, just read any of Arthur C. Clarke's novels or better yet the revised edition of "Profiles of the Future" where Clarke revisits technological predictions made in the sixties to see where they are now. Still though, if you're going to spend any considerable time predicting what technology or warfare will be like in the future, you should start by looking at where it is now and how it got there.
P.S. For the record, my favourite future warfare sci-fi and for my money, the one that is bang on for where we'll be is the HALO universe, particularly the novels.
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