2040 — A Time Odyssey

Dad is fifty-six now and I certainly don’t find myself some optimistic adolescent.

As a teenager who often argues with his parents over almost everything, I have often wondered about how it would be like, when I find myself of their age having a couple of brats of my own to raise. My father is forty-seven years old now, so I would have to imagine living in the year 2040, because that is when I will be of the same age.

Hmm, the first thing that will come up in anyone’s mind when they think of such a distant future is how their personal lifestyles would be at that time and how much of a role technology would play in it. I suppose my offspring would grow up in the lap of luxury and be as spoiled as rotten tomatoes. They may inhumanely order their robot servants to run errands — from fetching them remotes to scrubbing their backs while they are having a bath. I do wish and hope that this thing won’t come to pass, but it’s pretty hard to envisage that it won’t happen to everyone else too.

There would probably be no paper anymore. Everything will be digitized. The new generation probably won’t know how to find the least common multiple of the numbers eight and six. But hey — why should they? When computers already have all the answers? My friends and I type more than we write, but my children may only need to touch or gesticulate in mere air and give voice commands to communicate with people or entertain themselves. Their lives will be absolutely utopian.

But I am not so sure about the planet itself. I mean, are we to be the ones held responsible for ignoring all the doomsday prophecies? Will it be said that we stole, and not borrowed the earth from our children? I highly doubt it. Who knows, maybe we will be using solar and hydel power by then for all our cars and gadgets instead of using oil and coal. There may not be whales anymore, but surely forests would rejoice because, like I said, paper would be obsolete.

And what about me? Well, I would probably be too comfortable to really ever complain about all the change. And like my father, I might also turn out to be a couch potato with an oversized belly. Why care about anything else while you are experiencing a live holographic broadcast in which Arjun Tendulkar wins the ten-over Cricket World Cup by hitting a sixer off the very last ball of the match?! It would all look, sound, smell and feel so realistic, almost as if the players were in my living room or I were in the stadium. Try to imagine what a Homo Neanderthal would think if he were to see a microwave oven cook food! Moments yet to come are certainly going to be something along the lines of what the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke once famously said:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”