Predicting the future

As school age children we are encouraged to learn basic planning skills such that we can include future time for homework in our schedules and/or are encouraged to keep track of pocket money savings for the future. As adults we plan our future holidays well in advance, as well as a variety of other things such as the education of our children to different levels. However, detailed plans, such as those we include in Excel or similar spreadsheets are used only for smaller decisions, like purchasing a car, tracking costs of a building project, the design of an electrophoresis chip or similar things. The bigger more important decisions about our future just seem to happen to us. Be honest, how did you decide to marry? How did you get into undergraduate study at your university? I believe this is perfectly normal and a part of the way humans are made. Thus, the future is hard to plan for as the best laid plans are easily changed by small events.

I recently attended an event about looking forward to 2030 for the Ruhr region in Germany. Disappointingly, the Chancellor Angela Merkel had the shortest foresight plans I have heard. The lower the rank of the person talking, the more into the future they tried to speculate. (Admittedly this may be to do with the short length of time politicians are in power and the lack of responsibility at lower levels!) Listening to this speech it occurred to me that surely such decisions about the future need to involve today's teenagers in developing such long-term plans, and we should take them seriously as it is their future that will be most affected.

Plate1 Andreas Manz

Another future prediction I would like to tell you about in this wide reaching Editorial is the not so brilliant effort made by the Club of Rome¹ which used scientifically reasonable assumptions in predicting the end of all our energy resources According to this club, about now, we should be running out of just about everything. Fortunately, this is not the case and we are now using more energy than ever.

The growth of the human population appears to be something that also cannot be predicted or controlled as it seems to be growing exponentially—this is one of the major issues facing the world today, so why are there no major attempts to control this growth? Why bother attempting to plan for the future at all if we cannot address this most significant problem? It reminds me of a field of mushrooms growing exponentially in a field with no external controls.

Let's take a look at archaeology. We are thrilled by the pyramids of Gizeh, by the mummified body found in a glacier in the Ötztal, and the clay warriors buried beneath a Chinese king in Xi'an. The humans who left these did, intentionally or by accident, leave traces for us to discover. A Rosetta stone, a stele of Hammurabi or Stonehenge were clearly intended to teach someone something in the future!

Let's have a look at what parts of today’s highly elaborate culture will be passed on to future generations: much of everyday life is documented on paper or on the hard disks of computers. These do not have a good chance of survival even for a thousand years. Digital cameras, CDs or TV will not fare much better. I guess, stone engravings on graveyards would survive for some time, perhaps a few oil paintings, too. Isn't it striking that most likely all of our achievements will be lost, should there be a discontinuity in our culture? In the Middle Ages humans were lucky enough to have monks to meticulously copy and interpret the ancient Greek literature, otherwise that part of human history would also be lost to us.

Now, what has all this talk about predicting the future have to do with our own ‘lab on a chip’? Well, if you think long and hard enough it may occur to you that monocrystalline silicon has a low etch rate at ambient conditions. Therefore, a channel system etched deep into it may survive for a million years. Isn't that interesting? Imagine, an intelligent being (hopefully humans) finding nothing but microfluidic silicon chips. What kind of interpretation would she/he have about human culture of the year 2008? A few parallel channels, through holes, pillar arrays……no written language, no pictures. Did we have eyes and brains back in 2008, they might ask…

I have a strong feeling that it is time to change all this. Sending information into outer space is probably a romantic vision, and I guess the few plates on those satellites will be lost forever. On earth, however, we could document our entire culture using silicon chips. Use them in large numbers, write on them, draw on them, pictures, scientific data perhaps, and don't forget that array of quantum dots around the edge which should attract the attention of future generations! But where would be the best locations to distribute them? Around Gizeh? Or Tower Bridge? Or just randomly somewhere in the desert? What exactly should go onto them? Our daily life, pieces of art, music, technology and DNA sequencing? I don't know.

Or, should we encode all this information in DNA and place it into microorganisms? Hopefully, yeast, mould and E. coli might still be here in a million years. Perhaps the 95% of human DNA which is currently encoding for ‘nothing’ is already doing that? Unfortunately, the incumbent error rate will soon wipe out the chances of trading proper code down for more than 20 generations…

For the time being, at least, it appears too hard to predict the path(s) the future might take, so we should forget the philosophising, look to our day jobs and the excellent tools we have such as the Lab on a Chip journal that give us some excellent insights into what the future might hold in terms of new technologies and applications that will surely increase the quality of our lives in the future? Lab on a Chip continues to grow in both impact and size moving on from success to success—see the Editorial from Harp Minhas on the following page for a detailed look at new developments and innovations.

Forgive me for the above excursion into the recesses of my mind, but I had the romantic notion that we, as humans, could do better at predicting the future than a field of mushrooms…

Andreas Manz

Editorial Board Chair, Lab on a Chip

References

1. The Limits of Growth. A Report for The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, D. H. Meadows, Universe Books, 381 Park Avenue South, New York, 1972.

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