2123 A. D.

A new candidate for the world's championship in scientific prediction has arisen to challenge Mr. Herbert George Wells. He is J. B. S. Haldane, reader in biochemistry at Cambridge University, who in the August Century, lays bare to the dazed layman what you might expect If You Were Alive in 2123. The paper created a sensation when it was read at Cambridge. Haldane advances his theses only as personal deductions from present tendencies. His points:

1) The main effects of Einstein's relativity will be felt in philosophy and ethics by a reaction from dogmatic materialism.

2) Abundant light with a minimum of heat will be produced at a fiftieth of the present cost, and night will be eliminated where desired.

3) Speed of transportation will be vastly increased and will be limited only by the velocity of light (186,000 miles a second) . Interplanetary communication may not succeed, but it will certainly be attempted.

4) Industry will be compelled by economic interdependence to stabilize production and eliminate periodic depression with some form of employee government.

5) When the coal and oil fields are exhausted, the final substitute will be neither water power nor radium energy, but wind and sunlight. Surplus power will be generated by the formation and storage of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The latter is, weight for weight, the most efficient known method of storing energy. It will be universally cheap, decentralizing industry, and producing no dirt.

6) Modern artists and poets do not understand modern science, and no great new art will arise until they do.

7) Substances with physiological properties which may add to the amenities and enjoyment of life, such as wine, coffee, tobacco, perfumes, etc., will be produced without harmful effects.

8) All food will become synthetic, agriculture will become a luxury and mankind completely urbanized.

9) Disease will be abolished throughout even backward nations within the 20th Century, if the world is prepared to tolerate enough state interference in private life.

10) New nitrogen-fixating bacteria will be developed which will quadruple crops, and by the resultant fall of prices, agricultural States will be temporarily ruined. The same agents, introduced into the sea, will cause an enormous glut of fish as food.

11 ) Children will be born " ecto-genetically," i. e., ovaries from superior women will be kept alive in suitable cultures, artificially fertilized from selected males, and the embryos protected until able to endure air. The resulting improvement in the quality of the race will save civilization from degeneracy.

12) The separation of sexual love from the reproductive function will eliminate old-fashioned family life.

13) Knowledge of the ductless glands will make possible undreamed-of control of passions, imagination, delinquency, etc.

14) Death will be due exclusively to senility and will be still further postponed by glandular therapy.

15) International organization will end war, or war, attacking all noncombatants, will destroy contemporary civilization.

16) Spiritualism may, by obtaining scientific verification, displace Christianity. But the religion of the scientific mind will be a religion of relativity, with a flexible moral tradition.