Future Imperfect.(Brief Article)

It's half past 10 on a Monday morning, and the audience in the Loews Regency Ballroom B is hanging on the words of a lanky man with a bushy white beard and a floral print tie. "Racism will be a quaint bit of history," the speaker, Joseph Coates, is saying. Sexism and most infectious diseases will all "become historical phenomena." Sleep will be manipulated to increase productivity. Standing by the doorway in the back of the room, Ann Coombs, a fellow futurist and a Coates admirer, cups a hand over her mouth and leans toward a reporter standing next to her. "Joseph has just predicted the next 1,000 years," she whispers reverentially.

In the field of futurology, it doesn't get much better than that. And at WorldView 2002, the annual conference of the World Future Society, held recently in Philadelphia, this was just the beginning. Next door a futurist from New Jersey was about to begin discussing the colonization of Mars. And over in the Commonwealth D Room, the author of a book called "Male Menopause" was explaining how "males have been taught to define their manhood based on not being a woman," and how this has left them with no "independent sense of being." Not to worry: "There's a fathering movement beginning to happen."

In a postmillennial world preoccupied with Islamic terror and worthless stock-market portfolios, the 150 participants at WorldView 2002 formed a warm island of hope. Talk of September 11 was drowned out by idealism of an oddly nostalgic kind. Futurology (a term futurists despise), or future studies (the term most prefer), got its start when optimism was easy, and the World Future Society was in the center of it all. In the early 1970s Vice President Gerald Ford was the keynote speaker at its annual conference. As recently as 1986 a delegation traveled to the White House to share thoughts with Ronald Reagan.

That was then. In the past 10 years, membership in the World Future Society has plummeted from almost 60,000 to less than half that. Future-studies departments at institutions like the University of Southern California have shut their doors. The far-out faith in progress, Mars colonies and the like is all but dead. "There used to be a real sense of the future in society and what we should do about it," says Michael Marien, editor of Future Survey, the monthly publication of the World Future Society. "But [future studies] never developed. It never fulfilled its promise. Now we'd rather spend money and have a good time in the present."

Futurology was born during the cold war and initially had an alarmist tinge. In the R&D labs of America's military, scientists began doing mathematical trend analysis of such questions as: how fast will the Soviets develop new ...