PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

Ten Years Later
9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
Following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 on
the world trade center and the Pentagon, president George
W. Bush declared war on terrorism. Going beyond the
president’s rhetoric, we realize that terrorism indeed provides
a believable life-and-death threat, and also the socially
organizing function of war. But in order to “effectively fulfill
the economy’s stabilizing function” expenditures for
this war must rise to no less than an annual 10 percent of
gross national product. President Bush would have to realize
that taking war on terrorism seriously might require
sacrificing the star wars program, which to some extent
would placate “the enemy “ anyway.
So we now have two war candidates to stimulate economic
growth in the coming decades: war on pollution, and
war on terrorism. Interestingly these two are interrelated in
a curious way. The war on terrorism generally mobilizes
polluters, while the war on pollution mobilizes “terrorist”
environmentalists.
Global Village in 2025
Assuming humanity fares well in its wars be it on pollution or terrorism,
we can now look further into the future using some of the ideas presented
in Chapter One—in particular, the concept of invariants. Let us
try to picture urban life in the next century.
Invariants are quantities that do not change over time and geography
because they represent a natural equilibrium. Such universal constants
can be exploited to reveal future shapes of society. Cars, for example,
display a curious characteristic in regard to the average speed they can
attain. Today in the United States it is about thirty miles per hour;
hardly changed since Henry Ford’s time. 10 Car users seem to be satisfied
with an average speed of thirty miles per hour, and all performance
improvements serve merely to counterbalance the time lost in traffic
jams and at traffic lights.
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