PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

9. REACHING THE CEILING EVERYWHERE
If we now imagine the supersonic airplane of the future with an additional
factor of ten, say an average of three thousand miles per hour, we
can visualize the whole Western world as one town. In his book Megatrends,
John Naisbitt claims that Marshall McLuhan’s “world village”
became realized when communication satellites linked the world together
informationally. 13 This is not quite accurate. Information
exchange is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. It is true that empires
in antiquity broke up when they grew so large that it took more
than two weeks to transmit a message from one end to the other. But it
is also true that communications media are poor substitutes for personal
contact (see Chapter Six). The condition for a “world village” is that it
should take not much more than one hour to reach physically any location.
One way of achieving this is a supersonic air connection among distant
cities, with Maglevs acting as high-speed high-volume connections
between closer core cities, and expedient subway access to the airports.
There is not much room in this picture for conventional railways. They
seem to have no future as a network and will inevitably decline worldwide
during the economic cycle 1995-2050. In some fast network
branches, such as the French TGV connecting Paris to Lyon, trains may
linger for a while, losing ground slowly to improving subsonic jumbo
plane service over the same routes.
But what will happen to the car, this long-time favorite means of
transportation, toy, and hallmark of individual freedom and mobility?
Cars are not suitable for the densely populated cities that are emerging
everywhere. Urban centers with a high population density increasingly
provide public services that eliminate the need for a personal car.
This is becoming more and more evident with expanding areas in city
centers in which automobile traffic is excluded. On the other hand,
urbanization is still on the rise. World population is imploding exponentially
(this trend will eventually slow down) into cities of evergrowing
numbers and sizes. 14 Combining the above elements one may
conclude that long time from now the majority of the population will
not use a private car for urban neither for intercity transport. Possible
remaining uses are for hobbies and pleasure. Marchetti’s long-term
view of future car employment is inspired by clues already found in the
222