PASTIMES OF FUTURE TIMES

Decades ago it was thought that the growth in robotics and an increasing focus on computers, would see most of us only working a few days a week, with way more leisure time on our hands. Hardly! What we found instead is that automation eliminates a lot of jobs entirely, requiring people to shift careers several times in their lives, or hold down more than one job at a time. More leisure hours? Not so much.

From that, I think it’s fair to project into the future that whatever provides us with an income will still occupy most of our week. But that doesn’t mean we won’t want, and need, leisure activities. There’s lots of evidence that hobbies and crafts are important for our well-being. Engaging in complex activity with learnable skills, continual room for improvement, and a concrete reward in the end, can foster feelings of worth and accomplishment and supply important diversion from stress. Researchers compare it to meditation—we can’t dwell on our other problems while doing it, so it calms us, lowers blood pressure and stress chemicals, and provides a range of health benefits from that alone. (Knitting has long been prescribed for soldiers returning from the horrors of combat.) Such activities have been shown to sustain and improve cognitive function (memory, concentration, and problem-solving), and maybe help ward off dementia. They can reduce the likelihood of depression (quilters apparently benefit from working with lots of colours during a drab winter), and provide lots of opportunities for social interaction with all the mental health benefits that go along with that, from emotional support to language skills to mental stimulation. The list of possible benefits from hobbies and creative pursuits is long and most could also be applied to playing sports, too, along with the obvious gains from regular physical activity.

Yet when we picture the future in our stories, TV shows, and movies, leisure activities are rarely mentioned. (There are exceptions: Hollywood seems to be convinced that high-tech gaming will take over our lives, and TV shows like Star Trek have always had more time to indulge in character development, including hobbies. The STNG characters playing out mystery scenarios in the holodeck is a plausible extension of present day game nights and the escape room boom.) Outside of TV series, though, we hardly ever see characters knitting, painting, making music, doing pottery or, for that matter, kicking around a soccer ball. SF novels seem to be especially stingy on this front. And believe me, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I get that we authors are afraid to hold up the plot, but research consistently shows that what makes readers love and remember books is the characters, and that should include (at least briefly) what a spaceship pilot does for fun when he’s not on the bridge. Interestingly, a study of scientists found a connection between their leisure activities and their professional success—their hobbies often helped them discover solutions to puzzling problems in their work, so this could be true for our fictional heroes too. (Lots of potential there!)

Granted, it might be challenging to imagine future hobbies and crafts, but it can’t be harder than figuring out the kinds of controls a spacecraft’s helmsman will use, exotic forms of transportation between stars, or the mating habits of alien species.

There might not be a lot of call for knitted sweaters on a spacecraft with carefully-regulated temperatures, but on planetary colonies or research stations, why not? And people will always want to personalize our living spaces with unique art, crafted items, wall-hangings, you name it.

Men, especially, used to tinker at repairing appliances and small motors. That’s fallen out of fashion—not to mention that it now requires electronic and even computer knowledge as well as mechanical skills because of ubiquitous ‘smart’ circuitry. And woodworking might suffer from a shortage of raw material anywhere but Earth. But it’s possibly to envision a diverting pursuit of useful gadgets, aided by future offshoots of 3D printing or Trek-like replicator technology, and assisted by computers or neural augments.

Constantly-improving music synthesis might seem to make most physical instruments obsolete, but I think that playing a musical instrument (like, say, a spacey miniature harp) could well see a resurgence as we look for ways to reassert our individuality. The same could be said for any number of artistic pursuits. We already feel modern society reducing us to the anonymity of being “just a number”. Creativity and special talents are a way to fight back.

There’s no reason that astronomy won’t remain fascinating for many—the universe seems to hold endless mysteries—we’ll just have much superior instrumentation with which to watch the night sky.

If you want to think on the grand scale, we might someday have the ability to mould clouds, sculpt asteroids, or rearrange space phenomena like Saturn’s rings. But I think it’s more likely that, whether on Earth, fledgling colonies, or interstellar craft, limitations of space will force us to go smaller, perhaps producing ever more intricate models or even subatomic tchotchkes only visible with microscopes. Simply for the pleasure in making them.

I also expect that our current trend toward letting our communication technologies make us more isolated, with less real contact with people, will eventually undergo a reversal and we’ll seek out more in-person social activities. We’re social animals—we’re not meant to only interact by screens.

And let’s not forget that, as a species, we’ve always been storytellers. It’s how we pass on knowledge, relate to other people, and entertain ourselves and others. Maybe we’ll still write books—whatever they might look like—or maybe technology will enable any of us to create games, visual presentations, or holodeck simulations, and participate in them with almost anyone, anywhere. I can’t imagine us ever losing our love of stories. It’s in our DNA.

What hobbies or other leisure activities do you think our future holds? I’d love to see your comments.

HOPE IN SCIENCE

It’s impossible to ignore all of the discouraging stories in the news these days, but there are also stories of great hope, including in the various fields of science. Here are a few recent ones:

In October 2017 a couple of teenage Cystic Fibrosis patients in the UK who’d been given double lung transplants developed bacterial infections that didn’t respond to any of the drugs available.

A University of Pittsburgh micro­biologist named Graham Hatfull had been gathering the world’s largest collection of bacteriophages—viruses that prey solely on bacteria—more than 15,000 of them, so a colleague at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital called him up. Although Hatfull’s team couldn’t save one of the patients, they were able to identify four phages that would attack the other patient’s infection once they were “activated” via some genetic modification. That patient is slowly recovering. The drawback is that this method is ultra-specific—it involves tailoring a cure for each individual patient. As bacteria and viruses become more drug-resistant, this development offers hope, though it needs to be greatly improved in efficiency to be practical on any larger scale. And there are an estimated nonillion phages that haven’t yet been discovered and catalogued (a US nonillion is a 1 followed by 30 zeroes). Other top-level medical science facilities are now exploring this territory.

With climate change threatening to make some dry areas of the planet even drier, and with industry and agriculture’s voracious appetite for water, the need to reclaim industrial waste water and even produce drinkable water from the oceans will become increasingly urgent. Now some researchers from Columbia University have developed a process called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction which involves mixing amine solvents with heavily-salted water at room temperature. The solvent-and-water is lighter than the salts and can be extracted, and then higher temperatures separate the solvent from the pure water. Experiments show that up to 98.4% of the salt can be removed, which is comparable to reverse osmosis. But this new process requires relatively little energy and produces very high water recoverability compared to current desalination methods. If it can be scaled up, it could be a real lifesaver in the world of the future.

Researchers who call themselves agroecologists are promoting more natural ways of growing crops. This approach not only nourishes soil, which makes it more productive and its crops more nutritious, but by helping the microorganisms in the soil to flourish, it also helps to absorb carbon dioxide and water vapour from the air at a much greater rate than scientists thought possible. CO2 and water vapour are two of the most prevalent greenhouse gases driving global climate change. Plants soak up carbon and share it with the microbes in soil, which helps the soil retain water. Scientists warn that, although reducing the amount of CO2 we produce is absolutely necessary, it’s no longer enough to ward off serious climate effects. So we need to find ways to remove excess carbon and water from the atmosphere, and the methods of agroecology could be very effective in doing this. Plus it reduces dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides while making food more nutritious. Sounds like a big win in my book.

In a similar story, though on a much smaller scale, astronauts on the International Space Station will be testing an algae bioreactor—a contraption that will use the CO2 the crew exhales to grow algae which can be used as food. On one level, this could be a great help for long space voyages and colonies on other planets, but it has often been proposed that large algae farms here on Earth, perhaps on the oceans, could be an abundant source of food while, again, removing a lot of unwanted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

All of these stories offer much-needed hope in trying times. Science fiction has been coming up with ideas similar to these, and many more, for decades, as authors imagine the exploration and exploitation of outer space. Science is constantly proving that radical ideas can be turned into reality, and I would argue that science fiction provides the fertile imaginative “soil” from which harvests of new scientific developments spring.

Examples like these also reinforce my belief that hopeful and optimistic SF is still not only defensible, but perfectly sensible. We can’t ignore the potential hazards of human technology and growth, but we also have a duty to promote science as a force for good.

It truly is, when we make it so.