The future may be just around the corner, but to bring you this forward-looking edition, we travelled far and wide. I was trying to calculate just how far but I gave up when I passed the 70,000-kilometre mark.
Our first stop was Pasadena, to meet Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of NASA’s JPL. Among the many fascinating things he left us considering were what life-changing discoveries Curiosity, his lab’s Martian rover, might find. “If life evolved on Mars,” he told us, “is it still there? If not, what happened to it?”
Then it was off to New Mexico, where we toured Sir Norman Foster’s Spaceport America, the planet’s first waystation to the stars and boy, did it look the part. We’d barely absorbed that thrill when it was time to make our way to Boston to meet Juan Enriquez, a thinker at the forefront of the coming Life Sciences revolution. His bombshell? A considered belief that we Homo Sapiens are on the verge of evolving into another species with downloadable brains, organs repaired and regrown via stem-cell technology and enhancement through biomachine parts.
Heads spinning, we headed for New York, where Raghida Dergham, the outspoken Al Hayat journalist, told us about her plans to launch our region’s first fully indigenous think tank, one she believes is capable of addressing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
But we weren’t finished yet. Next up was Denmark where we visited the Bang & Olufsen factory, Bangkok where we lingered at the Oriental Residence, Germany where we took Porsche’s new Boxster for a spin along the autobahn and finally, the Côte d’Azure, where our minds were blown by Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles and Riva’s brave new Virtus.
After all that travel, we couldn’t help feeling the one truly useful advancement we humans need now is a quicker way to trot our globe, so we’d like to issue a call to the airlines - bring back supersonic flight! Wishful thinking, we know but we’re all about hope. As Noam Chomsky said, “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” Welcome to the Future.
