Science: Plastic Ball

At the Manhattan convention of the American Chemical Society (18,000 chemists), Dr. James Bryant Conant, chemist and president of Harvard, looked into his crystal ball (a plastic one, he explained, in deference to modern chemistry). It told him what the world would be like after the next 50 years. ¶Atomic war has been averted, though by “the narrowest of margins.” At the end of the century, “Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Moscow still stand physically undamaged by any enemy action since World War II.” Communist regimes still hold much of the world, but both Marxism and its opponents have been somewhat mellowed by “time and local conditions.” ¶By the year 2000, the world’s oil and natural gas are depleted. Coal is diminishing too. Atomic energy has been a disappointment, but solar energy has become a cheap and inexhaustible source of power. ¶The coal and oil that still remain are not used as fuel. They are turned by new chemical techniques into a wide variety of valuable chemical products. ¶ Food production has been improved enormously, and less food is wasted. Alcoholic beverages, for instance, are based on synthetic alcohol with fermentation used only to give flavor, “as is now done in the case of producing sherry.” ¶ Cheap and abundant power makes it possible to get fresh water from the ocean. This happened about 1985, and turned deserts that lay near the sea into garden spots. ¶ The threat of world overpopulation has been diminished not only by more food but by improved birth control methods, especially “cheap and harmless antifertility components to be added as one saw fit to the diet.” The attitude of religious leaders on this subject will slowly change “without any diminution of religious feeling.”