The future’s so bright …

I gotta wear shades

by Rick Johansen

One day,” I said to my friend, as we were discussing a cheerful range of issues ranging from illness to death, “there will be cures for everything. You will arrive at your GP, not knowing what you are doing there, nor how you arrived, and s/he will diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease. S/he will then write a prescription, explaining how you must take these tablets twice a day for a couple of weeks and soon you will start remembering things again. Or you will have an examination after feeling unwell, said GP will diagnose cancer, work out quickly which type of cancer it is and a different type of tablet will be prescribed.”  This, we agreed, will happen one day, certainly long after we have shuffled off our respective mortal coils because in terms of existence we have only been here for a very short while and technology has already changed so much.

We were on a train journey back to Bristol and my friend was diddling away on his telephone, checking his mum’s smart door bell, as well as putting on his central heating from around 80 miles away. In truth, he could have been on the other side of the world and checked the house temperature. If you can do this and so much more, then why in due can’t technology cure the illnesses and conditions that blight and indeed end our lives?

We had a small popping and crackling little black and white television set when I was a kid and not so much as a house phone. We didn’t have central heating and I was a teenager by the time we got a fridge. The technology we take for granted today would have been the stuff of sci fi movies 50 years ago, maybe 25 in terms of mobile phones. If I can carry my banking on a phone, as well as store all my music, do my weekly shop, order my prescriptions, record how many steps I take every day, order train and bus tickets and Christ knows how much more, then why can’t the technology of tomorrow, maybe even today, not eradicate illness, too?

I am not so naive to imagine that the big cures will be arriving at Boots the Chemist anytime soon, not least because, believe it or not, even things like televisions, ovens and fridges arrived only recently into our lives. Nor am I an expert in how long it may take to overcome major medical issues. Perhaps it will take many thousands of years, but one thing I am as sure as I can be about is that cures and solutions will come along. A computer expert told me recently that in reality we are still in the stone age of technology. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Doubtless at some point some boffin will come up with the elixir of life, where unlike in religion, people really do live forever. I’m not sure I’d want that if it meant a permanent diet of Mrs Brown’s Boys but that could be the way of things in the future.

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to try to get through this one with the assistance of modern techniques and medication. Assuming this generation and the ones that follow don’t fuck things up too badly, the future may be so bright people will have to wear shades.

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