- Sun-Times Media
- University of Chicago students study low-temperature chemistry in 1962. Cryogenic science may soon be able to let people live in the future—but why would they want to?
Change is like the stranger in the movies who arrives in town and is a little too smooth and a little too friendly to children. We know he’s up to no good. When we look back to where the human race was a few hundred years ago, we might concede change some respect. But not our affection.
The e-mails flew fast and furious. “Half the team stayed on one half of the court and passed the ball across the center line to the other half,” one of the basketball girls recalled. “To play full court (running from one end to the other) was too strenuous for young women. Also, we could only dribble the ball twice.”
Shulevitz was describing the personal dystopia that is the fate of everyone who wanders too far into the future. In 100 years, language will be riddled with idioms we don’t know, constructions we’ll manhandle, taboos we’ll violate. Everything we say will be a little off. To our despair we’ll discover that the glue of society is common cultural memory—and that we share none of it. We’ll be the stranger at the cocktail party who can’t break into the conversation.
