Editorial: Future starts now

Within 20 years we'll be sending people to Mars and back. Photo / 123RF

It's not hard to picture the ancient Greeks considering Pythagoras a mad fool when he proudly announced the world was not flat but, in fact, a sphere.

We may smile now - but what would we have thought as recently as the 1980s if told we'd all have miniature phones in our pockets that we'd watch TV on and use to connect with people all over the world via a vast computer network? Oh, and it'll be voice-activated, know our location and we could use it to find information on any subject.

If it took several hundreds years and supporting voices for Pythagoras' theory to stick, it's taken just the blink of an eye to accept our digital, online life today.

So what comes next?

There's as much fun in the speculation as there is in the finding.

Today, American theoretical physicist Brian Greene is in Auckland. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008.

This year's festival has just wrapped up in Brisbane and Greene brings his mind-bending talk A Time Traveller's Tale to the Bruce Mason Centre.

Greene tells science reporter Jamie Morton today (p20-21) of a number of advances that sound straight out of the realm of fantasy.

Within 20 years we'll be sending people to Mars and back, we're likely to know when the universe will end and we're almost certain to discover intelligent life on other planets. Artificial intelligence will become part of everyday life.

Perhaps most excitingly, is the introduction of nanoparticle patrols. These man-made particles will travel round our bloodstream identifying and preventing diseases taking control, transforming almost everything we understand about medicine. New Zealand's own MacDiarmid Institute is at the forefront of cutting edge nanotechnology.

Some of this sounds preposterous - but scroll through your iPhone and remember how far we've come so quickly.

And in a world where atrocities in London and elsewhere consume our thoughts it's reassuring to know there are so many incredible people working to create a brighter, if yet largely unimaginable, future.