IS IT WAR?

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 421, 4 January 1933, Page 7

IS IT WAR?

H, G. WELLS' WARNING INYVENTIONS OF SCIENCE ARE FULL OF FOREBODING. Msn will be able to pack up a parcel of explosives or poison gas, or incendiary matter, or any little thing of that sort and send it up into the air to travel to any chosen spot in the world and drop its load. I do not think it is going to be so very long before it is practicable.' • H. G. Wells made this remarkable forcast in a talk which he-broad-casted in England is an introduction to a programme of sound pictures illustrating developments in methods of communication during the p>ast 10 years. He was giving a picture of what science will make of the world ili the future. "Ouf military people still stick to guns that carry only 20 miles or so, or airplances that must fight their way through hostile 'planes and gunfire, to drop whatever they do drop. But nobody believes that these things mark the extreme range of offensive activities. "Air torpedoes for anywhere, bomb, gas, and flame delivered wherever you like, or don't like, at any time, this is one of the manifest possibilities to which all this improvement in communications is leading — that is to say, if we go on much longer without taking hold of the war problem much more courageously than we have done hitherto. To-night we are confronted with two facts; one bad and one good. The first has only been hinted at — ^that acts of war have become hideously immediate and far-reaching. The secorid is that the whole round world can be brought together into one brotherhood, into one communion, one close-knit freely communicating citizenship, far more easily to-day than was possible with even such a little country as England a century ago." Mr. Wells urged that what the world needed to-day was Professors of Foresight to warn the nations against the consequences of new inventions. "When I was a student half a century ago," he said, "we used to talk of the abolition of distanee, because of those then eomparatively recent triumphs, the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway train. Nobody believed we should live to take a ticket and fiy round the world. The swiftest thing upon the road was a bicycle, and television seemed a fantastic impossibility. "In a little while all round the earth will be a few days' journey, and everybody will be potentially within sight and sound of everybody all over the planet. "There will he no more distanee left and little separation. You will be able to see and talk to your friends anywhere in the world as easily and surely as you send a telegram to-day. Before another half-century _ has passed everybody, so to speak, will be on call next door. "But I want to call your attention to something still more wonderful something that we' haven't done. Foi all practical purposes we haven't even begun to think yet what we are going to do about this abolition of distsncs "It seems -an odd thing to me that though' we have thousands and thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of students of history working upon the records of the j'ast, there is not a single person anywheie_ who makes a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices. "There isn't a single Professor of Foresight in the world. But why shouldn't there he? All these new things, these new inventions and new powevs come crowding along, eveiyone is fraught with consequences, and yet is it only after something has liit us hard that we set about dealing with it. "See how unprepared our world was for the motor car. The motor car ought to have been anticipated at the beginning of this century it was bound to come. It was bound to he cheapened and make our roads, take passengers and goods traffic from the railways, alter the distribution of our population, congest our towns with traffic. It was bound to make it possible for a man to commit a robbery or murder in Devonshire overnight and breakfast in London or Birmingham. , "Did we do anything to work out any of these consequences of fthe motor car before they came? We did nothing to our roads until they were choked, we did nothing to adjust our railroads to fit in with this new 'element in life until they were overtaken and bankrupt; we have still to bring our police up-to-date with the motor bandit. "That is what I mean of want o± foresight. - "Isn't it plain that we ought to have not simply one or two Prol'essois of Foresight, but whole Faculties and Departments of Foresight, doing all they can to anticipate and prepare for the consequences of this gathering together, this bunching up, which is now going on, of what wei e once widely dispersed human relationships? . . "W^ need to organise foresight m these matters very urgently indeed, because, you see, it is not only that men will he able to get at and see and talk to their friends anywhere, they will also be able to get at those they suppose their enemiss witbj an equal facility. Let me ask you _ how long you suppose it is before this becomes possible?" At this point Mr. Wells introduced his proph'ecy of warefare of the future, as qiioted above, and continued. — "There are no Professors of Fore-

sight yet, hut I am by way of being an amateur. Let me draw a plain conclusion from to-night's audition. "Either we must make peace throughout the world, make one world-State, one world-pax, with one money, one police, one speech,'and one brotherhood, however hard that task may seem, or we must prepare to live with' the voice of the stranger in our ears, with the eyes of the stranger in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our throats in fear and in danger of death, enemy neighbotirs with the rest of our species. "Distanee was ' protection, was safety, though it meant also ignorance and indifferenee and a narrow unstimulated life. For good or evil, distanee has been done away with. This' problem of communications rushes upon us to-day — it rushes upon us like Jehu the son> of Nimshi. It driveth' furiously. "It 'evokes the same question: Is it peace? Because if it is not to be peace forseen and planned and. establish'ed, then it will be disaster and death. Will there he no Foresight until those hombs begin to rain ipon us?" '