Section 3. Outlining. Technology and the future. Part 1.
The title of my talk is technology and the future, and it's only fair to start with a couple of warnings. I have never been interested in the near future, only the more distant one.

So if you take my predictions too seriously, you'll go broke, but if your children don't take them seriously enough, they will go broke.

I will deal first with transportation and communication, because they are inextricably linked together and do more than anything else to shape society.

For near-earth applications, both communication and transportation, may not be approaching their practical limits and may reach them by the turn of the century.

For terrestrial transportation, I don't see any real need for much advance beyond the currently planned supersonic transports, operating at almost 200 miles per hour. True, one could build pure rocket vehicles to go from pole to pole in about one hour, but I don't think the public will enjoy 15 minutes of high acceleration and 15 minutes of high deceleration, separated by half an hour of complete weightlessness.

Rather more practical, and of much more immediate importance, will be ground-effect vehicles, or hovercraft. I think we'll have them in the thousand-ton and ten-thousand ton class by the end of the century.