In 'Unexpected Futurist,' we profile the lesser-known future side of influential individuals.
This episode's unexpected time traveler:
Benjamin Franklin
Ben Franklin was an inventor,
observer,
electricity pioneer, and serial experimenter, so it's not entirely surprising
he looked to the future. But it turns out he was looking to the far, far future. In 1780,
he wrote a letter to a friend in which he lamented that he was born during the dawn of science:
Franklin: The Rapid Progress true science now makes
occasions my regretting sometimes
That I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried in a thousand years
the power of man over matter.
We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity
for the sake of easy transport.
Agriculture May diminish its labor and double its produce.
All diseases made by sure means be prevented or cured,
not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.
Narrator: Although one can debate the level of accuracy in Franklin's comments here, he was right about one core concept:
Acceptance of the scientific method and the resulting accelerating pace of discovery was on the brink of
fundamentally changing Mankind's relationship to the world.
Even more shockingly, Franklin also seems to have been the first individual to ever document a variation of the general concept behind cryonics -
preserving a body so that future technologies might return it to life. In another letter, he wrote:
Franklin: I wish it were possible to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life
at any period, however distant:
For having a very ardent desire to see and observe state of America a hundred years hence,
I should prefer to an ordinary death the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine with a few friends
until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country.
But, in all probability,
We live in an age too early, and too
near the infancy of science to see such an art brought in our time to live its perfection.
Franklin had been inspired by observing drowned flies that seemed to regain life after being removed from wine:
A method of life extension that does not work for humans, or even, it turns out, flies.
But while Franklin's ideas here was certainly not fully baked,
it would be hard to blame him seeing as how the cryonics of today is also far from perfection.
Perhaps it was because Franklin was a respected scientist that he kept his speculative futurist side, in which he had concepts,
but no scientific hypothesis on how to achieve them, to private letters. In any case,
it's hard to know if franklin would have been as excited about the idea of cryonics as he was with the promise of wine based preservation.
Deep-freeze isn't as alluring as traveling to the future encased in your own stash of spirits. Whatever his beliefs,
Franklin ended one of these futuristic letters with another thought commonly encountered in the contemporary world:
That mankind's morality was lagging behind its technological progress:
Franklin: Oh, that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement,
that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn
what they now improperly call
humanity.
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