I love James Burke and think his Connections & The Day the Universe Changed series as some of the best historical scientific documentaries ever. I was pleased that he was still around and doing talks and while I find his talk on the potential game changing world of abundance with the help of personal nano-factories to be intriguing it is well worth looking at his documentary “After the Warming” in which most of his predictions are way off the mark. You can probably find it on youtube, it was made in the early 90s but made to look like it was the year 2050 and we were looking back at what happened in the early 21st century. We are given mock newscasts of climate disasters - some of which really are close to home, such as the Katrina and Sandy hurricanes, massive bush fires in Greece etc. Yet some of them are hopelessly off the mark - such as Japan dominating the world economy and a word wide planetary body that regulates carbon etc. to mitigate climate change. It is all wildly optimistic, and obviously doesn’t take into account a post 911 world, a post 2008 Economic collapse world, and the fact that the vested fossil fuel energy interests were willing to put up a fight against climate change science. Another wildly optimistic prediction that most of the world stops eating beef by 2020. Still I enjoy listening to Burke, there still might be more things coming out of left field such as synthetic biology. (I suggest George Church’s Regenesis).
