ГДЗ з англійської мови 11 клас Л.В. Калініна

Unit 5

5.4.

Ex. 7, p. 301

What are scientists currently working on? What is already technologically possibly? What will enter our everyday life in a couple of decades?

The school system is a main reason for that. For many years kids have to attend history courses, but there are no futurology courses. Why do educators care so much about the past and so little (not at all) about the future? Probably for the same reasons as above: fear of change, indifference, and lack of imagination. It’s also much easier to grovel in the past than to think about our future.

But it is important to imagine our potential futures, since we will soon live in one of them, and we can (to some extend) influence the future, while the past is fixed and dead. The primary function of history should be to serve as inspiration for the future; e.g. to avoid making the same mistakes and as a means of extrapolation. The most pleasant way to broaden your mind is to watch or read science fiction. Better read the online science News for Nerds for state of the art developments. Note that many of the following future inventions will have severe social, ethic, environmental, philosophical, and legal consequences, too numerous and complex to be discussed here.

Space exploration. Since 1969 men have landed 6 times on the moon, since about y 2000 there is an International Space Station in the earth orbit that even (rich) tourists can visit, thousands of satellites orbit earth, unmanned spacecrafts passed by nearly every planet and moon and left our solar system, and landed on some of them. Some planets and moons have climates with oceans, atmosphere, storms, mountains, etc. Wormholes, parallel universes, time-travel, etc. Einstein’s special relativity allows time-travel into the future. His general relativity theory may allow via wormholes time-travel into the past. Quantum theory implies that there are zillions of parallel universes. Most of these physical possibilities will probably not be technically realizable (soon), partly due to technical difficulties, partly due to immense costs. Practical space-travel will be confined to our solar system, nearby stars, and mostly unmanned. New species or individuals may occasionally settle on new planets, but active planet tourism is unlikely. [Nevertheless, the movies The Black Hole, Back to the future, and the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine are fun.]