ON APRIL 17, 2013, attendees at an independently organized TEDx event in Geneva, Switzerland, were offered a glimpse at a seemingly impossible future.
Presented under the theme of “eCulture 360° and Wikinomics”, the event offered something unique even to a gathering of some of the most renowned international speakers on science and technology: the organizers billed it as a “TEDx with the opportunity to meet Jacques Vallée, one of the founder[s] of ARPANET, the first version of the Internet.”
Vallée’s lecture at the event, titled “The Age of Impossible: Anticipating Discontinuous Futures,” dealt with how the speed at which modern technology accelerates has resulted in events that would have seemed impossible to many people only years before they transpired. With examples ranging from the collapse of General Motors in 2009 to Bernie Madoff’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vallee presented what he called a “Typology of the Impossible” that hinged on four main kinds of scenarios: events that escalated too quickly, convergences of “low-p scenarios,” events that appear to violate current cultural norms, and finally, scenarios that involve the appearance of a “completely alien concept within a particular culture.”
“There are many things in our culture today that fit that model,” Vallée said at one point during the talk, as he described historical instances where things that seemed unimaginable at one time later became technological norms. Such things, Vallee said, “are possible, but we cannot imagine them. The public is not aware that they can be done. History provides many examples, and the internet itself is an example of something that was unimaginable.”
After discussing his own part in helping create ARPANET, Vallée went on to share several more examples from recent history where unforeseen scientific advancements occurred, seemingly out of the blue.
“And finally,” the scientist said, never evincing a change in his measured tone and demeanor, “the Pentagon could not imagine that fast, erratic, mobile, oval objects in the sky were anything other than mental illusions, and they…” After a brief pause, Vallée cryptically added, “and you can fill out the answers in the next few years.”
Hellbound and Down 