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BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
Predicting the future: The internet and two old poems by Paul Danish
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” —Yogi Berra
B
ack in 1984 or 1985, the late Jerry Pournelle, sci-fi writer, futurist, computer geek and American polymath extraordinaire, wrote a piece for InfoWorld on the perils of predicting the future. Generally speaking, he said, predictions you make for five years in the future will be overly optimistic. Predictions you make for 20 years in the future will be overly conservative. Then he made a prediction for 20 years in the future: Thanks to exponentially increasing computer power, I
in 20 years, it will be possible for anyone on Earth to find the answer to any question, provided the answer exists. It was a bold prediction for the time. In 1985 the internet was still being cobbled together. The world wide web wouldn’t be available to the general public until 1991. Google didn’t come into existence until 1998. But as more powerful search engines began to appear in the midand late-1990s, I thought of a small way I could monitor how Pournelle’s prediction was playing out. I picked two obscure poems I had read in high school, but which I couldn’t find online at the time. A JULY 9, 2020
couple times a year I would look for them. The first was titled “The Little Red God,” by an unknown author, probably written in the 19th century. I found it online in late 2004, 20 years give or take after Pournelle’s prediction, with a straightforward Google search on the title. The second poem was more mysterious. It was a short work about the discovery of the early surgical anesthetic ether by Crawford Long and William Morton in the 1840s. I had forgotten both its title and the author’s name, but the opening stanzas were unforgettable. I’d search for it a couple times a year, using a phrase from the first stanza, “whet your saws.” I finally found it last year — quite by accident in the online edition of a 1933 collecsee DANISH PLAN Page 6
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