Every age has its pessimists. The ’60s had Rachel Carson and her overblown manifesto Silent Spring, which foretold of the poisoning of the planet by man. The ’70s were influenced by the radical ideas of Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb envisioned “hundreds of millions of people” starving to death in the next decade. Neither authors’ visions of disaster came true. Despite their spectacular failures, both Carson and Ehrlich remain heroes of apocalyptic leftists. Perhaps more stunning still is the fact that the enduring mythos of impending doom that they and others like them created retains its potency in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The myth of doom is a triumph of perception over reality.

That perception has run rampant in the 21st century, and not without reason. The expected disaster at the turn of the century, Y2K as it was known, failed to materialize, but the horrible attacks of 9/11 confirmed for many that the new century would be one of disaster and tragedy. To some extent, this view can be said to have been vindicated, with the war on terrorism and its attendant attacks on long-cherished freedoms, disastrous hurricanes, the great Asian tsunami, and economic turmoil repeatedly grabbing headlines and attention. There is even a new Ehrlich on the scene. In The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, author James Howard Kunstler argues that the world is going to run out of oil and, as a result, society is going to crumble. “There will be a substantial interval of trouble like nothing we have ever seen before in the United States,” Kunstler said in an interview, summing up his bleak outlook on the future.

Is such pessimism really justified? The disasters that have occurred so far have been on the local or regional level. They have been horribly damaging to lives and properties in the regions in which they occurred, but they have not been the paradigm-shifting harbingers of doom that the pessimists, like Kunstler, continually warn about. In fact, so far the pessimists have been 100 percent wrong 100 percent of the time.

The fact is that since the close of World War II the world has been experiencing a an age of progress that is nearly unequaled in human history. More people have more food, more shelter, more access to medical care, more access to transportation, to education, and to technology than ever before. Of course, problems remain to be solved and progress is yet to be made in a number of areas. But advances since World War II that have led to such marvels as the Internet, personal computing, and synthetic materials, to name but a few, have allowed millions to live in greater comfort and dignity than ever before. The lesson of the last 50 years is not that technology is good for its own sake, but that it is good because it allows mankind the luxury of studying and reflecting upon the good and the ineffable. Moreover, the future is brighter than the naysayers will have people believe as technology will continue to be a force that liberates the mind for more salubrious endeavors. Looking forward, then, here are the top areas in which rapid technological advance will improve the way people live.

10. Life Expectancy
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, an agency affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the current life expectancy in the United States is 77.6 years. This is a remarkable number. For most of human history, 25 to 35 years would have been a good, long life. Even as recently as 100 years ago, life spans in the United States were remarkably lower than they are now. According to economists Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, “In 1900 the average life expectancy in the United States was just under 50 years.” This figure is, of course, based in part on statistics stemming from the formerly high rates of infant mortality experienced even in the United States. Nevertheless, it also reflects deficiencies in diet, sanitation, work conditions, and health care that have been improved over time.

So, have we reached the limits of life expectancy? In 2002, researchers Jim Oeppen and James W. Vaupel argued in the pages of Science magazine that the answer is no. They pointed out that “experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling: these experts have repeatedly been proven wrong.”

In the near future gains in life expectancy will come through an improved understanding of biology. Scientists are now studying intriguing genetic possibilities. In one study, Cynthia Kenyon, at the University of California in San Francisco, found that by altering the function of one gene, the life span of a species of roundworm could be increased from the usual two weeks to a month.

Another study with roundworms found that certain anticonvulsant drugs had a substantial impact on life expectancy. The drugs lengthened the life of the worms by up to 50 percent. The research has fueled speculation that there soon may be drugs available that could have related life-extending effects in humans. “What's very encouraging is that these drugs were developed to treat humans, and they are well understood, because they've been used for a long time,” said Kerry Kornfeld, a geneticist with the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

These discoveries come on the tail of research from 2001 pointing to genes located on the fourth chromosome in humans that play a role in extending life. But for researchers studying aging, there is still much left to learn. “Somehow … neural activity seems to regulate the aging of all of the body … the skin, musculature, and reproductive tract,” Kornfeld told National Geographic. “Somehow the nervous system coordinates the progress of all these tissues, evidently, through the life stages. But we don't know how it does that.” Nevertheless, as science begins to uncover the hidden control mechanisms behind aging, it is likely that rapid advances in life expectancy will be the norm in coming decades.

9. Regenerative Medicine
According to the American Heart Association, there are almost 500,000 deaths from heart attacks each year in the United States alone. Some estimates indicate that as many as 6.5 million Americans suffer from angina or chest pain stemming from heart disease. Currently, heart disease is treated by drugs or, in more serious cases, with bypass surgeries and angioplasties. In the worst cases, heart transplants may extend life. These treatments may soon be supplemented with or supplanted by a new, innovative technology.

Tissue engineers are now growing and testing heart “patches” that someday soon could be used to repair damaged heart tissue, essentially returning the heart to pre-heart attack functionality. According to HealthDay reporter E.J. Mundell, the patches are grown in a “cardiac environment inside a special tissue-growing chamber called a bioreactor.” Of course, much work remains on techniques to implant such patches within the heart, but some trials in animals on aspects of the problem are already underway. As in Star Trek, someday, perhaps in the next decade say scientists, damaged tissues will be replaced by custom-grown replacements.

The most exciting part of the research into regenerative therapies is the prospect that future regenerative treatments could focus on causing damaged tissues to repair themselves in the body. “Conventional, chemically-based drugs serve mostly as temporary supports for the body's failing chemistry,” says William A. Haseltine, chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, Inc. “They usually do not repair what is wrong. If a patient with a tendency to depression stops taking medication, for example, the depression returns. Nor do chemically based drugs regenerate injured or worn tissues. Regenerative medicine, by contrast, has the potential to cure disease, because it can bring about long-lasting changes in the body that are tailored to a particular ailment.”

There is, of course, an intrinsic limitation on the freedom scientists have to investigate some potentially promising therapies. This limitation often stems from the availability of public funding for research. At present, public sources provide a rather large percentage of funding for medical research and these funds, in many cases, are given only to researchers following established and approved lines of inquiry. As the new field of regenerative medicine shows, remarkable advances are possible under such conditions. Still, the rapidity of advancement and the proliferation of useful therapies would be further ensured if the structural limitations on scientific inquiry that presently exist were removed.
    
8. Energy
It may seem counter-intuitive to list energy among a list of reasons to be optimistic for the future. The conventional wisdom is that energy supplies are dwindling while demand is rising, creating a condition in which a serious social and economic dislocation is unavoidable, if not actually imminent. Nevertheless, there is plenty of oil to go around. Estimates of oil in the world’s proved reserves range from 1.025 trillion barrels (2002 U.S. estimate)  to 1.15 trillion barrels (2003 British Petroleum estimate). This is enough oil to last as much as 40 years.

It is not just oil that is in abundance. Coal abounds in the U.S. and can be burned much more cleanly now than in the past, making it, once again, a very viable resource for the generation of electricity. U.S. coal reserves are large enough to meet current demand for coal for the next 200 years.

Despite their abundance, there is increasing demand for these traditional fuel resources, stemming from increased demand for energy. This demand-rich environment is stimulating development of other energy technologies. Interest in nuclear energy abroad has remained strong, but with higher prices for traditional fuels, interest is again growing in the United States. Moreover, there is continual interest in the development of fusion as a viable energy option, though for the moment this remains largely a government funded, and therefore less likely to succeed, initiative. Current fusion efforts include the high profile International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) to be built in France and another, similar reactor to be built in China. These will not produce any commercially available power, but the highly trained engineers and scientists working on these projects will be able to apply the knowledge they gain toward other improvements and developments.

Other energy technologies are closer to reality. Innovation in gasoline-fueled power systems has brought the first hybrid gas-electric cars to market. As fuel prices increase, demand for these efficient vehicles will rise, spurring further investment in developing advances to the technology. Fuel cells too, though still needing further development, will eventually come to play a larger role in both industrial and consumer use.

7. Personal Fabrication
One of the emblematic scenes from Star Trek is of crew members nonchalantly requesting food or drink from the “replicator.” In Star Trek The Next Generation, Captain Picard, for instance, is frequently asking for “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” which then miraculously appears in a white china cup atop a matching saucer. This exact type of personal fabrication is still very much in the realm of fiction, but something bearing a certain likeness to this is already having an impact in industry and, according to some, will eventually come to be commonplace even in the home.

In industry, rapid prototyping technology is changing the way in which businesses create models of future products and produce items with intricate geometrical designs. Formerly the preserve of CNC machining, rapid prototyping is now a real alternative. In this process, a product is built from layer after layer of bonded material. In a sense, it is a bit like having an ink jet printer print layer after layer of the same design over the same space. Eventually the layers build up into an object.

In fact, a smaller, sometimes desktop version of rapid prototyping known as 3D printing has become available, offering “printed” three dimensional output in color. The next step is to make consumer goods using such technology. Scientist and engineer Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. In his 2005 book entitled Fab, he notes that 3D printing and rapid prototyping has tremendous potential. “The final frontier in rapid prototyping is to introduce functional as well as structural materials, in order to print complete working systems,” Gershenfeld writes. “Powders and plastics that conduct electricity can be used to print wires, there are printable semiconductors that can be used to deposit logic circuits, motors can be made with magnetic materials, combinations of chemicals can store energy…. Printable inks containing each of these types of materials have been developed and demonstrated in the laboratory. Integrating all of them into a printer is the most promising route toward making one machine that can make anything.”

It may seem far-fetched, but impressive real-world applications using this technology are right around the corner. Engineer Behrokh Koshnevis at the University of Southern California, for instance, has developed a giant “printer” that can print houses and other buildings using concrete. “It’s much like printing on paper,” Koshnevis told Popular Science last year. “But unlike an inkjet print head that just moves sideways, our nozzle can move in all directions….” We may still be some distance from hot, replicated Earl Grey tea, but custom-printed shoes and even houses and office buildings may be just around the digital corner.

6. Civilian Space Exploration    
Government has had a virtual chokehold on space ever since the Soviets launched Sputnik. There are two fascinating developments that seem to indicate that this government monopoly may be challenged in the 21st Century.    

The first of these developments is the capture of the $10 million X Prize in 2004 by SpaceShipOne, the privately funded and built rocket ship produced by Burt Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites. With astronaut Brian Binnie at the controls, SpaceShipOne reached a record high altitude (for what is nominally an airplane) of 367,442 feet. The previous record was set by the U.S. Air Force with its experimental flights in the X-15 rocket plane. The previous high mark was 354,200 feet, set by Joseph Walker in 1963.

While SpaceShipOne is not the Space Shuttle, it does seem to be the machine that will inaugurate the beginning of serious civilian space flight. On July 27, 2005, Scaled Composites President Burt Rutan and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson announced the formation of a new business venture formed to build and fly civilian space vehicles. A press release from Scaled Composites indicated that the new Spaceship Company “will manufacture the new launch aircraft, spaceships and support equipment and market them to spaceline operators, including the launch customer, Virgin Galactic.”

Branson is serious about space, and Virgin Galactic is a serious business. The company has signed a deal with the state of New Mexico to build a spaceport in the state. The venture is going to cost New Mexico $100 million (and one wonders why taxpayers should foot any part of this bill), but Virgin Galactic, as part of the deal, has agreed to lease the spaceport for 20 years. It is also planning on locating its world headquarters there. The company will initially operate five space planes designed by Rutan and built by the Spaceship Company.

Not only may it be possible to get into space soon, but there may actually be somewhere to go once you’ve reached space. Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America hotels, has invested $500 million in developing a commercial space station. The project is quietly underway at the millionaire’s other firm, Bigelow Aerospace, in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

The project has drawn the attention of NASA. The space agency has cooperated with Bigelow Aerospace on the private company’s efforts with an eye toward utilizing some of the company’s technology itself. And this technology is nearly mature. The firm has planned for a launch of prototype technology this year. “We are taking a robust, step-by-step development approach,” Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace said in an interview with Space.com. “The purpose of this mission is to demonstrate and validate the core technology, such as the inflation process, as well as the durability and longevity of the vehicle when actually exposed to the on-orbit environment for a period of years.” With Virgin Galactic, Burt Rutan, and Bigelow Aerospace involved, the civilian conquest of space is on.
    
5. Food
With it being a basic necessity of life, there is always concern about the quality and availability of food. In the last few years, though, concerns about the food supply have escalated in no small part because of hysteria over mad cow disease and genetically modified food. Tainted products from China have also put consumers on edge. Driven by these concerns, consumers have turned increasingly to organic growers in the pursuit of quality and safety. Unfortunately, organic agriculture has no hope of feeding the world because it is a more labor-intensive type of agriculture that does not make maximal use of agricultural resources. On the other hand, advances in agricultural technology will continue to make better food available to more people.

Despite the criticism leveled against it, especially in Europe, the next revolution in agriculture, the one that will bring a new and unprecedented bounty of food, is genetic modification. According to researcher Julia A. Moore in an article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Biotechnology promises to boost crop yields, reduce environmentally harmful chemical use, lessen pesticide consumption and exposure, and fight off devastating agricultural pests and diseases.”

In fact, genetically modified food is the next logical step in mankind’s ongoing quest to develop better varieties and types of crops. From the very beginning of organized agricultural activity, man has been working continuously to manipulate the genotype of many plants in order to make them more productive when grown in a systematic way. Take corn, for instance. Today this common staple bears scarcely any resemblance to its ancient, wild ancestor. That ancestor, teosinte or Zea mays parviglumis is native to central Mexico and was domesticated 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. Wild teosinte ears have very few kernels stacked one upon the other. Only through genetic manipulation through selective breeding has man been able to turn this unremarkable plant into the staple crop it is today. Now, genetically modified corn is engineered to resist pests that reduce crops.

The most common type of modified corn is known as Bt corn. This strain contains certain genes from a type of soil bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis. The inclusion of a gene from this bacterium causes the corn to produce a protein that kills the larvae of the European corn borer. As a result, insect damage to crops is reduced without the need to spray insecticides, and this leads to increased crop yield.

Genetic modification of crops is not just about increasing yields. It is also about increasing the nutritional value of food crops. A good example of this is so-called “Golden Rice.” Normal rice lacks vitamin A, a substance that is especially important for the health of children. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an organization that has not been friendly to genetically modified food, worldwide there are “400 million children suffering from vitamin A deficiency.”

The situation is particularly acute in poorer nations in which rice is the primary staple. Now, though, through genetic modification, researchers have been able to create a rice variety that is high in provitamin A. Availability of this crop may be vitally important to the health of millions of children. Other crops with enhanced nutritional values are beginning to appear as well. This is especially true of soybeans, which are being modified in a number of ways. Some researchers are working on creating soybeans that produce healthier cooking oils. Others are working on making soybeans that produce large quantities of Omega-3 fatty acids, compounds currently available in fish products that are important for neuro and cardiovascular health.1 And these are just a few examples. In coming years, genetically modified food will make the world a healthier place to live.
 
4. Nanotechnology
Imagine being able to build a structure one molecule, or even one atom, at a time. As with other entries on this list, this concept seems straight out of science fiction. Until recently, the only experience humankind has had with this technology is with items “built by nature.” In the human body, for instance, proteins are assembled by cellular “machinery” one molecule at a time. But this nano-scale assembly has been beyond the grasp of human-made technology. Until now, that is. According to Edward Samulski, a physicist from the University of North Carolina who is an advisor on nanotechnology to the State Department, “We now have tools to manipulate atoms and build nanoscale structures. Simultaneously, we are getting better at predicting risks and we must improve our ability to manage the side effects of all newly discovered phenomena ultimately for the betterment of the human race.”

Nanotechnology has been at the forefront of technological fears in recent years. The most feared enemies in the Star Trek universe, for instance, were the Borg, cybernetic beings that constructed and controlled themselves and their environment with “nannites,” or nano-scale robots. In the more recent science fiction series Stargate SG1, the protagonists had to defeat a mechanical race of “replicators” that were able to self-replicate through nanotechnology. This last bit of fiction roughly approximated what nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler called “grey goo,” a seething mass of self-replicating nano-machines that could destroy the world.

Fortunately, “grey goo” is a very long way off. But the positive aspects of nanotechnology are beginning to appear in everyday life. These range from exotic, high-tech medical applications to everyday items that will soon be available on retail shelves. In the realm of “high tech,” for instance, researchers at the University of Illinois have found that certain assemblies of so-called carbon “nanotubules” could be implanted in people suffering from diabetes to provide real-time monitoring of blood sugar. The same technology may be able to sense other harmful substances from within cells. “This is the first nanotube-based sensor that can detect analytes at the subcellular level,” said Michael Strano, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois. Nanotech is becoming available right now in more mundane applications. PPG Industries has introduced, for instance, self-cleaning glass made using nanotechnology. According to PPG, the new glass uses UV radiation to “slowly break down and loosen organic dirt.” Researchers in Australia are hoping to use similar technology to make self-cleaning bathrooms. “If you've got this on tiles or shower screens you don't need so many chemical agents,” Professor Rose Amal, one of the Australian researchers, told the Sydney Morning Herald. Nanotechnology is new and these innovations are just the tip of the future iceberg. In years to come, the products around us, the medical treatments we receive, and the work that we do will be heavily influenced by nanotech.

3. The Next Computing Revolution
When it comes to computing, Moore’s Law famously specifies that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. Pessimists have pointed out that such an exponential trend can’t possibly continue. Moore himself was considered bullish on the subject in 2003 when he said the trend could continue for at least one more decade. “Another decade is probably straightforward,” Moore said at the International Solid-States Circuits Conference. “There is certainly no end to creativity.”

In fact, if Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy is right, Moore’s Law will continue in operation far beyond 2010. In a now famous Wired magazine article that discussed the dangers represented by several technologies, Joy indicated that computers would continue to grow in power. “Until last year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore’s law might continue only until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached,” Joy wrote. “It was not obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing smoothly. But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics – where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors – and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore’s law rate of progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today.”

The first generations of this new computer technology are nearing implementation. Wherein traditional chips shuffle electrical impulses around a chip, in the next phase of computer development it will be photons, particles of light that are shuffled around. Already Intel is experimenting with such photonic technology. In 2005, the company announced that it had created a silicon-based laser on a chip. The laser could emit a stream of photons – light – that could be modulated to represent data. “This is a scientific breakthrough, and a psychological breakthrough, because no one thought you could do it," said physicist Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s photonics technology lab.2 The use of photonics in computer chips would allow chip makers to sidestep the physical limitations of existing computer technology. “At data rates approaching 10 billion bits per second, microscopic imperfections in the copper or irregularities in a printed-circuit board begin to weaken and distort the signals,” Paniccia and coauthor Sean Koehl wrote in Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This will result in much faster computer technologies. “The performance gains will be significant,” Paniccia and Koehl noted. “Integrated onto a silicon chip, an optical transceiver could send and receive data at 10 billion or even 100 billion bits per second.” This is orders of magnitude faster than current Gigabit Ethernet, the fastest networking technology presently and commonly available. How soon will fully photonic, or holographic computers become available? In 2002 Purdue University physics professor David D. Nolte, in his book Mind At Light Speed, predicted that this technology would be commercially available by 2020. With Intel’s discovery, this could happen even sooner.

As powerful as holographic computation seems to be, it pales beside what might be possible via quantum computation. This form of computation, largely but not entirely theoretical at this point, relies on the potential processing power inherent in the subatomic world. This is the world governed by the strangeness of quantum theory (famously developed by some of the last century’s greatest minds, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, and Werner Heisenberg to name a few) in which subatomic particles behave in seemingly random and non-deterministic ways.

The first concrete steps toward the development of quantum computers have been taken. In late 2005, researchers at the University of Michigan developed a quantum chip that can isolate a single atom. Once isolated, the atom can be used as the basic, and powerful, element of quantum data storage and processing. “The semiconductor chip we demonstrated holds an individual atom in free space inside the chip – we levitate the atom in the chip by applying certain electrical signals to the tiny nearby electrodes,” said Michigan physics professor Christopher Monroe. “We directly view this single atom with specially-tuned lasers and a sensitive camera.” This crucial step paves the way for further developments that quite possibly could make quantum computing available in the next ten or twenty years. “There is a worldwide race to build these (chips) right now, as such an integrated chip structure shows a way to scale the quantum computer to bigger systems – just like the microfabrication of conventional chips have given us the impressive gains in conventional computing speed and power,”3 said professor Monroe. With holographic and quantum technologies, it seems that the computer revolution is just getting started.

2. Cold Fusion
In 1989 scientists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Utah announced that they had initiated a room temperature fusion reaction. The announcement was met, initially, with wild applause and congratulations. But soon attempts elsewhere to replicate the Pons-Fleischmann results proved inconsistent and the Utah scientists and cold fusion became a laughing stock.

Research on cold fusion has continued, however, and some surprising and potentially useful developments have occurred, with recent findings pointing toward the development of real-world applications in the near future. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced a couple of years ago that researchers there had “developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.”

The device used can only be considered a first step, if the desired goal is a technology that can produce usable output for power generation. But in addition to demonstrating that tabletop cold fusion is a reality, it may prove to have many practical applications. “Our study shows that ‘crystal fusion’ is a mature technology with considerable commercial potential,” says Yaron Danon, associate professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer. “This new device is simpler and less expensive than the previous version, and it has the potential to produce even more neutrons.” According to the Rensselaer press release announcing the research, the findings “could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports.”

The Rensselaer device uses pyroelectric crystals that produce a strong electric field when heated or cooled to initiate the fusion reaction. In addition to this technology, other methods of initiating a fusion reaction are being explored. These include techniques for “sonofusion” in which sound waves bombard a substrate causing bubbles to form and violently collapse4 as well as the infamous palladium technique explored by Pons and Fleischmann years ago. Though once viewed with disdain, cold fusion may yet play a practical roll in the near future.

1. Freedom
One of the major trends, if not the major trend, of the last few years has been the ongoing attack on liberty. Especially since 9/11, but certainly predating that terrible attack, the trend in Washington has been to gradually erode Constitutional protections for the natural rights and liberties this nation was, in fact, founded to protect. Fortunately, these attacks on liberty, despite being real and dangerous, have not undermined the legal framework that safeguards freedom in the U.S. The United States Constitution is still the law of the land and the Congress must still, in the end, answer to the American people. A vigilant citizenry can still make a difference in the United States.    

As long as liberty remains protected and guarded within the U.S., material and technological progress will continue unabated. There is no telling what the ingenuity of the human mind can accomplish within a free environment. Where a person or a group of people can be free to work and collaborate and in the end earn a profit from creative ingenuity the potential rewards will motivate Herculean efforts at progress. The proof that this is true is writ large on history. Since 1800, the world has experienced an astounding degree of economic and material advancements unsurpassed and unequaled by any previous age. The peculiar difference between this age of modernity and all ages past is the emphasis on freedom. The Occidental world, and especially the English speaking portion of that world, and most notably the United States, has experienced the greatest degree of freedom and, consequently, the greatest expansion of prosperity.

Looking forward, then, the United States and the world must make a choice. Will freedom continue to be valued and protected or will it disappear under the iron heels of the many would-be totalitarians of the world? This is the fundamental question of the age. If generations to come are to benefit from the many wonders listed here and the many others yet undreamt, then the value of freedom must be recognized. Freedom is not only essential to a life of dignity, it is the engine of progress.

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