Quirks and Quarks - Predictions about science in 2025, recorded 25 years ago

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

In 2000, Quirks & Quarks celebrated its 25th anniversary by travelling forward in time — to 2025 — to find out how science had changed in the years since. In this fictitious future, our present, Zargon the robot, wakes up a Bob McDonald clone from the year 2000 to speak with scientists about 25 years of science. It's a mindbending audio time-capsule with predictions that were oddly prescient, sometimes unsettling or wildly wrong.

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. We're celebrating a half century of science radio programming on CBC Radio. And to mark our anniversary, we have a time-bending treat for you. Here's an encore presentation of our 25th anniversary show, recorded in the year 2000.

Enjoy. Hello, I am Zargun 5, Process 9 Alpha. Welcome to the 50th anniversary of Quarks and Quarks. In 1975, a radio institution was born as Quarks and Quarks took to the airwaves for the first time. And now, here in 2025, we're going to celebrate the anniversary of Canada's favorite science program. On today's program, we will hear how Quarks and Quarks covered great discoveries of the past. We will also introduce special guests who will bring us up to date on what has happened in science in the 25 years since the millennium. At first, it's time to introduce our special guest host.

Long-time listeners might remember that back in the year 2000, radio was still presented by biological life forms. The host for the 25th anniversary program was Human, Bob McDonald. The original Bob McDonald unit could not be here today but is still functioning. He is currently in retirement navigating his solar yacht. But without Bob's knowledge back in 2000, during the Quarks and Quarks 25th Anniversary program, a DNA sample was collected from him, and to help celebrate our 50th anniversary, we have used that sample to clone the Bob McDonald of the year 2000. We now release him from the cloning crash.

Ladies, gentlemen, and non-gendered automata, we present Bob McDonald Mark II. Huh? Huh? What? What the? Where am I? You're in a virtual simulacrum of the Glenn Gould Studio at the CBC Broadcast Center, circa 2000. Do not touch anything.

The holograms are easily disrupted. Holograms? Wow. This is pretty good. Hey, a realistic-looking audience, too. Wow. But why am I here? I got to think, just a minute. I can remember the year 2000, and I was actually in this studio or something like it,

and we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of Quarks and Quarks. And we were talking about how much science had changed since the show first went on the air. Like in 1975, there were no fax machines, there were no personal computers or cell phones. We didn't know about the ozone hole. Nobody had cloned an animal, and antibiotic resistance was unknown. And then we were talking about all this stuff, and all of a sudden I got this stab from a needle. I can still feel it. That's all I remember.

Correct. It is currently October 14, 2025. You have been reconstituted from a tissue sample taken 25 years ago to assist me in hosting the 50th anniversary of quarks and quarks. Wow. 2025. And there's still a CBC. Wow. That's amazing. So, what's been going on in the last 25 years? Well, Bob McDonald, that's what we're here to discuss.

We have invited several scientists familiar to you from your era to bring you up to date on science of the last 25 years. In fact, let's bring out the first one now. We will begin with the field of computers and technology. Our first expert is designated Dr. Rol Vertigal, assistant professor in human computer interaction at Queen's University in Kingston. Welcome to the program, Father.

Nice kids you've got here. Well, if there's one field, I'm sure, has changed in the last 25 years or quarter century as the world of computers. Now, I remember back in 2000, the computers were everywhere. They were part of our lives, and I can see from our little friend here, how far we've come or not.

So what do computers look like now in the year 2025? Well, what's interesting is that they are largely invisible. Really? Yeah. Where are they? Well, in two ways. They're everywhere. In all the gadgets we use, they're in beer bottles, in glasses, we use everything.

But we don't actually see them. So we don't see them. So they're incredibly small. Exactly. The second development that we've seen is that they look like humans. They do. Yeah. You mean like me? Except I'm a clone. I'm not a computer. There you go. So yeah, what happened was 25 years ago You know, we had these big boxes right sitting on our our desks and

People were coming you know increasingly frustrated with that. So a neoludite movement occurred and you know They started chucking these boxes out of the window. Really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know I was pretty frustrated with this this keyboard thing that you had to it bothered me that you had to know how to operate a computer in order to operate it. Yeah. And I didn't care about that. Right. What's happened to all that?

Well, you know, big problem was that there was, you know, a lot of bandwidth coming from the computer to the user. Not that it was used, but it was there. But there wasn't, you know, much users can do to the computer. Right. So, you know, have you ever tried interacting with a human being with a mouse? No. It's not very satisfying, I can tell you. Click away here, yeah.

It's not very satisfying. So what happened? Well, there were basically two, uh, two, uh, two developments. One of the problems with these big boxes was they were designed to do everything. So they were like Swiss Army Knives. So they didn't do anything well. I mean, you know. If at all, yes. Have you ever, you know, gone to a restaurant with your Swiss Army knife? No. No, right, exactly. So people started developing specialized tools and that actually were good at the job. Oh, I see. So each computer does one thing really well. Exactly. And, you know, and then they started

talking to each other. Okay. And that was a problem. Why? Well, can you imagine a thousand computers talking to you? Oh, right. Okay. So how do I talk to the computers I want to talk to for whatever I want them to do? Right. Well, a development called eye tracking allows the computer to see.

Oh. So I just have to look at it. Yeah, I just have to look at it. And it sees that you're talking to it. And that was a wonderful development because the whole cacophony died. Uh-huh. You know, these cell phones, they were called. and they're going off all over the place.

They didn't know. Like when you were talking to another person, it would still go off. It was amazing. So how do we communicate through the computers now? What's that interface if I want to actually do something like talk to somebody else and I don't have to hold something up to my head? Well, you can actually talk to your computer.

Just talk? Yeah, you just talk. Well, that's convenient. So how have they changed our working environment? They were everywhere before. Everybody had one sitting on their desk. What impact would they actually have? Well, after the first RSI problems starting to go away, people did start to use computers again.

We had huge problems. About 60% of the working population became disabled because they're used of the mouse and the keyboard. Oh, yeah? They got all these weird fingers. Exactly. Yeah, a mouse finger. Exactly. So after that, sort of like, people started using them more and more again.

and now basically they've been so ingrained in our every life that we don't even realize that they're everywhere, they're in the air, they're wireless. Is that right? Wow. Now, we did a story back in 2000 about the amazing possibilities of nanotechnology, like incredibly microscopic machines. What happened there?

Well, a lot has happened since then. I think one of the more interesting developments has been the development of nanobots. nanobots? Yeah. Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little bots that you can actually inject. And you can make them latch onto your neurons.

And if you inject a lot of these, you can actually get a feed from your brain. They're connected directly into the neurons in my brain. Exactly. And it's kind of scary. I mean, there's all sorts of privacy issues, which people are suing all over the place right now. Okay.

Okay, so once I get the computer in my head, what's that? Well, it basically means that we now no longer have to wear goggles. Like we used to wear these big goggles and everything and suits and everything because we had to connect to our actual limbs. Now we can just connect to our neural pathways, and it's much more efficient. And much more satisfying. Well, pornography was big back then, you know. Oh, virtual reality is right now.

right in your head. Exactly. It sounds like dreaming. It sounds like the computer program would be like a dream. You just experience it. Well, yeah, it could be a nightmare. I guess so. It's crashing.

Oh, my head hurts. There was one other thing that happened in the 90s that I remember when a computer called Deep Blue beat a chess master. It was Gary Kasparov, I think it was his name. And it beat him anyway. It was a big deal that a chess master had been beaten by a computer and everybody was talking about artificial intelligence and computers are going to get so smart that they're going to take over.

How smart are they? Well, it's not smartness. That's the real problem. The Olympic Games are no fun anymore. They're not? No. Why? Well, robots win all the medals.

Don't you hate it? And, you know, occasionally Canada gets, you know, a bronze. Which actually not much has changed. Well, I'm glad to see that the computers have. become invisible, but they're still part of our lives. Interesting thought to be thinking your virtual reality instead of having to wear those cameras or whatever we put on our heads. And I'm glad they didn't take over too much in our lives and that they're not really like us. Dr. Vertigo, thank you very much for joining us. It was a pleasure. Okay. That was Dr. Roll Vertigo,

Professor of Human Computer Interaction at Queens University. Bob McDonald, in addition to inviting these scientists here to update you on the last 25 years, we have also included events from Quarks and Quarks in your era, the late 20th century. You will find these events described on the paper in front of you. Will you please introduce them for our audience? Okay. Here's a voice that may be familiar to many of you. He was the very first host of Quarks and Quarks in 1975. David Suzuki, you might have heard of him. Here he is in 1978, reporting on the end of one of humanity's greatest scourges. The scene is a small village in Somalia,

where the last known case of smallpox on the entire planet was tracked down by WHO, the World Health Organization. The villagers are brought together and chant their ritual songs before they're to be protected from the dread disease by vaccination. The World Health Organization won the last battle in the war against smallpox in 1978. Ali Malim, the man who the WHO tracked down in Somalia,

was the last person on Earth to have naturally contracted smallpox. Now you will see to my left the latest version of the MP64 holographic audiovisual musical component known as the Charlie Gray Cosmic Quarks Quintet. You may remember

that in the last millennium Charlie Gray composed the theme for quarks and quarks. Now, of course, we have far more sophisticated computer composition programs. Let's hear it for the holograms for Charlie Gray and our great Perks and Quarks band. It's so neat to see them live, isn't it? You hear it on the show every week, and there they are in person. Bob McDonald, it is time for our next guest. In the year 2000, Anne Gibbons was Professor and Chair of the Department of Animal Science at the University of Guelph. She was studying recombinant technology. Dr. Gibbons.

Hi, Dr. Gibbons. Hello. Well, biotechnology. Talk about a hot, if not controversial subject. What's happened in that subject since the year 2000? Well, I have to say, first of all, that I feel very uncomfortable sitting next to you right now, because I'm old-fashioned. And 25 years ago, in 2000, you were an illegal entity.

So you sort of snuck in. Yes, human clones. I'm a cloned human. We're a cloned human, yes. So we'll talk about this after the show. Okay, sorry. I'm illegal. Is it legal in the year 2025?

I'm not sure that it's legal generally, but it's being practiced in some places. But definitely, as far as my area of interest is concerned, it's legal. So there are many, many animal clones used now. But not too many humans. I'm not prepared to comment on that. Okay, so what's happened other than not doing human cloning? Yeah. What's happened in the field of biotechnology?

Well, a great deal of cloning, as I said. Also, a lot of genetic engineering, a lot of genetic modifications, so that the problems that we saw in the year 2000 have largely been resolved through a great deal of public debate and development of practices that ensured that the progress was made. Well, I know there were a lot of problems. promises of biotechnology that they were saying was going to make our lives easier. Did it actually do that?

In some cases, perhaps it did. If we look at a funny example, it would be milk. I remember as a young married woman having to haul around bags and bags and bags of milk for my family because in the 20th century this was the thing to do, drink loads of milk. And cows were bred so that they produced large volumes of milk. much of which of course was water. So now, partly through genetic engineering,

partly through more sophisticated selection mechanisms, we can now develop cows that produce milk with the same types of solids that we want, the protein and the fat from the milk, but a much smaller volume. So we don't have to spend all that energy and effort heaving milk, heaving water around, either for processing or on the farm or from the grocery store. So you're saying the case.

cow's milk is more concentrated now. It's more concentrated now and the processes or you in your home can make it into a beverage if you wish in any way that you like. Just add water. Yes. Now what about this idea that you add stuff to milk? They were doing that with biotechnology as well and that's that has progressed a great deal. So this is mainly through genetic engineering where products are added to the milk naturally in the cow to improve it. its nutritional content or to improve its safety, but also to produce products that are useful, say, in the pharmaceutical industry. Even in the year 2001, human proteins were being deposited in the milk of livestock animals,

like antitripsin, helping people who have emphysema or antithrombin, helping people with circulatory problems. That was a big idea, that all you have to do is drink milk to get your medicine. that you don't have to take care. Well, I think actually the way things go, of course, most of this is now extracted and we take it in other forms. Are there any other ways that biotech has made our lives easier or changed them? Well, another aspect of biotechnology is the use of nanobots. Oh, really?

So nanobots in the last 25 years have become a very big thing in agricultural biotechnology. And just as it's being done in humans, we can now. use them in animals to convey various drugs around the body to very specific areas where they're required. We can use them to monitor whether there's disease or damage in an animal so we have a much better, we're alerted much faster to any potential disease problems and there are lots of other fascinating things we can do like sheer sheep by carrying depilitary agents through the body in nano robots. So no longer do we have to see the poor shearer standing as I've seen in New

Zealand the shearer standing over with sweat literally pouring off his brow. It's all done by nano robots now. We can also... Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold. You're saying that you've got little microscopic machines that'll go around and cut the hair off the sheep on the sheep skin so you don't have to shear, it just falls off. It's carrying an agent which causes the hair to fall, the fleece to fall, very specifically to the hair roots. And then will it weave itself into a sweater?

No, no, never mind. Do you want the answer to that? Okay, now there was also the idea of transgenic animals, where you have animals where we put, say, human genes in them so that we could use them as organ donors and stuff like that. What happened to all that? Yes, well, that technology. has been superseded by increased sophistication using human cells. So although for a period the organs produced primarily and specially engineered pigs, were used quite a lot for organ transfer.

In actual fact, vast improvements in human medicine has meant that the number of transfers required has been reduced. And an exciting use of those pigs in the, those pigs in the first place was providing cells that could be used for people, say, who had Parkinson's disease and so on. Well, that can all be done now through human cells. So that was a bubble that was very interesting at the time, but it's now over. I was just thinking about your self-shearing sheep. Maybe you could have sheep that would produce wool in different colors so that you don't have to dye it. Yes, that's been thought of since

for quite a long time and certainly we can now produce cotton in different colors. It must look interesting walking around in the field there with a plaid sheep. That's right. There's a famous cartoon with a ferral sweater on the sheep already built in. Oh, I see. So we have multicolored sheep and multicolored trees now in the forest. But there are also plants that produce plastic. Even in the year 2000, there were plants developed, transgenic plants developed, that could synthesize a polyester. So that's preceded quite a lot, and it's saving those natural resources. I can't wait to take a walk outside this studio.

I'm wondering what the world must look like right now. One last thing about biotechnology, though, is in my time in the year 2000, there was a lot of opposition to it. And a lot of people felt that we shouldn't be doing this. It was the wrong thing. It was unnecessary. There was a lot of controversy about it. What happened to that?

Well, that began a very large debate, which was international and had to be. And it reminded me very much of the debate that took place in the 70s when recombinant DNA technology was first introduced. Exactly the same thing happened then. And so there was a period of about five to ten years when there was a great deal of debate and gradual harmonization. so that indeed safety practices were put in. There were special measures taken to breed plants, for instance, that couldn't escape and couldn't do all of the naturalization with wild relatives that was really worried about.

There was a lot of concern about the safety of foodstuffs from genetically engineered foods, and that was also addressed by the regulatory agents. The big concern of the public now is the nanorobots, they are now being designed to self-replicate. Ooh. And so that's worrying. Yeah, I can understand.

Especially for a biologist. Well, yeah, it's good to know that, though, that the protests and the resistance to biotechnology was a good thing because it did police it, and it did point to the problems it needed to be addressed. And it led to measures being developed to address those problems. Dr. Gibbons, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Dr. Anne Gibbons, from the Department of the Department of the Department of of animal science at the University of Guel. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves, I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet

doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary on CBC Radio this year of 2025, and you're listening to a special encore presentation of our 25th anniversary show, a time capsule of where we thought science would be in 2025. Well, if you're confused about what's going on here, so am I. The last thing I remember is celebrating the 25th anniversary of, CBC Radio's National Science Program, Quarks and Quarks. The next thing I know, I'm here in the year 2025 at the 50th anniversary program in a virtual reality

recreation of Glenn Gould Studio at the CBC Broadcast Center in Toronto. And this robot here who calls themselves Zargon, who hosts Quarks and Quarks in 2025, is telling me I'm a clone of the original Bob McDonald. I fail to see what's so confusing. Yeah. Well, fortunately, it seems that the producers of this program in 2020, 25 are planning to bring me up the speed, and they've invited a whole pile of scientists to come on and tell me about what's happened in the world in the 25 years since 2000. I guess it all makes sense, but it's kind of a weird idea for a radio program, wouldn't you say? Bob McDonald, let us proceed.

Here is your next guest who will inform you about progress in physics and astronomy. In the year 2000, Dr. Bart Nettlefield was Associate Professor of Observational Cosmology at the University of Toronto. he investigated the cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang. Dr. Netterfield. Hi, Dr. Netterfield. Welcome to Brooks and Korps. That's good to be here.

Okay. We're into my favorite subject here, which is astronomy. You have good taste? Yep. And I remember in 2000 that the Hubble telescope and other great instruments were revealing all kinds of wonderful things. Where do we go from there? Well, of course, the next 25 years has been

a continuation and even acceleration of our ability to resolve distant objects with the explosion of instrumentation. The 50-meter telescope in space now where you can observe objects back to the very beginning, to the very first stars. I think at this point now we've really sort of covered historically the history of the universe from the CMB and Echo the Big Bang right through the generation of the first stars and galaxies. We have a very good idea of what's happened. We have a 50-meter telescope out there? That's huge.

Well, that's the large. a single dish. There are arrays now with a square kilometer of collecting area. Wow. Okay. So we've got these giant telescopes. Astronomy seems to be in good shape. How about some of the basic questions in cosmology? Because I remember during my time, there was this embarrassing fact that most of the universe was missing. That there was this stuff called dark matter, and we didn't know what it was, and what happened? Did we ever find it? Well, this has been really one of the major efforts in theoretical. physics as well as in an experiment.

And it ties right in with the whole question of the granified theory of matter, of combining gravity with quantum mechanics. And I don't know if you recollect there was a large number of people back in the previous generation who were working on what was then called string theory. And that whole avenue has evolved considerably in the last 25 years.

And the rumor is coming out of several institutions now where they actually have a solution to the whole quantum gravity question that, in course, includes a solution to this question of the dark matter. Unfortunately, this theory is complicated enough that it's rumored there's only six people who actually understand it. So, um, and I'm not one of them. And I'm not either.

So a lot of the research now is going on into science education in fact. Uh huh. Oh really? So the unified theory is unified. They did that. Yeah. Okay. Now I know that if we, let's come back closer to Earth.

Yes. All right. The physics of the atmosphere was a big issue. We were worried about CO2 and global. warming and the climate change and all that. How are we doing? Well, it's sort of obvious. I mean, maybe you haven't been outside.

No. I haven't seen the plastic trees. We sort of have a new saying as rare as snowfall in Vancouver. Oh. There's been a definite warming. You think you'll find, especially in the coastal areas, a significant increase in the global temperatures. Really?

The Northwest Passage now is finally a reality. And there's shipping going through the Northwest Passage. So there's just some, some news. And I think the biggest thing that's happened is finally the computational models are such that we can do a much better job at understanding what the ramifications of decisions we make today are going to be in the next 25 years. I think we've learned from, well, the necessity of knowing what's going to happen is, as it's been sort of obvious, as you'll see. All right. So what would you say then was physics's greatest advance, or the, let me put it

another way. What would you say was the advance in physics that had the biggest impact on people's lives. Well, I think it's already been referred to by some of the previous people. The whole, the whole issue in biophysics of unlocking the interface with the human nervous system. And so now, I mean, initially it was maybe even in your time, they were toying with prosthetic hearing and things like that. And of course, it's developed substantially. Now we can actually decode the human nervous system and the whole biophysics questions that went along there. Dr. Netafield, thank you very much for your time. That's fine.

Okay. That was Dr. Barth Netafield from the Astronomy Department at the University of Toronto. Here's another great moment from Quarks and Quarks Archive. On April 25, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine exploded, killing dozens and sending out a toxic cloud of radiation all over Europe. Later that week, we interviewed a British nuclear scientist named Peter Potter, who was familiar with the Chernobyl-style reactor, and it became clear that he thought these Soviet...

reactors were just a disaster in waiting. The reactor is basically unstable, which may not be a problem in itself, but on top of that, there are very few secondary safety measures. For instance, there is no secondary containment which would contain the fission products which would be emitted if there was a meltdown. There is no secondary shutdown system if the primary shutdown system fails for any reason. We also found that if there was to be an escape of steam into the graphite moderator, in fact it would burst, and that appears to be what has happened. Although the people of the Ukraine and Belarus still live with the effects of the fallout from Chernobyl,

thankfully the disaster has not repeated. Bob McDonald, this has been a most edifying performance, but we are not done yet. Your next guest is familiar to you. Dr. Jackie Duffin was a regular guest on Quarks and Quarks in your era, presenting interesting cases from the annals of medicine. She reprises that role today discussing the history of medicine since the year 2000. Jackie is Hannah Professor of Medical History at Queen's University in Kingston. Hi, Jackie.

Hi, Bob. Hi. I'm astounded. You looked just like you did in the year 2000. Biotechnology, Bob. Ah. You look the same too. Well, I'm a clone.

so I can get away with it. Apparently an illegal clone, too. All right. So the big story in the year 2000 was the completion of the human genome project. And it was going to revolutionize medicine by now, the year 2025. Did it? Well, there was a lot of excitement.

You may remember, and I'm sure some people in the audience remember the decoding of the human genome project. And the first results were extremely exciting. With genomics and proteomics, we were able to solve those single gene defects. Wow. All right. Things like TASACs, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, taken care of. They were cured? Yeah. Because, wow, that's good. All right. So who benefited? I mean, were there... Well, then people got very interested in the possibilities of having your genome in your pocket.

And we were able to carry around little cards with barcodes on them that had our entire gene code on it. And we were hoping that we would be able to sort out all the diseases that we might be at risk of developing. and with proteomics prevent them. I see. So is everybody still really hot on it? I mean, is it the thing that everyone was talking about? It slowed down. Why?

After about the first five or ten years, there were several reasons. One was that most diseases turned out to be multifactorial in that there were many genes that favored them, or you needed some sort of interaction between the genetic predisposition and the environment, a trigger by a virus or some exposure in the environment. And that made it a little too complicated,

to be able to solve the problem through genetic engineering. Oh, I see. So it wasn't as simple as one gene, one disease. No, it was much more complicated. And that didn't really stop us from exploring it a little further. What slowed us down was the big Supreme Court case. Oh, what was that? Mr. X, Y.

You haven't, of course, heard about the case. Sure, there's people in the audience will remember the big case of Mr. X, Y, versus Rex. Tell us about it. Mr. XY argued that he had been discriminated against for employment because the employer had access to his gene code and felt that there were too many risky genes in his gene code. But Mr. X, Y, was a completely healthy person. And at this point, it became so difficult with the privacy issues

and the ethical issues of revealing people's gene codes or even owning your own gene code because other people could have access to it since computers have now disappeared and are actually everywhere, we kind of left it alone. Wow, isn't that amazing? That's sort of like the Revenue Canada nightmare, you know? They know everything about your, even your genes.

Wow. Okay, so what then, if it wasn't the Human Genome Project, what was the biggest medical history that happened in the last 25 years? Well, I hate to break this to you, but the biggest story was the plague of 2013. The plague of 2013? What happened? Well, there was a huge plague.

70 million people died in North America. Wow. And it swept the world, in fact, but North America suffered more than most. So what caused it? It was caused by a bacterium, an ordinary bacterium. You would have remembered back in the year 2000 that there were some multi-drug resistant bacteria emerging. The superbugs. The superbugs.

And there was talk of those superbugs. And we knew that they had come along, encouraged by the use of pharmaceuticals and antibiotics. It had been the big story in the middle of the 19th century, or the 20th century. Well, these superbugs were capable of creating horrible diseases in people, and mostly they were kept under control at a low level. But there was a massive ecological change when we developed the cure for the common cold. Oh, we got the cure for the cold? Yeah, in the year 2012.

It was widely used. So how did that make to a play? And it seems that in the pathosinosis of the world at that time, this super bug moved in to take advantage. And in the worldwide statistics, you can see that North America suffered proportionately more than did other places in Asia and Africa. But how did the common cold, solving the common cold,

lead to the plague? It created a space in the pathogens that affect us. Oh, they moved into where the comical would have been. But the cause of it was a multi-drug-resistant bacterium. Wow. So how did the epidemic end? It ended very quickly, in fact. Many people died.

There was a lot of chaos because the resources to support these people in the hospitals and the intensive care units were completely overrun. Most of the caregivers caught the plague as well. So people were dying in the streets. But within a year, it had basically vanished. And those who had had the disease and lived were immune. and those who didn't catch it were lucky.

The ones who died were dead. But the pharmaceutical industry was able to develop a new antibiotic for that particular strain. Oh, so if they've got a new antibiotic for the new disease that came along because of antibiotic resistance, does that mean that it can all happen again?

Yes. It could all happen again. That's kind of spooky. Okay, I'm depressed. I thought we'd be farther. So have there been other big changes in medicine in the last 25 years? Yes, there have been a lot of big changes. And if you leave out the plague deaths, you look at average survival now.

Women live well into their 90s, 95, is an average life expectancy for a Canadian woman. Canadian Mountain is close to 90. We still do die. Oh, good, okay. There was this anti-aging thing that was big in my day. We were talking about getting rid of the aging process and living forever. Well, you haven't asked me how old I am. Well, I'm too polite.

He is. How old are you? Never mind. Well, like I say, you looked just like you did in the year 2000. I rest my case on that point. And the radio listeners can't see. That's the beauty of the video. It's true.

But what we were able to do was develop more drugs for control of cancer that were far less toxic than the cytotoxic drugs we had been using around the year 2000. As a result, people tolerated the therapies much better, so we were able to control that. For other chronic diseases like heart disease or diseases that required surgery, the operations got a lot easier. People in the audience will remember that we used to have to open up the belly to do an operation or crack the chest, as we said, to do a sternotomy to operate on the heart. Now those kinds of things can be done with tiny little probes and computers from the outside of the patient's body, which means that the stress of a surgery is far less than it was back in the year 2000.

So people can live much longer and much more comfortably because the treatments are better. Wow. So Dr. McCoy's little thing that he puts on your arm from the outside may actually happen for real. Why isn't that great? Jackie, Jackie Duffin, the Hannah Professor of History and Medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Here's another moment from the Quarks Past. This is one of the truly chilling moments in the history of Quarks and Quarks. It happened in 1981. We did an interview about strange reports of two rare diseases that seem to be part of a growing epidemic among gay men in urban centers.

Dr. James Curran of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta told us about the outbreaks. The current epidemic, we've seen approximately 84 cases. of capesis sarcoma in homosexual men. We first became aware of the problem by the reporting of a disease called numiscus cariniinamonia which is a parasitic infection generally associated with terminal cancer patients and people who are receiving drugs chemotherapy for cancer.

And in retrospect these cases have been occurring since the middle of last year. The other point about that is that about 20% of the men with pneumocystis pneumonia or capocy sarcoma have both of these disorders. And sadly, we all later discovered that caposi sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia were characteristic infections associated with AIDS. By the year 2000, AIDS had killed nearly 20 million people, and 35 million more were infected with HIV, the virus that causes the disease. Bob McDonald, it's time for our last guest of the evening.

Okay. We know that all of the scientific progress has occurred between 2000 and 2025. You would be most curious to know about what has happened in the exploration of space. To satisfy your curiosity, I present Brian Feeney. In your era, Mr. Feeney was team leader of the Defengi Project, a Canadian attempt to put a human in space and claim the $10 million X prize. Mr. Feeney is an industrial designer who has worked in developing life support systems for space suits. Mr. Feeney, welcome to Quirks and Quarks.

Thank you. Okay, I'm really curious about this one. Did you win the X Prize? The prize that was to set beats put a private spacecraft into space with people on it and bring it back and then go up again within two weeks? Yeah, that's right. That was the challenge. Did you win? The Da Vinci Project won the X Prize in 2001.

Hey, let's hear it for Canada. We won the X Prize. How did it work? We launched our rocket under the world's largest balloon. We floated at 40,000 feet. The rocket flew to an altitude of minimum 100 kilometers. We hit, I think, 130 in the first one, and 125 in the second one. And we did that twice in a two-week period, and it was completely reusable.

Wow. Launched from a balloon. What a great idea. Well, I remember in 2000, and in fact, it was in October. In fact, it was this week. Is this October right now? Yeah, yeah. We had the 100th launch of the space shuttle, and they were putting together pieces of the International Space Station.

They were just building it at the time. So what happened since then? The space station was operational for about 15 years, and it was sort of run out of business somewhat accidentally when an amateur flight bumped into it and took a few pieces off of it. And it was decided not to, given that other space stations were being built and put into orbit at the time. But it was a good scientific platform. It demonstrated that people could live continuously in space for years and years, and they finally did solve problems such as bone deterioration due to zero gravity.

It wasn't one of your rockets that ran into it, wasn't it? No, of course not. Okay, what about new kinds of technologies? I know that my, okay, if I'm the clone, what's the original Bob McDonald? Anyway, him, he's not my father. He's something weird. I don't know. I've never been, what the clones call them, their fault.

Anyway, he's out solar sailing right now. That's right. What other kinds of new technologies are coming? The technology sort of went through an evolutionary phase, much as the aircraft industry did back in the 30s through 60s. There were the original chemical engines, which are no longer being used, but those were used into the 2012-2015 time frame. There was a period of a type of engine called a Pulse Detonation Engine,

which gave the extra 15% more performance, that you could get out of a chemical engine, and that made all the difference to, in fact, get single-staged orbit. So by 20-08, the first private enterprises, we're building fully reusable single-staged orbit, so we finally brought the cost down to well under $100 a pound. Pulse detonation? How does that work? It's actually similar to the old automotive reciprocating engines.

You're going bang, bang, bang, bang, and the shockwave fires down the tube at hypersonic speeds. And you do this a thousand times a second, and you have multiple tubes set up, and you've got propulsion. But recently, since about 2015 on, there is fusion finally came into Vogue. There was a bit of a, when the first Mars mission was taking place, they fooled around a bit with plasma fission engines, gaseous core of fission engines, but fusion is a lot more powerful, a lot more efficient,

and it still is the tanker, as it were, of propulsion in space today. The engine of choice is fusion power. That's right. Did we ever get warped-dry? Well, if you recall the old NASA Space Agency, back in 1999, they let contracts totaling almost $2 million to explore faster-than-light concepts. In fact, you couldn't submit, if I recall, reading some old archival material. You couldn't actually submit anything if it didn't include something,

warping time, warping space, going faster than light. And that whole research area over the last 25 years has been amazing. There's a lot of really very close to fruition concepts that are finally coming of age where over the next 25 years we'll start to see some amazing things happening. That'll be on the 75th anniversary of course. We'll be talking about that. Who's paying for space travel? Because I know it was very expensive in 2000.

Each launch of the shuttle cost about $500 million. That's right. Yeah, the governments used to be, they used to fund space missions. And I think the big problem that the industries ran into back in those times is that they relied on government involvement for far too many of those 25 and 30 years, as they said, following men, the first missions to the moon. And the private sector with the advent of the Da Vinci team winning the XPRIZE competition, it was the whole paradigm that said you can do it financially, you can do it. The private sector can do it. Of course, the XPRIZE does not allow any government funding, and it just broke down the waterfall and brought in the private sector.

Okay, so if the private sector, if I presume now, I can go to what used to be, Pearson Airport or some commercial place, I can go up into space if I want to. How many people are actually in space now? How many are doing it? Well, I guess the big cruise yachts are the ones that are taking most of the people up, and they're on the order of about 10,000 people a week. you've got about anywhere from 100 people on the small yachts to some of the big Princess Space lines

that are launching up a thousand people at a time just into orbital flights. It's not that many going to the moon and settlements and Mars are still up in the air over some... Still a long way out there to Mars. What are they doing on the moon? Well, there are hotels on the moon.

It's a destination location. In the early days, we had to take we had to take the destination with us. So the mega yachts were built. And if you were very wealthy, such as your cloned father, who's got his own sailing yacht out there. But finally, when the fusion engines came along, it was you could loft hundreds and thousands of tons into orbit

and settlements were built on the moon. And, of course, you started utilizing the resources there to build it. Wow. So are people like playing sports? Or what do they do once they get there? Well, probably the biggest sport that's going on on the moon right now and in space for that matter is one of the oldest sports in the world. What's that? Oh, that.

I was thinking more about skiing the snow caps of Mars or Olympics on the moon or something. There was an old sport called snowboarding, actually. And while the world's gotten a little bit warmer, there's still a little bit of snow somewhere. But snowboarding down the craters actually in the moon is something that a lot of people are doing and the craters of course are enormous. So they're in your space suit and you zip down the side and the regolith material is not quite late snow, but it's close to it. I guess you'd call it moon dust boarding. Yeah, that's something like that. That's very close to what it's called.

Okay, so where are we going to go next? Well, just in the last year and a half to two years, the first nanoprobes have been launched to the closest star. We keep getting back to these tiny little machines again. Everything's nano. Well, it's all an energy equation. Ultimately, when you get down to it, it's a lot less expensive energy-wise to send grams to the closest star. And it only took hours to accelerate these two relativistic velocities, or 99% of the speed of light. And they accelerate at 50,000 Gs.

And, of course, well, I guess we could do that with you and then reclone you and put you back together. Just take a little sample. I mean, send you out and reconstituting. That's right. Those are off to the closest stars now. And within the next 25 years, I think you'll start to see entirely new breakthroughs in physics that are going to see us traveling and jumping. Cross time borders. That's right.

Yeah, wow. Did we ever meet aliens? Have we ever met aliens? Did we ever find out if there's anybody out there? There are some very good indications. Some of the photographs that have been taken. and resolve the planets. And, of course, looking at the effluence in the air,

it looks very, very promising that, in fact, there's something out there. But we still haven't made contact. Not yet. Mr. Feeney, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Brian Feeney is the team leader of the Da Vinci Project Canada's candidate for the XPRIZE. Before we leave, I just wanted to say a few words

about the remarkable 25 years that have gone by since Quarks and Quarks debuted in 1975. It's not really that long ago, and it's not that long in the history of science, but who back then would have predicted young kids carrying palm pilots, cell phones, and doing their homework on the Internet? But it hasn't all been good news. In the 1970s, our greatest fear for the future of the planet

was a nuclear winter brought on by atomic war. Now it's a permanent summer, brought on by global warming and greenhouse gases. And in both cases, we blame science for the problem, and we look to science for the solution. As Isaac Asimov said earlier, the word scientist itself is a relatively modern invention, and that idea was brought home this past week

when the Nobel Prizes were announced. Back in 1901, when the first Nobel Prize for Physics went to Wilhelm Rothengin for discovering X-rays, there were only about 1,000 full-time scientists in the entire world. Today, as the large Hadron Collider prepares to go online in Europe, more than 3,500 scientists

will work on that one project alone. Science has exploded and become an intimate part of our lives. And for many people made those lives better, fuller, easier, and longer. But for others, technological process has brought increased poverty, cultural dislocation, and environmental degradation.

As we look forward to the next 25 years, we can make informed predictions about where science is headed and try to imagine what our world will be like. Some may even come true. But what's more exciting are the surprises, the unexpected discoveries that will change us in ways we can't predict today. In the end, we can only rely on science to provide the tools. What we do with those tools is really up to us.

And that's it for this week's special 25th anniversary edition of Quirks and Forks. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Jim Hanman, Jim Levens, who was also the voice of Zargan, Pat Sensen and Cheyenne Loon, with help from Amy folks. And we have special thanks tonight for Tom Chifton, Mike Carroll, and the staff of Glenn Gould Studio, and to our Robot Wrangler, Steve Watts. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks to everyone in the audience for joining us this evening. And thanks to everyone at home for listening. See you next. And that's it for our special encore presentation of Quirx and Quarks's 25th anniversary show.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our webpage at cbc.ca.ca slash Quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast. Get us on Serious. XXM or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quirks and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez and Amanda Buchowitz. Our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting. Our fearless leader and senior producer, as well as the voice of Zargon in that 25th anniversary episode, is Jim Lebbins. He's retiring from Quirks and Quarks after more than three decades with the show. We're going to miss you, Jim. Thank you.

for everything. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca