Clinton Talks About The Future

What will life in the next century be like? Will it be a technological paradise or a nightmare of overpopulation and terrorism? Correspondent Charlie Rose recently spoke to President Clinton about his views on the future.

He said that he is confident that the country has taken care of any potential Y2K computer glitches. "It wouldn't bother me a bit to get on a commercial airline, for example, on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day."

"Our systems are in order here. My concerns really are for some of our friends around the world that have more rudimentary computer networks and capacities - and whether they will have a shutdown that they won't be able to immediately fix or get around," he said.

People will be also be living in outer space, Clinton said. "And at some time in the next century, I think, there will be large, permanent platforms, sustaining life in outer space that will basically be jumping off places to distant planets." The president is deeply interested in space exploration and might go into space himself if given the opportunity, he said.

Medicine will also make huge advances, he said, adding that many cancers will have been cured and there will be a vaccine for AIDS.

Clinton is particularly excited about the human genome project, the race to map all of the genes in the human body. "Within a matter of a few years, young mothers will come home from the hospital with a genetic map of their children," he said.

"It'll be scary," he said. "For some of them, it will say your child, your daughter, has a 50 percent change of developing breast cancer between 35 and 50 because of this genetic problem."

"But also it will say if you do these 10 things from birth, you can cut the odds down to 10 percent," Clinton said. "It won't be long before babies coming home from the hospital in advanced societies will have a life expectancy of about 100 years."

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President Clinton talks with Charlie Rose.

"When the genome is fully sequenced, we will shortly thereafter know a lot more than we now know about how to live,...maximize our life expectancy, not only the length, but the quality of life," he said. "That will be stunning."

On a sociopolitical level, Clinton worries about a backlash against American world dominance. "All over the world people are embracing democracy and market economics," he said. "But if you enjoy the level of military and economic strength we have and the level of political influence, people are going to resent you."

The world will change a great deal in the next century, Clinton said. "We know that, barring some completely unforeseen events, China - and some time thereafter India - will have economies that look bigger than ours because they've got so many more people than we do, four times as many people. In the case of China even more. We know that Europe will grow more integrated, I think, in the 21st century."

"I do not believe that we will have the relative economic dominance we have today. We've got about 4 percent of the world's people and almost 22 percent of the world's income. But I think we can be still very prosperous. I think we can still be the strongest individual country in the world in many ways," Clinton added.

"But I think we will have to build in partnerships with some of those who resent us now," he said. "We will have to have an increasingly interdependent world. Because, whether we like it or not, it's like, globalization. We will become more interdependent, and we'll have to learn to be adroit at that."

The key, Clinton said, is to realize that there is a danger and to plan ahead. "If you go back through all of human history, and you look at conflicts, in weapons systems, and that's what we're talking about - biological and chemical weapons - offense always precedes defense," he said.

"My goal in trying to mobilize the country on biological and chemical weapons is to make sure the government's doing everthing possible, is to close the gap between offense and defense," Clinton added.

Clinton is excited about what the next century will hold, he said. "Most people are good people," he said. "We got plenty of talented people. We just need to be imagining the future, thinking about all the problems as well as all the opportunities, and then prepare. Society always has problems; they're always misfortunes."

"But basically I believe the future is quite promising and far more exciting than any period in history. I wish I was going to live to be 150. I'd love to see what happens," he said.

Broadcast story produced by John Hamlin; Web story produced by David Kohn;