Science fiction: students and celebs look to the future

SHOES that teach the wearer to dance, iPods that gauge the mood of the listener and adjust the musical selection accordingly — if the predictions of a selection of the public are anything to go by, the future looks blissfully bright.

A project for national Science Week has gathered the thoughts of students and celebrities alike on their vision of what scientific progress will bring to the Ireland of tomorrow and their ideas will be on display on the bandstand in Stephen’s Green in Dublin and on the scienceweek.ie website until next Sunday.

Not surprisingly, many of the junior contributors are hopeful of finding robots and computerised gizmos to help with the tedium of schoolwork although Eight-year-old Darragh Healy, clearly a friend of Steve Staunton, envisions “a football that can do skills for you if you can’t do them yourself”.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern might have been expected to picture an electronic voting machine that actually works, or perhaps an atom-zapper to make the Opposition disappear.

Instead, he predicted that over the next 10-15 years, Ireland would be “renowned for niches of scientific and technological excellence, providing highly rewarding careers for our young people, while enhancing our attractiveness as a location of choice for internationally mobile talent and expertise.” A Bertiespeak decoder was unfortunately not on his list. Others taking part in the project let their imaginations run a little wilder. Dustin the Turkey predicts all Christmas dinners will be vegetarian and, perhaps not so unlikely, that schoolchildren will have their text books stored on their mobile phones. Karl Spain envisages no more household chores as everything will be self cleaning. You’d never know he was a comedian.

Model Glenda Gilson imagined clothes shops that keeps a database of the styles, colours and sizes of everything they sell a customer and make up outfits at the touch of a button. TV architect Duncan Stewart dreams of homes that generate their heat from their own rubbish while DJ Ian Dempsey predicted the arrival of the microcooler. The reverse of a microwave, it will chill and freeze food instead of defrosting and heating them.

Broadcast veteran, Marty Whelan, meanwhile pictures himself travelling by hovercar to the studios for his nightly Whelan Over Oz show which is beamed by satellite to Australia.