The Year 3,000
The Year 3,000 () is a novel written by Italian writer and physician Paolo Mantegazza in 1897. It is a short romance which follows the typical utopian forecasting of life and society in the future, which was common at the end of the 19th century in the Western countries, so enthused with the fantastic and exceedingly rapid new conquests of science and technology brought about by the Industrial Revolution and new forms of energy, such as electricity, and the plethora of inventions such as the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the phonograph, steam, internal combustion and electric  engines, etc. Authors such as Jules Verne exploited successfully this desire of the public for prediction of the future, and Mantegazza belongs to this trend; he was a scientist with a strong optimism about the eventual victory of internationalism, pacifism, hedonism, etc. In this book, Mantegazza foresees with remarkable accuracy important social and economic movements and global political changes which actually have been occurring since the last decades of the 20th century, such as the defeat of the communist regimes and the appearance of the United Nations Organization and the European Community. The plot. Paolo and Maria (the same names  as those of the author and his wife) are going to marry after the mandatory period of five years of experimentation "with love but not children" (Mantegazza was a sexual libertarian and wrote a very popular book explaining sexuality for young people, titled "The Physiology of Love"). So, they start a journey to Andropolis (the "city of man"), the huge (10 million inhabitants) and ultramodern capital of the "United Planetary States". And that is all about it: they visit its political institutions, energy plants, libraries and theaters, laboratories and schools, where Paul acting as a guide, shows Maria around and  describes and explains everything. Main concepts. Mantegazza was a neurophysiologist, and when he wrote the book, impressive discoveries were being made at a quick pace around European laboratories on the organization and function of the nervous system, by scientists like Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Charles Scott Sherrington, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and where the role of axons and synapses in the transmission of information and of neural networks were being elucidated. He also acknowledged the progress of psychopharmacology in discovering new drugs which affected the emotions, conscience, cognition, etc. (Mantegazza was the first to isolate cocaine from coca leaves and  to praise its powerful effect on the human mind, by experimenting on himself). In the technological frontier, he describes the futuristic role of electricity in generating heat, movement and light and of instant telecommunications spanning the globe. Therefore, he apprehended the main factors which have really contributed to the 20th century society. In one passage in the book, an engineer explains to Paolo and Maria: ""I believe that the speed of communications, obtained with steam and telegraph, has contributed more than all the books, all the newspapers, all the parliaments, laws, and even all religions; to destroy the criminal old  order of war among peoples and to create a new moral, sane and sincere"" This was a kind of morally optimistic, pre-First World War scientific utopia. Predictions. Mantegazza was accurate in predicting technological developments which became a reality (or likely will be in the future). In the first three chapters he predicts the following: In the first chapter Mantegazza predicted the First World War, with two sides fighting bloody, immense naval and ground battles and with "one million deaths in a single day" near Paris. After this war, all nations unite to abolish war ("a war that killed all  wars") and the "United States of Europe was founded", with a single idiom and a single currency, engendering peace for the succeeding two millennia. After almost a century of dictatorial domination, socialist regimes were replaced by democratic ones. Besides predicting for the year 3000 things that would become reality less than 50 years later, Mantegazza was mistaken only a few times. One of the most peculiar errors, considering that he was a physician, was his judgment that the average longevity would be 60 years, and that medicine would abandon drugs, surgery and other forms of conventional therapy, focusing instead on  changes in diet and life style (like functional medicine in the 21st century).