Trends in shipping economics 1966–2066

No one can predict what the world will look like 100 years hence. In 100 years undreamt-of technical changes, the discovery of new resources or new ways of using existing resources, changes in rates of population and income growth, the advent of wars, and a host of other factors can crack any crystal ball, which must always picture the future as growing out of the present. All one can do is to indicate direction of movement. The consequences of some movements may be realised in twenty years or thirty years and themselves give rise to movements in different directions. All one can say with certainty is that generations of technical progress have shown that nothing is too imaginative to be considered. The problem is not that imaginative flights are likely to be too extreme, but that the innate conservatism in all of us will cause us to boggle at, and eventually to reject, the most imaginative ideas as being essentially wild. In 1866 the man who forecast a tanker of 120,000 deadweight tons would almost certainly have been locked up.