It is 122 years since the beginning of the Second Boer War in South Africa. To all intents and purposes, at the time, electricity did not exist. There were a few small devices that produced electricity and one or two early interesting applications, but the world existed entirely using candles and various forms of lamp.

Now, 122 years later, it would be impossible to list the various devices which could broadly be described as electrical in nature in the space available for writing this piece.

If a super-clever scientist of 1900 was asked to guess his wildest thoughts of how electricity may develop, provided that you explained to him what electricity was, he would come nowhere close to filling all the options and devices which have been electrically invented, being basic illumination, transport, food supply, health and communication.

If you were to ask him if he thought people would still die of hunger or neglect 122 years later, he would, without question, say such hardships would be very unlikely. He would possibly think that the world would have become utopian or, more likely, that most of it was utopian, with a small minority living in some sort of chaotic absurdity (Tweebuffelfontein), where sustained life is virtually impossible.

He would not have entertained the thought (nobody would have entertained the thought) that some of the world’s civilised nations – such as Canada, France, Sweden and Germany – are at this moment, to a greater or lesser extent, expending large sums on the supply of arms whose purpose is to kill and maim. We regularly see on the Internet what the capabilities of these weapons are. Their virtues of range, performance and manoeuvrability are extolled, but, almost as an afterthought, that these same devices will result in injury and death.

We have, after 122 years of electrical devices, ‘improved’ the ability to maim, kill and destroy people. The only thing that the devices have become is more refined.

Let’s take a guess now as to where we will be in another 122 years. It’s quite possible there will be other worlds, and it’s quite possible we will be living longer (if Clint Eastwood can make it to 94, you too can). But, fundamentally, the rifle used in 1900 does not differ that much from those used by many armies today. We have to accept that no amount of development is going to cause the end of weapons as we know them on Planet Earth.

It’s quite likely there are going to be other environments where people live safely, and an optimistic person will hope such an environment exists somewhere in our universe, but it would take a person of almost lunatic optimism to believe this will occur in the next 122 years.

In another 122 years, however, many more technical things will be known and there will be few secrets. Even the Blue Bulls rugby strategy might be an open secret. We can then hope that living in such an environment will cause devices that encourage military action to be easily suppressed and will, like nuclear weapons, be devices that are known about, but not used.

The difficulty is that development in the last 122 years was a fairly slow process because communication knowledge developed at the same speed as the development of other systems. In our environment now we are not far away from rapid communications throughout the world, so changes can happen very rapidly. I don’t think that when the Second Boer War began that anyone had the vaguest idea how rapidly things would develop.

Let’s hope that in the not-too-distant future there is invented a device that makes all war, injury and suffering technologically irrelevant, and makes and forces all people to live lives that are acceptable – to enable people to have a far better quality of life.

This sounds an impossible dream. But there are many other dreams that seemed impossible that have come true. We can say we will not live long enough, but we can dream.