80 Ways the Eighties Will Change Your Life

Remember 1970, only ten years ago? Richard Nixon was President. Watergate was an office complex. There was a war in Vietnam. Life magazine discovered women's lib and Ford introduced its first compact car, the Pinto. Clocks had dials. Pan Am was promoting its new 747 service; the smallest computers you could buy were the size of breadboxes and cost $12,000--and there was no such thing as a pocket calculator.

Now it's 1980. No one can say what truly radical technological changes the next ten years will bring, because break-throughs aren't predictable. But much that will come in the decade of the Eighties is already in production, or on the drawing boards, or, at the chanciest, looks plausible given a few breaks. And here, for your amusement and possible awe, in no particular order, are 80 of the Eighties' best shots.

Gossypol. Gossypol, a pigment isolated from cottonseed, is undergoing extensive testing in the People's Republic of China as an inexpensive, effective male birth-control agent. Twenty milligrams taken daily for two months produced infertility in more than 4000 men at an efficiency of 99.89 percent--as good as the female pill, which is the best of all existing methods of contraception. Gossypol isn't a hormone; it acts locally on seminiferous tubules of the testis, damaging semen precursors and dropping the sperm count to zero or nearby. Side effects are minor: temporary weakness that passes without treatment and, for six percent of the men studied, a decrease in libido. Sperm counts returned to normal three months after daily doses were discontinued. Studies are continuing in the P.R.C. and the U. S. is watching. If gossypol checks out, sometime in the Eighties, you'll hear sighs of relief all across America.

Long Lens. Contact-lens wearers can look forward to lenses they can wear for up to two months between cleanings. The FDA has already approved one type of continuous-wear lens for postcataract patients. With more research, a lens is likely for normal cosmetic wear. Another type of lens being developed would make soft contacts available for correction of astigmatism. And lens-industry rumor has it that someone's working on a disposable soft contact, available in six-packs, to be thrown away at bedtime.

Bug Jam. The U. S. Department of Agriculture has discovered that insects produce extremely high-frequency "radio" waves, similar to microwaves, through the anatomical equivalents of the paraphernalia of microwave generation. The tiny signals work for bug communication, and the USDA is studying bug jamming as a means of pest control: The waves would be beamed at a particular pest's radio frequencies and would interfere with communication for reproduction. Pesticides would thus give way to microwaves.

High-Protein Pop. Developed by CocaCola, Samson is a soft drink with a difference: It supplies one third of an adult's daily vitamins and minerals and ten percent of his basic protein requirements--in flavors such as orange and mango. Already on sale in Mexico, Samson will appear in the U. S. in the early Eighties, adding nutritional value to the pause that refreshes.

Home Tape. LVR--longitudinal video recording--will overwhelm the video-cassette-recording market in the Eighties. Toshiba announced in 1979 a forthcoming new generation of LVRs; Kodak is said to be working on an LVR system of its own. LVRs use half-inch tape and a fixed recording head; they have two thirds fewer moving parts than VCRs, they use less power, they're lighter and more portable and they'll cost half as much. Toshiba has figured out how to prerecord tapes in less than real time, which means cheaper prerecorded programing as well.

Green Gas. According to Nobel laureate Melvin Calvin of the University of California at Berkeley, a wild shrub named Euphorbia lathyris, grown under cultivation for its hydrocarbonlike latex, could ease the gasoline shortage in the Eighties and Nineties. Calvin calculates Euphorbia could produce 10 to 20 barrels of oil per acre, which means that an area the size of Arizona could meet all U. S. oil needs. Euphorbia grows on land too dry and too poor for food-crop cultivation. Other plant researchers think goldenrod and guayule--the latter a woody shrub of the arid Southwest--could supply natural rubber to replace synthetic rubber based on petroleum.

Whole Cloth. Fabrics of the Eighties will do more for you than fabrics do today. Wrinkle-free 100 percent cotton is already coming into use nationwide. Specially treated natural fibers begin looking good again as the cost of artificial fibers based on oil goes up. The textile industry expects to create cloth that changes color--an offshoot of the same liquid-crystal technology that gave us mood rings--but garmentmakers don't think there'll be much demand for it. More practical (continued on page 156)80 ways(continued from page 149) in the coming days of energy conservation will be cloth that adjusts itself to temperature extremes, expanding and opening its weave in heat, contracting and tightening its weave as a barrier against cold. On the comfort front, Du Pont has experimented with blending small amounts of Lycra Spandex into fabrics such as wool, flannel and corduroy. This process makes scratchy fabrics more comfortable and changes tight, highly tailored fashions into garments that won't cramp your style.

Caries Off. Dental scientists continue to pursue methods to prevent tooth decay. It's now known that dental caries is an infectious disease caused, in susceptible individuals, primarily by the bacteria Streptococcus mutans. Eliminate this organism from the mouth by inoculation, deprive it of the nutrients it feeds on or increase the resistance of the teeth against its acid attacks, and you eliminate caries (S. mutans is spread by kissing, by the way). Most researchers think one approach or more will prove practical within the next decade. Look, Ma, no cavities.

Five by Five. Nonprojection wall TV--a flat screen probably five feet square--will be in volume production in the Eighties. Small flat-screen video displays already exist in prototype. By the end of the decade, the new systems will display images in full color at resolutions comparable to fine photography. Small units will sell for less than $20. True three-dimensional television imaging requires breakthrough holographic technology; don't look for it until the Nineties.

Plastic Vending. Vending-machine manufacturers are searching out multi-dollar sales with the appearance of the Susan B. Anthony dollar. Next on line, in the early Eighties, are vending machines that accept major credit cards. Buy complete meals, oil for your car, wine--almost anything solid enough to store behind a slot. Since reliable microprocessors will run the machines, you won't have to kick them as often.

Feast of Fungi. The French National Institute of Agronomic Research has successfully cultivated the elusive French black truffle, the fungus Tuber melanosporum, and from a pitiful 25 tons in 1979 expects the French crop to increase in the Eighties to 250 tons--joyous news to truffle fanciers everywhere. At the same time, American research may soon lead to commercial production of a delectable and little-known mushroom, the morel, which will expand from a wild crop picked in river bottoms several weekends a year to rival the supply of ordinary white mushrooms in supermarkets across the land.

Fast Track. Harvard introduced the world's first "tuned" running track in 1977. Its synthetic surface, attached to a wooden substructure, acts as a spring to propel runners in comfort at optimum speed. The track gives an average speed advantage of 2.91 percent, improves comfort and dramatically improves safety. Tuned-track design should spread to other schools in the Eighties. When outdoor tracks are tuned, Harvard designers predict a seven-second improvement in the world record for the mile.

Highlight. In 1981, General Electric will introduce a better light bulb, an octagonal bulb with built-in electronics that will burn for five years and save at least $20 in electricity. It's a scaled-down version of the metal-halide lights that turn ball-park night games into day games. It's weird-looking, takes a standard socket and a 75--150-watt bulb; G.E. expects to collect ten dollars apiece.

Pocket Pal. What won't the Eighties-generation computer do? The personal computer of the next decade will be notebook-sized, with a flat-screen graphic display--but it will weigh in with as much computing power as the most powerful computers of today. It will be capable of three-dimensional graphic simulation, extensive data storage and individual programming. It will affect your life at least as much as television and the telephone do. You'll program it to your personal and professional needs and use it every day. Businessmen will actively model their businesses, students will study, physicians will diagnose, artists and architects will design. It will be, in effect, an extension of your brain, vastly increasing your memory and assisting you at problem solving and in making decisions. You'll feel naked without it, and when you're naked may be the only time you won't have it with you.

Space Truck. The space shuttle, scheduled to fly in the Eighties, is no one-shot program. It's more like a near-earth truck service. No fewer than 487 missions are expected between 1980 and 1992. After that, a private corporation will probably buy the used shuttles and keep them going commercially until they wear out. Boeing has already expressed interest. While NASA's flying the shuttles, it thinks it might take a few private citizens along for the ride when there's a spare seat. If you're a journalist, an artist, a poet, a philosopher or a teacher, that private citizen could be you.

Jesus Wept. In the interest, presumably, of energy conservation, and after long labor, Reader's Digest will publish a 40,000-word condensation of the Bible.

Access. A phone/home TV/computer data link is in the works for the Eighties. Such systems are already being tested in Great Britain, France and other countries; General Telephone and Electronics has acquired rights to offer an American version of the British system. The decoder costs about $100, the telephone carries the information and it's displayed on the TV. British customers have access to up to 250,000 pages of data--weather, news, plane schedules, sports results, TV schedules, price lists, you name it. It is, in effect, an electronic newspaper.

Good Offices. Factory productivity goes up with automation, but office productivity has dawdled far behind. In the Eighties, the numbers will change. Automated equipment--copiers, computers, word processors--will move into the office at an annual increase of nearly 20 percent. Desktop video displays will pop up everywhere to supply business data from central company computers. Next will come computerized work stations. One system, by Xerox, is already under test at the White House. It's called an Advanced Multifunction Work Station, and it links a computer terminal to a copier to edit letters and documents electronically, to store information, to design graphic displays and then to print out finished hard copies. By the turn of the century, office work stations will understand speech and speak when spoken to. The secretary will be a luxury or a highly trained office manager, and the clerk will be obsolete.

Sweet Peas. Sugar snap peas, the hottest new vegetable sensation going, will be marketed commercially in the mid-Eighties. Developed by Gallatin Valley Seed Company, sugar snap peas are delectably sweet and have tender, edible pods. They can be eaten raw or cooked.

Touch and go. A solid-state switch that senses direction is already at hand. Touch its surface and slide your finger and it detects the motion. In the Eighties, it will make possible solid-state controls--on your stereo, solid-state dimmer switches, electronic games, equipment controls--wherever there's a dial or a slide today.

Blue-Collar Bacteria. Recombinant DNA is a technology for tricking bacteria into doing useful work. Scientists insert DNA--the material of genetic instruction--from various kinds of cells into bacteria. When the bacteria reproduce, they follow the instructions of the guest (continued on page 200)80 ways(continued from page 156) DNA along with their own and manufacture whatever is programed. Think of a miniature Xerox machine. In the Eighties, bacteria factories will produce human insulin, growth hormone, clotting factor and other scarce or expensive medical substances in plentiful supply and at reasonable cost.

Home Movies. Video-tape and disc systems already make it possible to watch recent-vintage motion pictures without interruption at home. In the Eighties, as the number of units increases into the millions, film-production companies will begin making feature-length films for home release. Theaters won't fold, but increasingly they'll be reserved for high-ticket extravaganzas. Can a home popcorn pipeline be far behind?

Five-Finger Exercise. If you don't know how to type, you've been stuck so far with laborious handwriting. No more. Britain's Microwriter Ltd. is currently producing, but not yet selling, a five-key writing machine utilizing microprocessor technology that makes it possible to "handwrite" typing. Your fingers on a keyboard, hardly moving, will imitate roughly the shapes of letters, numbers and punctuation marks; the machine will do the rest, displaying the text visually for editing and then printing it out on a line printer. You'll want one in the Eighties, especially since the Microwriter can give nontypists access to computer terminals.

Laid-Back Lobster. Researchers in aquaculture at San Diego State University have discovered that tasty lobsters descended from the best New England stock grow up to four times as fast in warm water and cost less to produce. Lobster farming approaches the commercial stage: Look for lower-priced Homarus americanus from Southern California on your supermarket shelf as the Eighties roll.

Asthma Cure. Swedish researchers recently identified the substance that causes bronchial tubes to contract and choke off air to asthma victims. Now that they know what it is, they can figure out how to inhibit it. Expect relief from the painful symptoms of bronchial asthma in the airy Eighties.

Halley's Comet. The best and brightest of all the comets will make its last 20th Century appearance beginning in 1985, with perihelion on February 9, 1986. Its head is luminous and spherical and bright as the brightest star, its spectacular tail two thirds as long as the distance from the horizon to overhead. Halley's comet will spark fads, songs and names for the baby. People will get together for comet parties; there'll be predictions of the end of the world.

Dry Martini. Powdered drinks are coming, via microencapsulation. The flavoring's a dry coating outside; inside is the liquid booze. Water makes it a beverage again. Look for powdered wine, bloody mary, screwdriver, daiquiri and Irish coffee as soon as the U. S. Treasury Department figures out how to tax them.

Happy Home. Another major microprocessor fix: the American home. With suitable sensors, and probably working through your electrical wiring, the microprocessor can open and close garage doors, turn lights on and off, adjust heating/air conditioning to any sequence of preset levels or in response to outside temperature changes, run stereo, TV and kitchen equipment, collect and deliver messages, control security, turn on heaters to melt sidewalk and driveway snow and... And almost anything else you can think of that can be plugged into a wall. The first such automatic houses are already in operation. Obviously, they cost a bundle. In the Eighties, the cost will come down.

War Club. The U. S., the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, France, the People's Republic of China, India and probably Israel presently have nuclear weapons. In the next decade, the nuclear club is likely to expand to include Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan and Taiwan, dramatically increasing the risk of nuclear war. Some military analysts consider war likely between the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. before 1984. Duck!

Telephone Talk. Phones will begin going all electronic in the Eighties, which means they'll be smaller, lighter and as varied in shape, color and function as designers choose to make them. Videophones will become available for residential use in some major cities. Call forwarding, already offered as a local option in cities with electronic switching, will go national, meaning you can have some or all of the calls you receive forwarded to you wherever in the U. S. you might be--forwarded from your Santa Barbara condo to your New York hotel room, for example. Your phone will become your computer link, and through it you'll be able to control home systems, send and receive mail, call up a vast variety of information, vote, order someone's phone number by punching in her name and, probably, bank and shop directly--without going through clerks. Eventually, you'll have a national phone number and a portable pocket phone. Anyone will be able to call you from anywhere; the switching system will find you and give you a ring.

Stereo TV. Japan added multichannel sound--stereo sound--to its television-broadcasting system in the autumn of 1978; the FCC is studying licensing it in the U. S. It's two or three years away. Sound quality is said to approach that of broadcast FM stereo. The second channel of sound can also provide a second language channel for dubbing foreign-language films, or a second, audio-only program such as broadcast music or sports coverage.

Satellite Mail. The U. S. Postal Service is testing instant international message service via COMSAT to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Brussels and Buenos Aires. Used mostly by banks and corporations now, it will become even more widespread in the Eighties--as additional satellites go up and transmission costs come down.

Best Beef. Genetic engineering advances more rapidly in animal science than in human; in the Seventies, cattle breeders routinely implanted fertilized eggs from prize cows into grade "carrier" cows and increased the prize cows' lifetime average number of offspring from five to more than 40. In the Eighties, expect cattle breeders to clone their highest-quality animals and grow the clones to birth weight in carrier cows--making high-quality prize beef routinely available in quantity.

Something Borrowed. Reliable organ transplantation is a major medical blessing predicted for the Eighties. It depends on breakthroughs in understanding the body's immune system that haven't yet come but that researchers believe are tantalizingly near. Manipulating the immune system to avoid rejection, surgeons will be able to transplant all major body organs: liver, heart, lungs, kidneys; even, probably, the head.

Jock Inflation. Texas inventor Byron Donzis' inflatable sports equipment will sweep the field in the early Eighties. Donzis is designing gear to replace all the National Football League's existing padding with inflatables. The National Hockey League comes next. The national Forest Service wants inflatable smoke-jumper suits and Donzis expects to outmode goose down (the inflatable stuff is warm) and to expand to inflatable luggage and clothing. His inflatable running shoes can be adjusted at heel and toe with valves.

Additive Subtraction. Red dye number two causes cancer, right? Right, but only if it's absorbed into the body. New technology coming in the Eighties will leash (continued on page 263)80 Ways(continued from page 200) small-molecule additives such as food colorings and antioxidants to large-molecule inert polymers, so that additives won't pass through the intestinal wall. They'll do their work, of coloring and preserving without increasing the load of carcinogens we all carry. And maybe red M & M's will come back.

Everyman-Powered Flight. AeroVironment's Gossamer Condor won the Kremer prize for man-powered flight in 1977. In 1979, Bryan Allen pedaled an improved Gossamer Albatross of Mylar film and Kevlar fibers across the English Channel in two hours, 49 minutes. Further improvements will reduce weight and wing drag until only .29 horsepower keeps a Gossamer flying. In the Eighties, any athletic bicyclist who can afford one will be able to pedal himself aloft and stay there for two hours.

Toothless Transmission. An automobile transmission without gears cuts friction and saves fuel--up to 20 percent, some researchers think. It's on its way. It uses rollers and needs a special transmission fluid, one that lubricates moving parts but also keeps them from slipping. Monsanto has developed the unlikely fluid. It turns into a solid under pressure--between the rollers, for example. Five years for industrial vehicles, two more--1987 or so--for cars.

z Tabs. The body produces a chemical, called the sleep factor, to induce sleep. It has been isolated and is under study. In the Eighties, it will become available for medical use, and that's a wrap for insomnia.

Sign Here. Your signature will be virtually safe from forgery with a new machine recently invented by scientists at IBM. The system, likely to come into common use in the Eighties, involves accelerometers--devices that measure acceleration--and a pressure sensor built into a special pen. You write your signature; the machine compares pressure, speed and direction against a reference pattern you've left on file. The muscular movements that produce your writing style are automatic and are extremely difficult to forge. Until voice-pattern recognition, probably in the early Nineties, the IBM invention is likely to be the standard personal-identification system for banks and for access to computers and records.

Solar Solution. A limit to the possible self-sufficiency of rooftop solar-cell electrical generation has been the problem of where to store the electricity that isn't needed, so that it can be used at night or during cloudy weather, when it is. Texas Instruments is working on the problem in the laboratory. Sunlight causes silicon beads in its new, low-cost solar cells to decompose a fluid electrolyte into hydrogen and iodide. The hydrogen is stored and burned on demand in a fuel cell that produces electricity. The Department of Energy has assigned Texas Instruments a four-year development agreement; the system should become available commercially in the late Eighties, at which time a wireless, all-electric house could be built anywhere there's sunlight.

New Networks. Cable TV, linked nationwide today by communication satellites, is poised to spawn any number of special-interest networks in the Eighties. Already broadcasting to 4,000,000 homes--as of September 1979--is the Entertainment and Sports Programing Network, which beams the equivalent of Wide World of Sports to subscribers day and night, seven days a week. Due in 1980 from Ted Turner's Turner Communications in Atlanta is a 24-hour Cable News Network, with news updates interspersed with human-interest features and with a two-hour program of evening news. An old folks' network is coming, and there'll be more as cable subscribers increase.

Synthetic Fuel. We'll have it in the Eighties whether it's a good idea or not: gas and gasoline from coal. The Germans developed the process in World War Two. It involves cooking up coal with steam, the steam adding hydrogen. The resulting goo can be refined much like oil, and synthetic gas is a by-product. Fill up and pretend you're Rommel. The catch: Synthetic-gasoline exhaust smells like rotten onions.

Solid Case. The attaché case of the Eighties will carry more than lunch: clock, calculator and telephone will also be inside, built in and run by a single microprocessor chip.

B1 Booze. Two physicians at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine have proposed fortifying all alcoholic beverages with thiamine--vitamin B1--as a practical and money-saving measure of preventive medicine. Alcoholics with diets short on thiamine often contract a nervous-system disorder called the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome that leads ultimately to chronic psychosis and institutionalization. Wernicke-Korsakoff costs American society some $70,000,000 a year. Enough thiamine to fortify all U. S. alcoholic beverages would cost no more than about $17,000,000. Maybe in the Eighties. There's talk, too, of a warning label on booze bottles like the one on cigarettes.

Drug Draw. Awaiting FDA approval, probably in the Eighties: a technology for packaging drugs in magnetic micro-spheres. Injected into the blood stream, the drugs can be drawn to a treatment site--a tumor, an abscess--by applying a magnet to the body surface over the site. The drug matrix dissolves and delivers the dose only locally, and so more potently than if the entire body were pervaded.

Home Holograph. White-light integral holography--laser photography--makes possible short 3-D holographic movies like the movie R2-D2 projected of Princess Leia in Star Wars. One enterprising New York photographer now offers holographic portraits; they come as film cylinders that you look through as you walk around them. The subject of the portrait appears in miniature, in 3-D, in motion inside the cylinder. Expect the technique to become available nationwide in the Eighties. Great for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Fat Attack. A pathology professor at Harvard Medical School has proposed that not cholesterol but a product of the body's protein metabolism, homocysteine, causes arteriosclerosis--hardening of the arteries--the leading cause of death by stroke and heart attack in the United States. If he's right--and the evidence is building that he is--then there's a simple preventive available: vitamin B6, taken daily in a ten-milligram dose. Its presence is required to change the deadly homocysteine to another harmless compound. Research will proceed, and probably settle the question finally in the Eighties. In the meantime, some of us are adding B6 to our daily pile of pills.

Read to me. Computer-software manufacturers are actively working on designing a scanner that can read printed text, with the U. S. Postal Service as a clamoring customer. In the Eighties, they will combine the scanner with a sophisticated version of Texas Instruments' solid-state voice-simulation system to produce scanners that read aloud.

Direct Dial. The United Nations is devising a 17-digit universal telephone numbering system, to be installed worldwide in the Eighties, that will make it possible to direct-dial almost anywhere on earth. The UN expects phones to increase to about one billion by the end of the decade. Nearly all of those one billion phones will be interconnected.

Speed Limit 88.5. By 1983, the Federal Highway Administration will have completed all planning necessary to change U. S. highway signs to show speed limits and distances in metric only. Brush up on your kilometers; you may need them.

Roach Clipped. After 30 years of research, scientists have finally synthesized the female American cockroach sex excitant. It drives male roaches crazy. They mount anything in sight, including each other. In the next decade, the hormone will be used to reduce roach populations by sowing confusion and so preventing mating.

Memory Pills. More than 12 drugs are presently known that improve alertness and memory, some of them dramatically. They're hung up on medical-research politics and FDA licensing, but one or more of them may pass go in the Eighties. They'll have dramatic effects on over-50 memory decline and on senility. If you can just remember to take the damn things!

Home Burial. Expect to see increasing numbers of underground homes in the Eighties as soaring fuel costs encourage innovation. A few feet underground, the temperature is the same from season to season--in the U. S., between about 55 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Underground homes are dug into hillsides or sunk in Hat ground with dirt mounded over them. Properly designed, they're not damp. With interior courtyards and skylights, they're as bright as surface houses, and they save from 40 to 80 percent of energy costs.

Virus Fighter. Medicine has a cure (really a preventive) for the common cold. It's called interferon, and it's a substance naturally produced in your body. The catch is that it's expensive to produce. Every cold prevention would cost you thousands of dollars. Interferon has other, more important uses. It combats secondary infections associated with cancer treatment; it's being tested on virus-induced cancers and chronic serum hepatitis. Workers are trying to synthesize it to bring the cost down. They'll succeed, probably in the Eighties, and one by one, the viruses will say goodbye.

Auto-Mation. Speeded by gas shortages and EPA pollution-control standards, the computer-controlled automobile is coming up fast. By the mid-Eighties, microcomputers will control your car's ignition and fuel-injection systems, will shift gears, balance cornering, govern speed, monitor security, adjust heating and air conditioning and gauge systems and performance. Your instrument panel will be digitized, reading out numbers and alerting you to problems. Your car will be smaller and fractionally lighter than the X cars of 1979; by the mid-Eighties, the body may be plastic--and, later, so will the frame. Air bags or automatic restraints will protect you in collisions. Don't look for a spare: It's going, and jack and tire iron with it, to save weight. Your tires will drive flat. All in all, the Eighties mean less car, but what's left will be sleeker, as responsive as automobiles of old, almost entirely automatic and capable of hauling you a lot farther between fill-ups.

Fast Film. Color-film speed--the chemical sensitivity of the film to light--has been doubling every ten years. Kodak introduced 400 ASA film late in the Seventies; in the Eighties, you can expect color film of at least 800 ASA, making the flashbulb a thing of the past. The film industry also expects to develop a universal film that will simultaneously produce transparencies and prints.

Merry Old Sol. Solar power will come of age in the Eighties in its most important immediate application: space heating of commercial buildings and homes. Far more valuable than such exotica as giant mirror-boiler electrical-generation systems or solar satellites in space, active and passive home solar-heating systems already make long-term economic good sense. Their advantage will improve as fuel costs go up. Recently, San Diego County passed an ordinance requiring all new residential buildings to be supplied with solar hot-water heating after October 1980. The trend will spread.

FM Quad. The Federal Communications Commission is taking another look at broadcast quadraphonic FM, heralded in the Seventies but never actually installed in the U. S. The technology is available to multiplex four signals instead of the two required for stereo--with a dramatic gain in fidelity. But the FCC has to digest massive technical studies before it can decide on licensing. Look for mid-Eighties approval of surround sound.

Warm Milk. Nonrefrigerated milk, already on the shelf in Europe, is coming to America in the Eighties. An ultrahigh temperature process keeps it sweet; until you open the carton, you can store it in the cabinet with the corn flakes for weeks, which means you don't have to run to the supermarket every three or four days.

Shock Car. General Motors, no less, is working on an electric commuter vehicle that would carry two passengers back and forth to work at reasonable cost on one battery charge per 100 miles. G.M.'s not alone--a few such cars have already gone on sale, but they use standard lead-acid batteries that don't meet G.M.'s standards of mileage per charge and long battery life. With its battery design, G.M. says electric commuter vehicles could roll sometime late in the Eighties.

Soft Tranks. Beta blockers are a class of experimental drugs that prevent adrenaline from working on cells to produce the high-speed jitters of nervousness, stage fright and stress. In one experiment, for example, string players with shaky hands have been steadied. Because they work directly on all body cells; beta blockers don't dull the brain, but they do have a variety of side effects and need more study. The road to FDA approval is long. Look for soft tranks late in the next decade. Great for exams.

News Line. Millions of Americans don't see that extra channel of news, weather and advertising that cable systems provide. There's a remedy, a system that uses the vertical blank lines among the 525 lines of scan that make up each flashed frame of a TV picture. It already supplies subtitles for the deaf over PBS. It requires a decoder, which will probably be built into standard sets once the FCC authorizes its use--by 1985.

Grunt Gadgets. The microprocessor revolution will reach even the lowly foot soldier in the next ten years, arming him for warfare on a scale the front-line troops have never known before. One system already in production will arm a forward observer with a laser designator to accurately target enemy arms and armored vehicles. The system supplies real-time computer calculation to pinpoint the enemy and digital launching of smart missiles or shells to destroy him on the ground. The system has a very high kill rate in tests.

Synthetic Blood. The Green Cross Corporation of Osaka, Japan, has developed synthetic blood. It's made of starch, egg-yolk product and perfluorochemicals. It carries more oxygen than good red blood; rats survived replacement of 90 percent of their blood with the synthetic mixture and regenerated the lost blood within two weeks. Unlike real blood, the synthetic stuff is shelf stable for a year. Expect it in the Eighties if it passes FDA licensing.

Pain Control. The Chinese have progressed in understanding acupuncture scientifically; we've progressed in testing naturally occurring painkillers. One or both approaches will give medicine new and effective methods of controlling pain in the decade to come. Chinese doctors are replacing mechanical needle twirling with applications of low-voltage electricity, and they've identified drugs that enhance acupuncture's relief. In the U. S., research progresses on the endorphins and the enkephalins, natural substances in the human pituitary and brain that block pain much as morphine does. Trouble is, they're addictive, too. If they turn out to be less addictive, or if analogs can be synthesized that aren't addictive, they'll replace the opiates.

Solar Colding. Solar-powered home air conditioning will be marketed by Lennox in the mid-Eighties. NASA developed the system in conjunction with other research labs: A solar-heated fluid turbine drives a conventional compressor to deliver 36,000 B.T.U. per hour.

Pocket Translator. Texas Instruments introduced a talking translator for international travelers late in 1979. You punch in your native tongue; the translator speaks the French, German, Spanish equivalent. With the development of computers that understand speech, at the end of the decade, you should be able to buy a shoulder-bag device that translates back and forth, hearing you in English and speaking to your listener in whatever language he understands.

Unchecked. In the Eighties, your bank will no longer return your canceled checks. Instead, you'll receive a computer print-out showing the checks in miniature, complete with a facsimile of your signature to verify that you wrote each check in the first place. Burroughs is developing the system for banks; Amoco has already bought a similar system for those millions of service-station charge slips and will be deploying it nationwide as the Eighties begin.

Practical Prostaglandins. Prosta-glandins will be the wonder drugs of the Eighties. They're a class of hormonelike substances that the body manufactures in bewildering variety to direct many of its functions; they're called prostaglandins because they were first thought to originate in the prostate glands. In the Eighties, they will control high blood pressure; protect the stomach from bleeding and prevent ulcers; dissolve blood clots and therefore improve the chances of survival of heart-attack and stroke victims; possibly, prevent heart attacks; induce therapeutic abortion and labor; and replace the pill with a single capsule--already in use in hospitals in the U. S.--to be taken two or three weeks after a missed period, that induces menstruation and therefore averts pregnancy. These benefits from prostaglandin analogs are likely or certain. More are under study from the 1000 or so analog variations that have so far been synthesized.

Heated Exchange. Home heat exchangers that extract heat from waste water, clothes dryers and furnace and hot-water-heater exhausts, and use the heat to warm your living quarters, could cut energy bills by 40 percent in buildings heated electrically and by 80 percent in buildings heated with natural gas. A British agency is developing designs; expect commercial units to be on sale in the U. S. in the Eighties.

Teeny TV. Large-scale integrated-circuit computer chips will make possible shirt-pocket television sets with nickel-size screens. By the end of the decade, Chester Gould's two-way wrist TV should be a reality. With mass production, the TVs should be essentially throwaways, costing less than $20 per unit. Remember, you saw it first in Dick Tracy.

Clap Cures. The several varieties of herpes simplex afflict 3,000,000 of us a year--cold sores for some, venereal infections for others, blindness for the unlucky. A compound patented in 1977, AIU, permanently blocks the reproduction of herpes-simplex viruses. It has to clear the FDA. Maybe in the Eighties. More certain of FDA approval before 1990: a reliable vaccine against gonorrhea. Pass it on.

Stereo AM. FM went stereo almost two decades ago, but AM continues to lag behind and, with few exceptions, is still monaural. Now the FCC is studying five stereo AM radio systems currently competing for licensing and expects to make up its mind in the Eighties. Why stereo AM? Greater range for high-fidelity programing than line-of-sight FM, better-quality car radio, more choices on more stations.

Cellulose Cells. Wood, straw and cotton waste are all made of cellulose, which is a long chain of glucose--sugar--molecules. People can't eat it, but yeasts and bacteria can when it's properly treated. And 1000 pounds of yeast growing on treated cellulose can produce 12,000 pounds of yeast babies--6000 pounds of single-cell protein--in 24 hours. That's animal feed, tons of it, growing on sawdust or straw or old newspapers, and that's one of the answers forthcoming in the Eighties to increasing the world's protein supply and holding down the prices you pay for beef and pork.

Select Sex. Medicine has already learned to determine the sex of unborn fetuses; in the Eighties, it's expected to learn to select sperm for artificial insemination separated by sex: boy sperm, girl sperm. One promising technique requires unsorted sperm to swim upward through a column of nourishing fluid--the more vigorous female sperm swim faster, effectively sorting themselves. Social critics fear that practical sex selection would result in a preponderance of couples choosing boys rather than girls for offspring, tragedy in the making when the mobs of boys grow up.

Whose Fault? Chances of a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault--past Los Angeles and Monterey and out to sea at San Francisco--increase every year. The Eighties will be riskier than the Seventies. Unfortunately, reliable earthquake prediction isn't likely before the early Nineties. Estimated deaths among Californians if a big quake hits: 60,000 or more. Still want to move to California?

Solar Ballooning. No more hissing propane and limited two-hour flights: Silent, all-day ballooning is here. Frederick Eshoo of Iran developed the solar balloon and flew it successfully in the United States early in 1978. It's half transparent lens, half black-and-silver collector (black inside, silver outside). A curtain inside adjusts the collector area. Small battery-powered fans on the outside walls rotate the balloon. When more collector area is exposed to sunlight, the balloon rises; less area and it maintains altitude or sinks. Eshoo packs a small propane burner for emergency lift, but he sails hour after hour in sunlit silence. In the Eighties, so will you.

Safe Meat. Twenty-five years after it began R&D, the U. S. Army Research and Development Command thinks it's close to proving the safety of irradiated meats--meats dosed with high-energy radiation that can be stored without refrigeration for long periods of time because the radiation kills all microorganisms that might decompose them. Irradiated meats aren't much yet for taste, and the Army's working on that problem. If the FDA approves, irradiated bacon, sausage, ham, precooked chicken and turkey, corned beef and other meat products will appear on supermarket shelves in the mid-Eighties. They'll be safe and storable, and they'll no longer be dosed with sodium nitrite. Sodium nitrite, presently used to prevent botulism, can transform itself in cooking into a potent carcinogen. It has an older name: It used to be called saltpeter.

Plastic Casket. Will you spend eternity in a plastic coffin? They're presently coming into use, the first ones manufactured by Atlas Casket Company of sheet acrylic and fiberglass-reinforced resin. They're double-walled and made without seams. In the Eighties, they'll displace metal on the low end of the undertaker's casket line.

"The secretary will be a luxury or a highly trained office manager, and the clerk will be obsolete."

"Powdered drinks are coming, via microencapsulation. Look for powdered wine and daiquiri."

"In the Eighties, any athletic bicyclist will be able to pedal himself aloft and stay there for two hours."