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Hello, the 21st century is only a few months old, yet already the first history has been written. The eminent historian Eric Hobbsperms book, The New Century, comes out next week.

But is it really possible for history to tell us something about an era which is hardly begun? Can we ever predict the future by understanding the past, often uses the justification for studying history?

Should we seek to understand the past because it holds important lessons for the future, or its history is Henry Ford would have it more or less bonk?

With me to discuss the history of the future is Richard J. Evans, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, an author among much else of that clarion call of a book in defensive history, and I'm also delighted to welcome Eric Hobbsperms himself.

Eric Hobbsperms, in a new century you've written, let us hope that the 21st century will experience further progress but without the catastrophes. But if there are catastrophes, there will be different as result of the 20th century.

Has humanity ever really learned from the past and been able to apply the lessons?

They always tried. In the past of course if people learnt because there was a mechanism by which in effect knowledge of the past and how things were done in the past was passed on from one generation to the other.

And until the 19th and 20th century, basically that was a model of how things should happen, at least for most ordinary people.

So to that extent learning from the past was built in almost wired into human life.

The novelty of a situation that we have to discuss is in the 19th and 20th century when the future simply is not based on the past.

We don't repeat, it's going to be very different and we've got to try and find out how it's going to be different.

When you say the future, can you just extrapolate a little more on that before I go on?

Well, as putty like this, for most of the world, say until the middle of the 20th century, the greater part of humanity lived on the land and by agriculture, one way or another.

Even the big industrial countries, with one or two exceptional England, the United States, Germany, very high percentage of people continue to be in the country.

Today, this is simply no longer so, it's a purely regional problem.

We've got to get used to a future in which only two, three percent, even less of people lives by farming, by agriculture, where the countryside is completely different from what it ever was before.

Again, in the past, education literacy was something which was a minority activity, except among certain special groups.

Secondary education was a tiny fraction.

Tertiary education, students, ridiculous.

I mean, when we talk about the students' role in the 1848 revolution, we're talking about three, four thousand people in Europe, or at least in Germany.

Today, we are in a completely different ballgame.

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