The Year 3,000

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 occurred 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.

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.

In the technological frontier, he describes the futuristic role of electricity in generating heat, movement and light and of instant telecommunications spanning the globe.

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.