Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

by Michio Kaku

Calculating the energy output of the planet, we can estimate that we will attain Type I status within 100 years. Unless we succumb to the forces of chaos and folly, the transition to a planetary civilization is inevitable, the end product of the enormous, inexorable forces of history and technology beyond anyone’s control.

There are two competing trends in the world today: one is to create a planetary civilization that is tolerant, scientific, and prosperous, but the other glorifies anarchy and ignorance that could rip the fabric of our society. We still have the same sectarian, fundamentalist, irrational passions of our ancestors, but the difference is that now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

(Some commentators have remarked that the Internet was originally conceived as a “male” device by the Pentagon, that is, it was concerned with dominating an enemy in wartime. But now the Internet is mainly “female,” in that it’s about reaching out and touching someone.)

Digital computers can calculate at nearly the speed of light. The human brain, by contrast, is incredibly slow. Nerve impulses travel at an excruciatingly slow pace of about 200 miles per hour. But the brain more than makes up for this because it is massively parallel, that is, it has 100 billion neurons operating at the same time, each one performing a tiny bit of computation, with each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. In a race, a superfast single processor is left in the dust by a superslow parallel processor.

parallel processing!!

Strings can pull but not push

someone might be pulling your strings but you are the one doing all the pushing.

In other words, one of the chief purposes of emotions is to give us values, so we can decide what is important, what is expensive, what is pretty, and what is precious. Without emotions, everything has the same value, and we become paralyzed by endless decisions, all of which have the same weight. So scientists are now beginning to understand that emotions, far from being a luxury, are essential to intelligence.

In a worst-case scenario, we could have a greenhouse effect that feeds on itself. For example, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic regions may release millions of tons of methane gas from rotting vegetation. Tundra covers nearly 9 million square miles of land in the Northern Hemisphere, containing vegetation frozen since the last Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. This tundra contains more carbon dioxide and methane than the atmosphere, and this poses an enormous threat to the world’s weather. Methane gas, moreover, is a much deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long, but it causes much more damage than carbon dioxide. The release of so much methane gas from the melting tundra could cause temperatures to rapidly rise, which will cause even more methane gas to be released, causing a runaway cycle of global warming.

That is why LISA is creating such excitement. LISA will measure an entirely new type of radiation: gravity waves from the instant of the big bang itself.

If you were an alien from Mars visiting earth in the year 1500 and viewed all the great civilizations, which would you think would eventually dominate the word? The answer would be easy: any civilization but the European one.

Then you have the pitiful European countries, which are racked by religious fundamentalism, witch trials, and the Inquisition. Western Europe, in precipitous decline for a thousand years since the collapse of the Roman Empire, is so backward that it is a net importer of technology. It is a medieval black hole. Most of the knowledge of the Roman Empire has long since vanished, replaced by stifling religious dogma. Opposition or dissent is frequently met with torture or worse. Moreover, the city-states of Europe are constantly at war with one another.

Simply trying to prop up obsolete businesses and overpaid jobs creates complacency, waste, and inefficiency. Subsidizing failing industries only prolongs the inevitable, delays the pain of collapse, and actually makes thing worse.

The United States and Europe went through the transition from a largely industrial to a service economy decades ago, and this historic shift cannot be reversed. The heyday of industrialization has passed, forever.

However, not every nation is following this path. Some nations are run by incompetent leaders, are culturally and ethnically fragmented to the point of dysfunction, and do not produce goods that the rest of the world wants. Instead of investing in education, they invest in huge armies and weapons to terrorize their people and maintain their privileges. Instead of investing in an infrastructure to speed up the industrialization of their country, they engage in corruption and keeping themselves in power, creating a kleptocracy, not a meritocracy.

until you realize that much of the U.S. science comes from overseas, in the form of the “brain drain.” The United States has a secret weapon, the H1B visa, the so-called genius visa. If you can show that you have special talents, resources, or scientific knowledge, you can jump ahead of the line and get an H1B visa.

Usually, there are no Americans qualified to take the highest-level jobs in Silicon Valley, which we’ve seen often go unfilled as a consequence.

But the H1B visa is only a stopgap measure. The United States cannot continue to live off foreign scientists, many of whom are beginning to return to China and India as their economies improve. So the brain drain is not sustainable. This means that the United States will eventually have to overhaul its archaic, sclerotic education system.

The brightest minds at Princeton were no longer tackling the difficult problems in physics and mathematics but were being drawn into careers like investment banking. Again, he thought, this might be a sign of decay, when the leaders of a society can no longer support the inventions and technology that made their society great.

We are seeing the rise of a planetary middle class. Hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and elsewhere are entering its ranks, which is perhaps the greatest social upheaval in the last half century.

(As the advisers to President Ronald Reagan once commented, the strategy of the United States was to spend Russia into a depression, that is, increase U.S. military expenditure so that the Russians, with an economy less than half the size of the United States’, would have to starve their own people to keep up.)

Politicians today have to include world opinion when they think about the consequences of their actions.

• Likewise, the falling price of intercontinental travel is accelerating contact between diverse peoples, making wars more difficult to wage and spreading the ideals of democracy. One of the main factors that whipped up animosity between nations was misunderstanding between people. In general, it is quite difficult to wage war on a nation you are intimately familiar with.

In general, war fever can be easily whipped up by demagogues who demonize the enemy. But in a democracy, with a vibrant press, oppositional parties, and a comfortable middle class that has everything to lose in a war, war fever is much more difficult to cultivate. It is hard to whip up war fever when there is a skeptical press and mothers who demand to know why their children are going to war.

The fact that the Black Plague killed perhaps half the European population was an indication, ironically, of progress, because populations had reached critical mass for epidemics and shipping routes connected ancient cities around the world.

There are groups, however, that instinctively resist the trend toward a Type I planetary civilization, because they know that it is progressive, free, scientific, prosperous, and educated. These forces may not be conscious of this fact and cannot articulate it, but they are in effect struggling against the trend toward a Type I civilization.

One of the reasons the people of North Korea, a horribly impoverished nation, do not rebel is because they are denied all contact with the world, whose people, they believe, are also starving. In part, not realizing that they do not have to accept their fate, they endure incredible hardship.

By the time a civilization reaches Type III status, it will have explored most of the galaxy. The most convenient way to visit the hundreds of billions of planets is to send self-replicating robot probes throughout the galaxy. A von Neumann probe is a robot that has the ability to make unlimited copies of itself; it lands on a moon (since it is free of rust and erosion) and makes a factory out of lunar dirt, which creates thousands of copies of itself.

The Expanse!

(The Planck energy is a quadrillion times larger than the energy produced by our largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. It is the energy at which Einstein’s theory of gravity finally breaks down. At this energy, it is theorized that the fabric of space-time will finally tear, creating tiny portals that might lead to other universes, or other points in space-time.) Harnessing such vast energy would require colossal machines on an unimaginable scale, but if successful they might make possible shortcuts through the fabric of space and time, either by compressing space or by passing through wormholes.

In recent years, another concern has arisen: pollution and waste. Energy and information are not enough to rank a civilization. In fact, the more energy a civilization consumes and the more information it spews out, the more pollution and waste it might produce. This is not an academic question, since the waste from a Type I or II civilization might be enough to destroy it.

Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores. However, once we make the transition to a Type I civilization, we will have many centuries to settle our differences.

the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1795 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which some claim is the most accurate prediction of future events ever written.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

Dictators live in fear of the Internet, terrified of what happens when their people rise up against them. So today, the nightmare of 1984 is gone, with the Internet changing from an instrument of terror into an instrument of democracy.

not totally true

The key to a democracy is an educated, informed electorate that can rationally and dispassionately discuss the issues of the day. The purpose of this book is to help start the debate that will determine how this century unfolds.

The image of your boss suddenly materializes in his chair. “Gentlemen,” he announces, “as you’ve probably heard, the dikes around Manhattan have suddenly begun to leak. It’s serious, but we caught it in time, so there is no danger of collapse.

in kaku's vision of 2100 America, women dont work i guess.

Mahatma Gandhi once wrote: The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.