Physics of the Future

by Michio Kaku

  Rock and roll, Hollywood movies, etc., are in fact prime examples of how intellectual capitalism is replacing commodity capitalism. Robots for decades to come will be incapable of creating music and movies that can thrill an international audience.

  This is also happening in the world of fashion, where a handful of brand names are extending their reach worldwide. High fashion, once reserved for the aristocracy and the extremely wealthy, is rapidly proliferating around the world as more people enter the middle class and aspire to some of the glamour of the rich. High fashion is no longer the exclusive province of the privileged elite.

  But the emergence of a planetary culture does not mean that local cultures or customs will be wiped out. Instead, people will be bicultural. On one hand, they will keep their local cultural traditions alive (and the Internet guarantees that these regional customs will survive forever). The rich cultural diversity of the world will continue to thrive into the future. In fact, certain obscure features of local culture can spread around the world via the Internet, gaining them a worldwide audience. On the other hand, people will be fluent in the changing trends that affect global culture. When people communicate with those from another culture, they will do so via the global culture. This has already happened to many of the elites on the planet: they speak the local language and obey local customs but use English and follow international customs when dealing with people from other countries. This is the model for the emerging Type I civilization. Local cultures will continue to thrive, coexisting side by side with the larger global culture.

  • The news is becoming planetary. With satellite TV, cell phones, the Internet, etc., it becomes impossible for one nation to completely control and filter the news. Raw footage is emerging from all parts of the world, beyond the reach of censors. When wars or revolutions break out, the stark images are broadcast instantly around the world as they happen in real time. In the past, it was relatively easy for the Great Powers of the nineteenth century to impose their values and manipulate the news. Today, this is still possible, but on a much reduced basis because of advanced technology. Also, with rising education levels around the world, there is a much larger audience for world news. Politicians today have to include world opinion when they think about the consequences of their actions.

  • Sports, which in the past were essential in forging a tribal and then a national identity, are now forging a planetary identity. Soccer and the Olympics are emerging to dominate planetary sports. The 2008 Olympics, for example, were widely interpreted as a coming-out party for the Chinese, who wanted to assume their rightful cultural position in the world after centuries of isolation. This is also an example of the Cave Man Principle, since sports are High Touch but are entering the world of High Tech.

  • Environmental threats are also being debated on a planetary scale. Nations realize that the pollution they create crosses national boundaries and hence can precipitate an international crisis. We first saw this when a gigantic hole in the ozone layer opened over the South Pole. Because the ozone layer prevents harmful UV and X-rays from the sun from reaching the ground, nations banded together to limit the production and consumption of chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerators and industrial systems. The Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 and successfully decreased the use of the ozone-depleting chemicals. Building on this international success, most nations adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to address the threat of global warming, which is an even greater threat to the environment of the planet.

  • Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet. During most of human history, it was common for people to live out their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. It was easy for unscrupulous leaders to manipulate their people, who had little to no contact with other peoples. But today, one can go around the globe on a modest budget. Backpacking youths of today who stay in budget youth hostels around the world will become the leaders of tomorrow. Some people decry the fact that tourists have only the crudest understanding of local cultures, histories, and politics. But we have to weigh that against the past, when contact between distant cultures was almost nonexistent, except during times of war, often with tragic results.

  • 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.

  • The nature of war itself is changing to reflect this new reality. History has shown that two democracies almost never wage war against each other. Almost all wars of the past have been waged between nondemocracies, or between a democracy and a nondemocracy. 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.

  There will still be wars in the future. As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once said, “War is politics by other means.” Although we will still have wars, their nature will change as democracy is spread around the world.

  (There is another reason why wars are becoming more difficult to wage as the world becomes more affluent and people have more to lose. Political theorist Edward Luttwak has written that wars are much more difficult to wage because families are smaller today. In the past, the average family had ten or so children; the eldest inherited the farm, while the younger siblings joined the church, the military, or sought their fortunes elsewhere. Today, when a typical family has an average of 1.5 children, there is no more surplus of children to easily fill the military and the priesthood. Hence, wars will be much more difficult to wage, especially between democracies and third-world guerrillas.)

  • Nations will weaken but will still exist in 2100. They will still be needed to pass laws and fix local problems. However, their power and influence will be vastly decreased as the engines of economic growth become regional, then global. For example, with the rise of capitalism in the late 1700s and early 1800s, nations were needed to enforce a common currency, language, tax laws, and regulations concerning trade and patents. Feudal laws and traditions, which hindered the advance of free trade, commerce, and finance, were quickly swept away by national governments. Normally, this process might take a century or so, but we saw an accelerated version of this when Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, forged the modern German state in 1871. In the same way, this march toward a Type I civilization is changing the nature of capitalism, and economic power is gradually shifting from national governments to regional powers and trade blocs.

  This does not necessarily mean a world government. There are many ways a planetary civilization could exist. It is clear that national governments will lose relative power, but what power will fill the vacuum will depend on many historical, cultural, and national trends that are hard to predict.

  • Diseases will be controlled on a planetary basis. In the ancient past, virulent diseases were actually not so dangerous because the human population was very low. The incurable Ebola virus, for example, is probably an ancient disease that infected just a few villages over thousands of years. But the rapid expansion of civilization into previously uninhabited areas and the rise of cities mean that something like Ebola has to be monitored very carefully.

  When the population of cities hit several hundred thousand to a million, diseases could spread rapidly and create genuine epidemics. 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.

  The recent outbreak of the H1N1 flu is thus a me
asure of our progress as well. Perhaps originating in Mexico City, the disease spread quickly around the globe via jet travel. More important, it took only a matter of months for the nations of the world to sequence the genes of the virus and then create a vaccine for it that was available to tens of millions of people.

  TERRORISM AND DICTATORSHIPS

  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. These are:

  • Islamic terrorists, who would prefer to go back a millennium, to the eleventh century, rather than live in the twenty-first century. They cannot frame their discontent in this fashion, but, judging from their own statements, they prefer to live in a theocracy where science, personal relations, and politics are all subject to strict religious edicts. (They forget that, historically, the greatness and scientific and technological prowess of the Islamic civilization were matched only by its tolerance of new ideas. These terrorists do not understand the true source of the greatness of the Islamic past.)

  • Dictatorships that depend on keeping their people ignorant of the wealth and progress of the outside world. One striking example was the demonstrations that gripped Iran in 2009, where the government tried to suppress the ideas of the demonstrators, who were using Twitter and YouTube in their struggle to carry their message to the world.

  In the past, people said that the pen was mightier than the sword. In the future, it will be the chip that is mightier than the sword.

  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.

  TYPE II CIVILIZATIONS

  By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the weather, ice ages can be avoided or altered. Meteors and comets can be also be deflected. Even if their sun goes supernova, the people will be able to flee to another star system, or perhaps prevent their star from exploding. (For example, if their sun turns into a red giant, they might be able swing asteroids around their planet in a slingshot effect in order to move their planet farther from the sun.)

  One way in which a Type II civilization may be able to exploit the entire energy output of a star is to create a gigantic sphere around it that absorbs all the sunlight of the star. This is called a Dyson sphere.

  A Type II civilization will probably be at peace with itself. Since space travel is so difficult, it will have remained a Type I civilization for centuries, plenty of time to iron out the divisions within their society. By the time a Type I civilization reaches Type II status, they will have colonized not just their entire solar system but also the nearby stars, perhaps out to several hundred light-years, but not much more. They will still be restricted by the speed of light.

  TYPE III CIVILIZATIONS

  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. Each copy rockets off to other distant star systems and makes thousands more copies. Starting with one such probe, we quickly create a sphere of trillions of these self-replicating probes expanding at near the speed of light, mapping out the entire Milky Way galaxy in just 100,000 years. Since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, there is plenty of time in which these civilizations may have risen (and fallen). (Such rapid, exponential growth is also the mechanism by which viruses spread in our body.)

  There is another possibility, however. By the time a civilization has reached Type III status, its people have enough energy resources to probe the “Planck energy,” or 1019 billion electron volts, the energy at which space-time itself become unstable. (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. Assuming that they can overcome a number of stubborn theoretical and practical obstacles (such as harnessing sufficient positive and negative energy and removing instabilities), it is conceivable that they might be able to colonize the entire galaxy.

  This has prompted many people to speculate about why they have not visited us. Where are they? the critics ask.

  One possible answer is that perhaps they already have, but we are too primitive to notice. Self-replicating von Neumann probes would be the most practical way of exploring the galaxy, and they do not have to be huge. They might be just a few inches long, because of revolutionary advances in nanotechnology. They might be in plain view, but we don’t recognize them because we are looking for the wrong thing, expecting a huge starship carrying aliens from outer space. More than likely, the probe will be fully automatic, part organic and part electronic, and will not contain any space aliens at all.

  And when we do eventually meet the aliens from space, we may be surprised, because they might have long ago altered their biology using robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

  Another possibility is that they have self-destructed. As we mentioned, the transition from Type 0 to Type I is the most dangerous one, since we still have all the savagery, fundamentalism, racism, and so on of the past. It is possible that one day, when we visit the stars, we may find evidence of Type 0 civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I (for example, their atmospheres may be too hot, or too radioactive, to support life).

  SETI (SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE)

  At the present time, the people of the world are certainly not conscious of the march toward a Type I planetary civilization. There is no collective self-awareness that this historic transition is taking place. If you take a poll, some people might be vaguely aware of the process of globalization, but beyond that there is no conscious awareness that we are headed to a specific destination.

  All this might suddenly change if we find evidence of intelligent life in outer space. Then, we would immediately be aware of our technological level in relation to this alien civilization. Scientists in particular would be intensely interested in which types of technologies this alien civilization has mastered.

  Although one cannot know for sure, probably within this century we will detect an advanced civilization in space, given the rapid advances in our technology.

  Two trends have made this possible. First is the launching of satellites specifically designed to find small, rocky extrasolar planets, the COROT and Kepler satellites. The Kepler is expected to identify up to 600 small, earthlike planets in space. Once these planets have been identified, the next step is to focus our search for intelligent emissions from these planets.

  In 2001, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen began donating funds, now more than $30 million, to jump-start the stalled SETI program. This will vastly increase the number of radio telescopes at the Hat Creek installation, located north of San Francisco. The Allen Telescope Array, when fully operational, will have 350 radio telescopes, making it the most advanced radio telescope facility in
the world. While in the past astronomers have scanned little more than 1,000 stars in their search for intelligent life, the new Allen Array will increase that number by a factor of 1,000, to a million stars.

  Although scientists have been searching vainly for signals from advanced civilizations for almost fifty years, only recently have these two developments given a much-needed boost to the SETI program. Many astronomers believe that there was simply too little effort and too few resources devoted to this project. With this influx of new resources and new data, the SETI program is becoming a serious scientific project.

  It is conceivable that we may, within this century, detect signals from an intelligent civilization in space. (Seth Shostak, the director of the SETI Institute in the Bay Area, told me that within twenty years, he expects to make contact with such a civilization. That may be too optimistic, but it is safe to say that within this century it would be strange if we did not detect signals from another civilization in space.)