Physics of the Future

Will we ever really have flying cars? To his credit, Michio Kaku only goes so far as "sort of." His vision of the future includes hovering cars--magnetic cars that float above magnetic roads and go from Los Angeles to New York with almost no energy, as there is no friction. (He doesn't address the fact that lifting a car up and over the Rocky Mountains is going to take some energy, even if there is no friction.) We have been promised flying cars by futurists since at least the time the airplane was invented, and so far...we are still stuck on the ground. Will the next hundred years change that?

Who knows. That's my main problem with these kind of predictions. A hundred years ago, back in 1915, was anyone really able to extrapolate wireless internet from the radio? Or a modern sports car from a Model T? Or the moon landing from biplanes? Do we really have any idea whatsoever how things are going to play out?

Kaku does start by giving several examples of accurate predictions from the past, but, let's be honest--everyone is constantly speculating about the future, and so the odds are that there are going to be some guesses that are randomly right. Kaku also gives some principles for prediction, and they seem reasonable enough in themselves, but insufficient. Humanity is just too complicated a thing to fit a curve to current trends and say "therefore thus and thus will happen a hundred years hence."  At the end of the day, we're guessing.

But these are interesting guesses. Kaku's vision of the future is remarkably rosy, partly because his focus is on science and technology. He hardly discusses politics at all. When he talks about the current state of the world, he's talking almost exclusively about the first world. His logic for this is that, once technology has been developed, it's only a matter of time before it spreads everywhere.

Yes and no. I agree that technology has a way of spreading, but...sometimes there's a reason third world nations are third world nations. If the government is too corrupt, if neighboring nations are too hostile, if internal strife it too severe, if a million other things that can go catastrophically wrong...then physics has nothing to do with it.

Now, I am of the opinion that the world is, all in all, getting better. From a historical perspective, the modern first world is insanely prosperous, and a rising tide does tend to lift all boats. When there's more, there's more to go around. It's possible that Kaku's right--that in a hundred years, nations will be existent in some official way but unimportant as a practical matter, because transportation will be trivial and virtual communication will be prolific. His vision of a world where disease is all but eradicated and lifespans are extended dramatically, where artificial intelligence is everywhere and helpful, where tourists can go to space and we get our energy entirely from clean sources (including nuclear fusion) is a vision I would love to see come to pass.

But I doubt it will happen. I'm not saying it will be worse, just that it will be different. I suspect that the future is a far weirder place than anyone really imagines. Still, it's fun to speculate.