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

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

The real bottleneck is software. Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human -sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper and laptop- is going to have to write the codes... One can mass-produce hardware and increase it's power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain.

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.

For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and finally tip the cell into a cancerous mode.

The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That’s the Cave Man Principle.

The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. 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.

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Unlike information, it cannot be dispensed via blogs and Internet chatter. Since we are drowning in an ocean of information, the most precious commodity in modern society is wisdom. Without wisdom and insight, we are left to drift aimlessly and without purpose, with an empty, hollow feeling after the novelty of unlimited information wears off.

The handsome and the beautiful may earn the admiration of society, but all the wondrous inventions of the future are a by-product of the unsung, anonymous scientists.

Telling a lie causes more centres of the brain to light up than telling the truth. Telling a lie implies that you know the truth but are thinking of the lie and its myriad consequences, which requires more energy than telling the truth.

In my field, physics, I see that most of us are engage in physics not for the money but for the sheer joy of discovery an innovation.

The lesson here is that it is very dangerous to bet against the future.

Social animals, on the other hand, are more intelligent than those with just a reptilian brain.

Sin un científico no hay futuro. Los guapos y atractivos personajes pueden ganarse la admiración de la sociedad, pero todas las invenciones maravillosas relacionadas con el futuro son consecuencia del trabajo de científicos anónimos que no reciben por ello elogio alguno.

Bilim şüphesiz ki iki tarafı keskin bir kılıçtır; çözüme ulaştırdığı sayıda problem yaratır, ve yarattığı her problem bir öncekinden hep daha zordur.

Liquid water is the universal solvent, the mixing bowl where the first DNA probably got off the ground. If liquid-water oceans are found on these planets, it could alter our understanding of life in the universe. Journalists in search of a scandal say, “Follow the money,” but astronomers searching for life in space say, “Follow the water.

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.)

Future Of Humanity - Planetary CivilizationIn mythology, the gods lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals.The Greek gods frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse gods who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the gods by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization?All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization.This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos.Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate. Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by analyzing the history of energy.

Cuando estamos sentados en una silla, creemos que la tocamos, pero en realidad estamos suspendidos sobre ella, flotando a menos de un nanometro sobre el asiento,

In 2009, Markram said optimistically, “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in ten years. If we build it correctly, it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does.” He cautions, however, that it would take a supercomputer 20,000 times more powerful than present supercomputers, with a memory storage 500 times the entire size of the current Internet, to achieve this.

Each of the genes of the human body is spelled out explicitly in this dictionary, but what each does is still largely a mystery.

If you remove a single transistor in the digital computer’s central processor, the computer will fail.

They found that temperature and carbon dioxide levels have oscillated in parallel, like two roller coasters moving together, in synchronization over many thousands of years. When one curve rises or falls, so does the other. Most important, they found a sudden spike in temperature and carbon dioxide content happening just within the last century. This is highly unusual, since most fluctuations occur slowly over millennia. This unusual spike is not part of this natural heating process, scientists claim, but is a direct indicator of human activity.

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain.

They would excel in the third characteristic: they would be able to run complex simulations of the future far ahead of us, from more perspectives, with more details and depth. Their simulations would be more accurate than ours, because they would have a better grasp of common sense and the rules of nature and hence better able to ferret out patterns

According to the long-term studies of Walter Mischel of Columbia University, and many others, children who were able to refrain from immediate gratification (e.g., eating a marshmallow given to them) and held out for greater long-term rewards (getting two marshmallows instead of one) consistently scored higher on almost every measure of future success, in SATs, life, love, and career.