Introduction - predicting the next hundred years, from the book "The Physics of the Future" by Michio Kaku

The book was published by Aryeh Nir, and was sold as part of the book week that is taking place these days

By Michio Kaku
Two experiences helped shape my personality as a child, and they instilled in me a passion for two fields that helped define my life.

First, when I was eight years old, I remember all the teachers excitedly talking about the latest news, announcing the passing of a great scientist. That night a picture of his office was printed in the newspaper, with an unfinished manuscript on his desk. The caption that accompanied the photo said that the greatest scientist of our time failed to finish his greatest masterpiece. And I asked myself what could be so difficult that such a great scientist is unable to finish it? What could be so complex and so important? These questions became for me, in the end, more fascinating than any murder mystery, more intriguing than any adventure story. I had to know what was in this unfinished manuscript.

Later, I discovered that this scientist was Albert Einstein, and the unfinished manuscript was to be the crowning glory of his life's work, his attempt to create a "theory of everything," an equation, perhaps no more than three inches long, that would reveal the secrets of the universe and perhaps allow him to "read the mind of God".

But the other defining experience of my childhood was watching the Saturday morning TV shows, especially Flash Gordon with Buster Crabb. Every week, my nose was glued to the TV background. Miraculously I was transported to a mysterious world of aliens, spaceships, ray gun battles, underwater cities and monsters. I got addicted. This was my first exposure to the world of the future. From then on, I felt childlike wonder whenever I thought about the future.

But after watching every episode of the series, I began to understand that even if Flash won all the praise, the scientist Dr. Zarkov is the one who did the serious work. He invented the space rocket, the vanishing shield, the power source of the city in the sky, etc. Without the scientist, there is no future. The beautiful and the fit may be admired by society, but all the wonderful inventions of the future are a byproduct of the work of anonymous and obscure scientists.

Later, in high school, I decided to follow in the footsteps of these great scientists and test some of the things I had learned. I wanted to take part in this great revolution that is about to change the world. I decided to build a particle accelerator. I asked my mother for permission to build an accelerator with a power of 2.3 million electron volts. She was a bit surprised but agreed. Then I approached the Westinghouse company, obtained 180 kilograms of steel from scrap electrical transformers and 35 kilometers of copper wires, and built a theater accelerator in my mother's driveway.

Even earlier I built a fog chamber with a strong magnetic field and photographed traces of antimatter. But I wasn't content with antimatter photography. My goal now was to produce a beam of antimatter. The magnetic coils of my accelerator were able to produce a massive magnetic field of 10,000 gauss (about 20,000 times greater than Earth's magnetic field, and capable of dislodging a hammer from your hand). The machine had a power of 6 kilowatts of electricity, and it used all the electricity in my house. When I turned on the machine, I often blew all the fuses in the house. (My poor mother must have wondered why she didn't have a son who played football.)

So, two passions have interested me throughout my life: the desire to understand all the laws of physics of the universe within one consistent theory and the desire to see the future. In the end, I realized that these two passions complement each other. The key to understanding the future is to grasp the fundamental laws of nature and then apply them to inventions, machines and healing methods that will redefine our culture from now to the far future.

As I discovered, countless attempts have been made to predict the future, many of them helpful and insightful. However, they were written mainly by historians, sociologists, science fiction writers and "futurists", that is, people from the outside who predict the progress of the world of science without having a first-hand understanding of science itself. The scientists, the people inside, who actually create the future in their laboratories, are mostly busy with groundbreaking research and don't have time to write books about the future for the general public.

That's why this book is different. I hope it will provide an inside look at the wondrous discoveries that await us and provide the most authentic and authoritative point of view into the world of 2100.

Of course, it is impossible to predict the future with perfect accuracy. The best thing that can be done, in my opinion, is to use the wisdom of the scientists engaged in groundbreaking research, who are busy with the dirty work of inventing the future. These are the people who create the facilities, inventions and healing methods that will revolutionize human culture. And this book is their story. I had the opportunity to sit in the front row and watch this great revolution, thanks to interviews I conducted with more than 300 of the most prominent scientists, thinkers and dreamers in the world as part of national television and radio programs. In addition, I took TV crews into their labs and filmed the prototypes of the amazing facilities that would change the future. I have had the rare honor of presenting several special science programs on the BBC, the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel, which have depicted the amazing inventions and discoveries of the bold visionaries who are creating the future. Thanks to the freedom given to me to continue my work in string theory and to eavesdrop on groundbreaking research that will revolutionize this century, I feel that I have won one of the most coveted jobs in the world of science. This is my childhood dream come true.

But this book is different from my previous books. In books like Beyond Einstein, about space and parallel worlds, I dealt with new and revolutionary approaches in my field of research, theoretical physics, which open up new ways for us to understand the universe. In The Physics of the Impossible, I was concerned with how the latest discoveries in physics may ultimately enable even the most imaginative inventions of science fiction.

This book is most similar to the Visions books, in which I dealt with how science will develop in the coming decades. I feel satisfied that many of the predictions made in the book are being fulfilled today according to the estimated schedule. This accuracy relies, in large part, on the wisdom and foresight of the many scientists I interviewed in the course of writing it.

But this book looks at the future more broadly, and deals with technologies that may mature in a century, and ultimately determine the fate of humanity. How we deal with the challenges and opportunities of the next hundred years will determine the course of the human race's progress.

Prediction of the next century
Forecasting the next few years, let alone the next century, is a task of enormous dimensions. But he also challenges us to dream of technologies that will one day change the fate of humanity.

In 1863, the great writer Jules Verne began what was perhaps his most ambitious venture. He wrote a prophetic novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which he applied the full force of his great talents to predict the next century. Unfortunately, the manuscript was lost in the mists of time, until we both chanced upon it in a safe where it had been locked for nearly 130 years. Realizing the treasure that fell into his hands, he arranged for its publication in 1994, and it became a bestseller.

In 1863, kings and emperors still reigned in ancient empires, and poor peasants worked hard manual labor in the fields. The United States was engulfed in a devastating civil war, which almost tore the country in two, and steam was just beginning to revolutionize the world. But Verne predicted that the Paris of 1960 would have glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, television, elevators, high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, fax machines, and even something resembling the Internet. With incredible precision, Verne described life in modern Paris.
This was not a one-time feat, as a few years later he had another spectacular prediction. In 1865 he wrote From the Earth to the Moon, in which he predicted the details of the mission that sent our astronauts to the moon more than a hundred years later, in 1969. He predicted the size of the spacecraft to within a few percent, the launch site in Florida not far from Cape Canaveral, the number of astronauts on the mission, the duration of the journey, the weightlessness the astronauts would experience and the landing in the ocean. (Verne's only big mistake was using gunpowder, instead of rocket fuel, to get his astronauts to the moon. But liquid-fuel rockets weren't invented until seventy years later.)

How did Jules Verne manage to predict the future a century later with such incredible accuracy? His biographers note that although Verne was not a scientist himself, he constantly sought out the company of scientists, peppering them with questions about their vision for the future. He accumulated an extensive archive summarizing the major scientific discoveries of his time. Verne, more than others, understood that science is the engine that shakes the foundations of civilization, pushing it into a new century of unexpected wonders and miracles. The key to Verne's vision and deep insights was his perception of the power of science to bring about social revolutions.
Another great prophet of technology was Leonardo da Vinci, painter, thinker and visionary. In the late fifteenth century, he drew beautiful and precise diagrams of machines that would one day fill the skies: drawings of parachutes, helicopters, gliders and even airplanes. It is amazing to discover that many of his inventions could fly. (Though his flying machines needed one more ingredient: an engine of at least one horse power, something that became possible only 400 years later.)
An equally amazing fact is that Leonardo drew a plan to build a calculating machine, which was ahead of its time by about 150 years. In 1967, an analysis of a misplaced manuscript revealed Leonardo's idea for a digital thirteen-wheel calculating machine. Through the rotation of a crank, the wheels in the machine rotate in a coordinated manner and perform the arithmetic calculation. (The machine was built in 1968, and it works.)
In the XNUMXs, another manuscript was discovered, which contained a drawing of a warrior automaton, wearing German-Italian armor, able to sit and move its arms, neck and mouth. It is also well built and works.
Like Jules Verne, Leonardo was able to reach deep insights into the future with the help of a handful of visionaries of his time. He is one of a small circle of people who are at the forefront of innovation. Furthermore, Leonardo was constantly experimenting, building and sketching models, a key ingredient for anyone who wants to translate thought into reality.

Given the tremendous and prophetic insights of Verne and Leonardo da Vinci, we pose the following question: Is it possible to predict the world of 2100? In the tradition of Verne and Leonardo, this book will take a close look at the work of today's leading scientists who are building the prototypes of the technologies that will change the future. This book is not a work of fiction, a byproduct of the wild imagination of Hollywood screenwriters, but is based on solid scientific research conducted today in important laboratories around the world.
The prototypes of all these technologies already exist. As William Gibson - the author of the book Neuromancer, who coined the term cyberspace - once said, "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.”

Predicting the world in 2100 is a huge task, because we are in an era of deep scientific upheavals, and the pace of discoveries is constantly accelerating. The scientific knowledge accumulated in the last decades is greater than that collected in all of human history. By 2100, this scientific knowledge will increase tens of thousands.

But perhaps the best way to grasp the magnitude of the challenge in predicting the next hundred years is to think about the world in 1900 and remember the life our grandfathers lived.

Journalist Mark Sullivan asks us to imagine a person reading the newspaper in 1900:

In the newspaper that a resident of the United States would read on January 1900, 1, a word like radio would not appear, because twenty years would pass before its invention; The word "film" didn't exist either, since it too was largely a matter of the future; Neither did a driver, since the car just appeared and was called "a chariot without a horse..." The word pilot did not exist... Farmers had not heard of tractors, and bankers had not heard of the Federal Reserve. Merchants have not heard of chains nor of "self-service"; And sailors had not heard of engines burning gasoline... Pairs of oxen pulling carts were still seen on the country roads... Horses and mules still carried loads everywhere... The volume under the broad-branched chestnut tree was part of reality. XNUMX

To understand the difficulty in predicting the next hundred years, we must appreciate the difficulty people in 1900 had in predicting the world in two thousand years. In 1893, as part of the World's Fair in Chicago that marked four hundred years since the discovery of America, seventy-four famous people were asked to predict what life would look like in the next hundred years. The main problem was that they all underestimated the rate of progress of science. For example, many of them correctly predicted that one day we would have commercial transatlantic aircraft, but they thought they would be airships. Senator John J. Ingalls said, "As today the citizen puts on boots or calls a carriage, so in the future he will order a hot air balloon."2 They also all missed the appearance of the automobile. The head of the Postal Service, John Vanamaker, pointed out that mail in the United States would be delivered by carriage and on horseback, even a hundred years later.

This downplaying of the importance of science and innovation also included the patent office. In 1899, Charles H. Dowell, inspector of the US Patent Office, said, "Everything that can be invented has already been invented."3

Sometimes, even experts in their field underestimate what is happening right under their noses. In 1927, during the silent film era, Harry M. Warner, one of the founders of Warner Brothers, remarked, "Who wants to hear actors talk?"4
And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, "I think there is a market in the world for maybe five computers."5

Even the respectable New York Times shares this underestimation of the power of scientific discovery. (In 1903, The Times declared that flying machines were a waste of time, just a week before the Wright brothers were able to fly an airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1920, The Times criticized rocket scientist Robert Goddard, declaring that his work was worthless because rockets could not To move in a vacuum. To the Times' credit, it will say that forty-nine years later, when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon, it issued an apology: "It is now perfectly clear that a missile is capable of operating in a vacuum. The Times apologizes for the mistake.")6

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

Predictions of the future, with a handful of exceptions, have always underestimated the importance of the pace of technological progress. History, we are repeatedly told, is written by the optimists, not the pessimists. As President Dwight Eisenhower said, "Pessimism has never won a war."

You can see how much even science fiction writers underestimated the importance of the pace of scientific discovery. If you watch reruns of the old Star Trek TV series from the XNUMXs, you'll notice that most of the "technology of the twenty-third century" is already here. At the time, television viewers were amazed to see mobile phones, laptops, talking machines, and typewriters that understood spoken language. But all these technologies exist today. Soon we will also have versions of universal translators, which can quickly translate between languages ​​while speaking, as well as "tricorders", which diagnose diseases from a distance. (With the exception of hyperspace engines and teleportation launchers, most of the science of the twenty-third century already exists today.)

Given the sweeping errors of people who underestimated the future, how can we provide a solid scientific basis for our predictions?

Understanding the laws of nature

We no longer live in the Middle Ages of science, when lightning and plagues were considered acts of God. We have a great advantage that Jules Verne and Leonardo da Vinci did not have: a solid understanding of the laws of nature.

Errors in predictions are inevitable, but one way to make them as reliable as possible is to understand the four fundamental forces in nature that underlie the operation of the entire universe. Every time one of them was explained and described, it changed human history.

The first force explained is gravity. Isaac Newton provided us with mechanics explaining that bodies move under the influence of forces, rather than through mystical spirits and metaphysics. This paved the way for the industrial revolution and the appearance of steam power, and especially the locomotive.

The second force understood was the electromagnetic force, which lights our cities and drives electrical appliances. When Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and others explained electricity and magnetism, the signal was given for the electronic revolution that created a multitude of scientific wonders. We see this every time there is a power outage, and society is suddenly thrown a hundred years into the past.

The third and fourth understood forces are the two nuclear forces: the weak and the strong force. When Einstein wrote that E=mc^2 and when the atom hatched in the thirties, scientists for the first time began to understand the forces that light up the sky. This is how the secret in the heart of the stars is revealed. This not only paved the way for the use of the tremendous power of atomic weapons, but also raised the hope that a day would come when we would be able to harness this power for our use on Earth.

Today, we have a fairly good understanding of these four forces. The first force, gravity, is currently described using Einstein's theory of general relativity. And the other three forces are described using quantum theory, which allows us to crack the secrets of the subatomic world.

Quantum theory itself gave us the transistor, the laser and the digital revolution that is the driving force behind modern society. Similarly, scientists used quantum theory to reveal the secrets of the DNA molecule. The dizzying speed of the biotechnological revolution is a direct product of computer technology, since DNA sequencing is done by machines, robots and computers.

As a result, we are able to better understand the direction in which science and technology will advance in the next century. There will always be new and completely unexpected surprises that will leave us stunned, but the foundations of modern physics, chemistry, and biology have largely been laid, and we do not expect any major change in this basic knowledge, at least not in the foreseeable future. As a result, the predictions we will make in this book are not the product of wild guesses but educated assessments of the maturation of today's technological prototypes.

In conclusion, there are several reasons to believe that we can outline the world in 2100:

1. This book is based on interviews with more than 300 leading scientists, who are at the forefront of scientific discovery.
2. Every scientific development mentioned in this book is in accordance with the known laws of physics.
3. The four fundamental forces and laws of nature are largely understood; We do not expect any important changes in them.
4. The prototypes of all the technologies mentioned in the book already exist.
5. The book was written by Adam "from the inside", who acquired first-hand knowledge about the innovative technologies in scientific research.

For countless ages we have been passive spectators of the dance of nature. We watched with wonder and fear at comets, lightning, volcanic eruptions and plagues, assuming that they were beyond our comprehension. The forces of nature were an eternal mystery to the ancients, forces to be feared and worshipped, and the gods and mythology were created to find order in the world. The ancients hoped that through their worship, the gods would show mercy and fulfill their dearest wishes.

Today we have become choreographers of the dance of nature, and here and there we are able to play with the laws of nature. By 2100, we will become the rulers of nature.

2100: To become the gods of mythology
If we could somehow visit our ancestors and show them the abundance of modern science and technology, we would be considered magicians. Through the magic of science, we would show them jet planes that soar to the clouds, rockets that explore the moon and the planets, MRI scanners that see the entrails of the living body and mobile phones that allow us to contact every person in the world. If we showed them laptops that instantly send moving pictures and messages across the continent, they would see it as sorcery.

But this is only the beginning. Science is not static. Science is advancing at an exponential rate in all directions. If you count the number of published scientific articles, you will find that the amount of existing science doubles every decade or so. The news and the discovery change the economic, political and social landscape, turning old beliefs and prejudices upside down.

Now we must dare to imagine the world in the year 2100.
By 2100, our destiny is to become the gods we worshiped and feared in the past. But our tools will not be wands and magic potions but computer science, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and above all, quantum theory, which is the basis of all these technologies.

By 2100, like the gods of mythology, we will be able to influence objects with the power of thought. Computers, silently reading our thoughts, will fill our voids. We can move objects with the power of thought alone, a telekinetic ability usually reserved only for gods. With the power of biotechnology, we will create perfect bodies and extend our lives. We will also be able to develop life forms the likes of which the world has not seen. With the power of nanotechnology, we can take an object and turn it into something else, create something almost out of nothing. We will travel not in chariots of fire but in magnificent vehicles that will float by themselves almost without the need for fuel, and fly in the air without effort. With our engines, we can harness the boundless power of the stars. We will be closer than ever to sending spaceships to explore the nearby stars.

Although these godlike forces seem to advance unfathomably, the seeds of these technologies are being planted right now. It is modern science, not prayers and hymns, that will give us this power.

I am a quantum physicist. Every day, I struggle to understand the equations that govern the subatomic particles that make up the universe. The world I live in exists in a hyperspace that includes eleven dimensions, black holes, and gateways to the superuniverse. But the quantum theory equations that describe exploding stars and the Big Bang can also be used to decipher the contours of the future.

But where does this technological change lead? What is the final destination in this long journey into the depths of science and technology?

The culmination of all these upheavals is the creation of a planetary civilization, what physicists call a Type I civilization. This change is perhaps the greatest in history, and all the headlines dominating the news reflect, in a sense, the birthing ropes of this planetary civilization. Commerce, economy, society, language, entertainment, leisure activities and even war are being revolutionized as a result of its growth. From the calculation of the world's energy consumption, we can estimate that we will reach Class I within 100 years. As long as we stand firm in the face of the forces of chaos and stupidity, the transition to a planetary civilization is inevitable, and is the product of mighty and firm forces of history and technology beyond our control.

Why some predictions do not come true
But some of the predictions made about the information age turned out to be big mistakes. For example, many futurists predicted the era of the "paperless office", that is, that the use of the computer would lead to the disappearance of paper. In fact, the opposite is true. A quick glance at any office shows that the amount of paper in it is greater than ever.

Some predicted the era of the "city without people". Futurists predicted that conference calls via the Internet would eliminate the need for face-to-face business meetings, thus eliminating the need for travel. They predicted, in fact, that the cities themselves would be largely emptied, becoming ghost towns, while people worked at home instead of in the office.

We will also witness the appearance of "virtual tourists", couch potatoes who will spend the entire day sitting, while wandering the world and watching the tourist attractions via the computer and the Internet. We will also see "virtual buyers", who will let the computer mouse walk in their place. The malls will go out of business. And "virtual students" will take all their courses online while drinking beer and secretly playing video games. The universities will be closed for lack of interest.

Also think about the fate of the "photo phone". Ahead of the 1964 World's Fair, AT&T spent about a hundred million dollars on perfecting a television screen that could connect to the telephone system, so that the people talking could see each other. The idea did not work; AT&T only sold a hundred devices, so the cost of each unit was about $XNUMX million. It was a very costly failure.

And finally, people thought the end of traditional media and entertainment was imminent. Some futurists claimed that the Internet was the giant that would swallow theater, movies, radio and television, and these would soon become museum exhibits.

In fact, the opposite happened. Traffic jams are worse today than before - they have become a permanent feature of urban life. People are flocking to tourist sites in record numbers, making tourism one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Buyers flood the stores, despite the economic difficulties. Instead of multiple virtual classrooms, universities are still registering record numbers of students. Undoubtedly, more people decide to work from home or hold conference calls with their colleagues, but the cities have not emptied at all. Instead, they merged and became sprawling megacities. Today it is easy to make video calls online, but most people do not like being filmed, and prefer face-to-face meetings. And of course, the Internet has changed all means of communication, while media giants grapple with the question of how to generate profits from the Internet. But it is still not close to eliminating television, radio and the theater. Broadway lights still glow with precious light as before.

The caveman principle
Why did these predictions not come true? I argue that most people rejected these innovations because of what I call the caveman (or cavewoman) principle. The genetic and fossil evidence shows that modern man, who looks just like us, evolved in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, but we find no evidence that our minds and personalities have changed much since then. If you were to take a man from that era, he would be anatomically identical to us: if you showered and shaved him, dressed him in a three-piece suit, and then placed him on Wall Street, physically he would be indistinguishable from any other person. That is, our desires, our dreams, our personalities and our passions have probably not changed much during these 100,000 years. We probably still think like our caveman ancestors.
And this is the main point: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the primitive Mawis of our ancestors, the primitive Mawis win. This is the caveman principle. For example, the caveman always required "proof of murder". It wasn't enough to brag about the big animal that escaped. Holding the fresh carcass in our hands was always preferable to stories about the one that got away. Likewise, we want a physical copy whenever we handle files. Out of instinct, we don't trust the electrons rushing across the computer screen, so we print emails and reports, even when there's no need for it. This is why the vision of the paperless office did not come true.
Our ancestors also preferred to meet face to face. This way they could make connections and read the hidden emotions of others. This is why the vision of the city without people was not fulfilled. For example, a boss may want to evaluate employees. It's hard to do online, but in a face-to-face meeting he can read body language and get valuable subconscious information. By observing people closely, we feel a common bond and can also read their implicit body language and find out what thoughts are running through their heads. This is because our ape-like ancestors, thousands of years before the development of spoken language, used almost exclusively body language to communicate their thoughts and feelings.
This is why virtual tourism failed to take off. It's one thing to see a picture of the Taj Mahal, and quite another to see it with your own eyes and enjoy the bragging rights of having seen it. Even listening to your favorite musician's CD is not like the sudden feeling of enthusiasm you experience when you see him in a live performance, surrounded by bustle, excitement and noise. This means that even if we can download realistic images of our favorite drama or celebrity, they are not comparable to watching the drama on stage or an actor playing a role. Fans go to great lengths to get autographed photos and cards of their favorite celebrities, even though they can download a photo from the Internet for free.
This is the explanation for the failure of the prediction that the internet will eliminate television and radio. When the movies and radio appeared, people lamented the death of the theater. When television appeared, people predicted the disappearance of movies and radio. We live today with a combination of all these means of communication. The lesson is that one form of entertainment never destroys another but exists alongside it. It is the combination and relationships between the various media tools that are constantly changing. Whoever manages to predict exactly the combination of these media tools in the future will become a very rich person.
The reason for this is that our ancestors always wanted to see things with their own eyes and not rely on hearsay. For our survival in the forest we would have to rely on actual physical evidence and not on hearsay. Even in a hundred years, there will still be a theater and we will still be chasing celebrities, as part of the ancient heritage of our ancient past.
In addition, we are descendants of carnivores who used to hunt. Hence we like to watch others and even sit for hours in front of the television watching endlessly the actions of our fellow humans, but we feel nervous when we feel that others are watching us. Scientists have calculated that we feel uncomfortable if a stranger looks at us for four seconds. After about ten seconds, we may get angry and become aggressive. This is why the first picture phone was such a big failure. Besides, who wants to comb their hair before going online? (Nowadays, after decades of slow and prolonged improvement, video conferencing is beginning to penetrate the market.)
It is now possible to study online courses. But the universities are full of students. The personal meeting with professors, who can pay attention to each student and answer questions on the spot, is still better than online courses. And when looking for a job, a university degree is still known to have more weight than a certificate obtained through online studies.
In fact, there is an ongoing competition between high technology and personal touch, that is, between sitting in an armchair and watching TV and between reaching out and touching the things around us. In this competition, we would like to have both things. This is why you can still go to the theater and rock concerts, use paper and travel the world in the age of cyberspace and virtual reality. But if we are offered a free picture of our favorite musician or tickets to his concert, we will choose the tickets without hesitation.
And this is the caveman principle: we prefer to have both, but if we have to choose we choose personal contact, like our caveman ancestors.
But there is also a consequence to this principle. When scientists invented the Internet in the sixties, it was widely believed that the web would become a dedicated forum for issues of education, science and progress. Instead, many people were horrified to discover that the web soon degenerated into the wild and lawless West it is today. In fact, it was expected. The result of the caveman principle is that if you want to predict the social relationships between humans in the future, you simply have to imagine our social relationships 100,000 years ago and multiply them a billion times. This means that priority should be given to gossip, socializing and entertainment. Rumors were necessary in the tribe to pass information quickly, especially regarding leaders and role models. Those who were not in business often failed to pass on their genes. Today, the same can be seen in the growth of celebrity-based culture and the supermarket checkout stands filled wall-to-wall with celebrity gossip magazines. The only difference today is that the magnitude of gossip has doubled significantly because of mass media, which can circle the world many times over in a split second.
The sudden proliferation of social networking sites, which turned young entrepreneurs into billionaires almost overnight, surprised many analysts, but it also exemplifies this principle. In our evolutionary history, those who maintained a large social network could rely on it for resources, advice, and help that were essential to their survival.

Finally, the entertainment sector will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Sometimes we don't like to admit it, but an important part of our culture is based on entertainment. Our ancestors entertained themselves after hunting. This was important not only for the ties between them, but also for establishing the status of each person in the tribe. It is no coincidence that dancing and singing, which are essential parts of entertainment, are also essential in the animal kingdom as a way to demonstrate one's competence to members of the opposite sex. The main reason that male birds sing beautiful and complex melodies, or engage in strange courtship rituals, is to show females of the opposite sex that they are healthy, physically fit, free of parasites, and have genes worth passing on to the next generation.

And the creation of art was not done just for fun. It also played an important role in the development of our brain, which perceives most information through symbols.
We can expect that the power of entertainment, social networks and tabloid gossip will increase in the future, unless we genetically alter our basic personality.

Science as a sword
I once saw a movie that completely changed my relationship to the future. It was called The Forbidden Planet, and was based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the film, astronauts meet an ancient culture, whose days of glory preceded us by millions of years. They have achieved the ultimate goal of their technology: infinite immaterial power, that is, the power to do almost anything with the mind. Their thoughts harnessed mighty nuclear reactors, buried in the depths of their world, which converted the energy and turned it into reality. In other words, they had the power of gods.

We will have similar power, but we won't have to wait millions of years. We only have to wait a hundred years, and we can already see the seeds of that future in today's technology. But the film is also a morality tale, as this divine power ultimately destroyed the culture.

Of course, science is a double-edged sword; He creates problems as much as he solves them, but always to a higher degree. Two trends compete with each other in the world today: one is the creation of a tolerant, scientific and prosperous planetary culture, but the other glorifies the anarchy and ignorance that could tear the fabric of our society. We still have the same class, bigoted and irrational passions of our forefathers, but the difference is that we now have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In the future we will go through the change from passive observers in the dance of nature, to choreographers of nature, to nature's rulers and finally to nature's guardians. Let us hope that we will be able to grasp the sword of science with reason and coolness, and curb the barbarism of our distant past.

Let us now embark on a hypothetical journey into the next hundred years of scientific innovation and discovery, which I have heard from the scientists responsible for them. It will be a wild ride that will include rapid developments in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology - which will undoubtedly change the future of civilization itself, no less.