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This is one of those books where we predict the future.
Fortunately, predicting the future is pretty easy. People do it all the time. Getting your prediction right is a bit harder, but honestly, does anyone really care?
There was a study in 2011 called “Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air,”
in which the predictive abilities of twenty-six pundits were assessed. Predictive powers ranged from mostly right to usually wrong.
For most people, the pleasure of reading this study was the discovery that certain individuals were not just intolerable morons, but statistically intolerable morons. From our perspective as pop science writers, there was an even more exciting result: Regardless of their predictive prowess, all these people still have jobs. In fact, a lot of the worst predictors were the most prominent public figures.
If there really is no relationship between predictive ability and having a successful career, we’ve put ourselves in an excellent position. After all, those pundits were just trying to predict what will happen in the short term among a
small number of squabbling political actors. They weren’t trying to decide if we’ll have an elevator to space in fifty years or if we’ll be uploading our brains to the cloud soon,
or if machines will print us new livers and kidneys and hearts, or if hospitals will use tiny, swimming robots to cure diseases.
Frankly, it’s really freakin’ hard to tell you whether any of the technologies in this book will be realized in their fullest form in any particular time frame. New technology is not simply the slow accumulation of better and better things. The big discontinuous leaps, like the laser and the computer, often depend on unrelated developments in different fields. And even if those big discoveries are made, it’s not always clear that a particular technology will find a market. Yes, time travelers from the year 1920, we have flying cars. No, nobody wants them. They’re the chessboxing
of vehicles—amusing to see once in a while, but most of the time, you’d rather have the two parts separate.
Given that any prediction we give you is likely to be not only wrong, but stupid, we’ve decided to employ some strategies we learned while reading other books where the authors envision the future.
First, a few preliminary predictions:
We predict that computers will get faster. We predict screens will get higher resolution. We predict gene sequencing will get cheaper. We predict the sky will remain blue, puppies will remain cute, pie will remain tasty, cows will continue mooing, and decorative hand towels will continue to make sense only to your mom.
We urge you to check back in a few years to grade our accuracy. Please note that we specified no time frame, so your grading options are either “correct” or “not not correct.”
Now that we’ve made the first round of predictions, we’re prepared to make a few more. We predict reusable rockets will lower the cost of rocket launches by 30–50% in the next twenty years. We predict it will be possible to diagnose most cancers with a blood test in the next thirty years. We predict that nano-bio-machines will cure most genetic disorders in the next fifty years.
Okay, that’s a total of eleven predictions. We believe that if we get eight out of eleven, we should be considered geniuses. Oh, and if any of the first set comes true, you can write clever news articles with titles like “ COUPLE WHO PREDICTED THE FUTURE OF GENE SEQUENCING SAY SPACEFARING WILL BE CHEAP IN NEAR FUTURE. ”
Predicting the future accurately is hard. Really hard.
New technologies are almost never the work of isolated geniuses with a neat idea. As time goes on, this is more and more true. A given future technology may need any number of intermediate technologies to develop beforehand, and many of them may appear to be irrelevant when they are first discovered.
One recently developed device we discuss in the book is called a superconducting quantum interference device, aka a SQUID. This very sensitive device detects subtle magnetic fields in the brain, which is one way to analyze people’s thought patterns without drilling holes in their skulls.
How did we get this thing?
Well, a superconductor is any material that conducts electricity without losing any electricity on the way. This is different from a regular old conductor (like a copper wire), which transmits electricity pretty well, but loses some en route.
We have superconductors because about two hundred years ago, Michael Faraday was making some glassware and accidentally turned a gas into a liquid by trapping it under pressure in a glass tube. There wasn’t TV back then, so a bunch of Victorians got really excited about the idea of liquefying gasses.
As it turns out, it’s easier to liquefy gasses by getting them really cold rather than getting them really pressurized. This insight led scientists to develop advanced refrigeration technology, which allowed them to liquefy stubbornly gassy elements, like hydrogen and helium. And once you have liquid hydrogen or helium, you can use them to cool down just about anything you like.
Helium, for example, is at about -450 degrees Fahrenheit when in liquid form. If you pour it onto just about anything, the liquid helium turns into a gas and takes heat away with it, until the thing you’re cooling is also about -450 degrees.
Eventually scientists wondered about what happens to conductors when you get them really cold. Conductors tend to get better at what they do as they cool down. In simple terms, this is because conductors are sort of like pipes for electrons, but they’re not perfect. In a copper wire, for example, the copper atoms get in the way of electron motion.
What we call “heat” is really just rapid wobbling at an atomic level. When you heat (aka wobble) atoms in copper wire, they are more likely to block electrons from moving downstream, in the same way it’s harder to get down the street if the guy in front of you keeps changing lanes over and over. At the level of atoms, wobbling (aka heat) means the electrons are more likely to bump into the copper atoms, increasing the wobble still more. This is why your laptop charger gets really hot after you use it for a while.
When you put that liquid helium on the conductor, the wobble energy in the copper atoms is transferred to the helium atoms, which then fly away. Now your copper atoms are less wobbly and your electrons experience a lot less resistance. The colder they get, the easier it is for electrons to flow.
Back then there was a debate about what would happen when you got toward zero wobble. Some thought conductance would cease because at that temperature motion should be impossible, even for electrons. Some thought conductance would get very good, but nothing special would happen.
So researchers started to pour their ultracold gasses onto metal elements. It turned out, bizarrely, that some metals became perfect conductors (aka superconductors) when they reached a certain very low temperature. If you kept the metal cold enough to superconduct, you could put electric current in a loop, and it would just keep looping forever. This may sound like a cute science fun fact, but it leads to all sorts of weirdness! That looping current would generate a magnetic field. And that means you could turn these cold metals into permanent magnets, whose magnetic strength was determined by how much current you added.
Later, in the 1960s, a guy named Brian Josephson (who got a Nobel Prize, but now spends his days defending magic nonsense like cold fusion and “water memory” at Cambridge) discovered an arrangement of superconductors that allows you to detect tiny variations in magnetic fields. This device, called a Josephson junction, eventually allowed for the development of the SQUID.
Now then. Consider this: If someone came to you two hundred years ago and asked how we might build a device to scan people’s brain patterns, would your immediate response be, “Well, first we need to trap some gas in a glass tube”?
We suspect not. In fact, even the last big technical step—the Josephson junction, which again was discovered by a man who thinks it’s possible that water remembers what you put in it —was considered theoretically impossible when it was first proposed. Its behavior was explained later, using a theoretical framework developed long after Michael Faraday was dead.
The contingent nature of technological development is why we don’t have a lunar base, even though we thought we would by now, but we do have pocket-sized supercomputers, which few people saw coming. *
The same difficulty holds for all the technologies in this book: Whether we can build an elevator to space may depend on how good chemists get at arranging carbon atoms into little straws. Whether we can make matter that assumes any shape we tell it to may depend on how well we understand termite behavior. Whether we can build medical nanobots may depend on how well we understand origami. Or maybe none of that stuff will end up mattering in the end. There is nothing about history that necessarily had to be as it was.
We now know that the ancient Greeks could create complex gear systems, but never constructed an advanced clock. The ancient Alexandrians had a rudimentary steam engine but never designed a train. The ancient Egyptians invented the folding stool four thousand years ago, but never built an IKEA.
All this is to say—we don’t know when any of this stuff is going to happen.
So why write this book? Because there are amazing things happening all over the place every day, all the time, and most people aren’t aware of them. There are also people who become cynical because they thought we’d have fusion power or weekend trips to Venus by now. This disappointment is not always due to scientists who overpromise the future; often books like this one omit the economic and technical challenges that stand between us and the future as depicted in fiction.
We don’t know why these challenges are so often left out of books. Would the story of Apollo 11 be better if getting to the moon were easy? To our way of thinking, part of what makes the idea of a brain-computer interface so exciting is that right now we have almost no clue how to decode thoughts. There is an unlimited frontier of questions to be asked, discoveries to be made, glory to be won, and heroes to be garlanded.
We picked out ten different emerging fields to explore with you, and we ordered them roughly from large to small, moving from outer space, to giant experimental power plants, to new ways to build things and experience the world, to the human body, finally all the way down to your brain. No offense.
Our guiding principle for each of these chapters was this: If you were sitting at a bar, and someone asked you, “Hey, what’s the deal on nuclear fusion power,” what would be the best answer possible? We were told we don’t know what bars are like, but the point is that each chapter will tell you what the technology is, where it is right this second, the challenges to its realization, the ways it might make everything terrible, and the ways it might make things wonderful.
To us, scientific progress isn’t just exciting because it does new things for us. Knowing how damn hard it would be to mine an asteroid or build a house with a robot swarm makes those things
more
interesting. And it means that when these things finally
do
happen
you’ll understand exactly how exciting it is.
You’ll also understand a bit about the strange detours and blind alleys science and technology take. At the end of most chapters, we provide a nota bene on some nugget of weirdness (or grossness or awesomeness) we unearthed. Sometimes these sections are directly related to their chapters, and sometimes they’re just weird, weird things we bumped into while doing our research. Like, really weird. Like, octopus-made-of-cornbread weird.
For all these chapters, we had to read a lot of technical books and papers and we had to talk to a lot of mildly crazy people. Some were crazier than others, and generally they were our favorites. The one unifying experience in all our research was that on every single topic all of our preconceptions were crushed. In every case, as we researched we discovered that we not only hadn’t understood the technology itself, but we hadn’t understood what was holding it back. Often what seemed complicated was easy, but what seemed easy was complicated.
New technologies are beautiful things, but just like with Michelangelo’s Pietà or Rodin’s Le Penseur, it’s usually an unholy pain in the ass to make them. We want you not just to understand what a technology is, but to understand why the future so stubbornly resists our best efforts.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Weinersmith Manor, September 2016
P.S. We also want you to know about this one experiment in which undergrads were forced to breathe through one nostril, then take exams. It’s kinda relevant. We promise.
