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

fish, and I will eat forever.” This means that instead of simply giving aid to developing nations, the stress should be on education and helping them develop new industries so they can become self-sufficient.
    TAKING ADVANTAGE OF SCIENCE
    Developing nations may be able to take advantage of the information revolution. They can, in principle, leapfrog past the developed nations in many areas. In the developed world, telephone companies had to tediously wire up every home or farm at great cost. But a developing nation does not have to wire up its country, since cell phone technology can excel in rural areas without any roads or infrastructure.
    Also, developing nations have the advantage that they do not have to rebuild an aging infrastructure. For example, the subway systems of New York and London are more than a century old and badly in need of repairs. Today, renovating these creaky systems would cost more than building the original system itself. A developing nation may decide to create a subwaysystem that is sparkling new with all the latest technology, taking advantage of vast improvements in metals, construction techniques, and technology. A brand-new subway system may cost much less than the systems of a century ago.
    China, for example, was able to benefit from all the mistakes made in the West when building a city from the ground up. As a result, Beijing and Shanghai are being built at a fraction of the original cost of building a major city in the West. Today, Beijing is building one of the largest, most modern subway systems in the world, benefiting from all the computer technology created in the West, in order to serve an exploding urban population.
    The Internet is another way for developing nations to take a shortcut to the future, bypassing all the mistakes made in the West, especially in the sciences. Previously, scientists in the developing world had to rely on a primitive postal system to deliver scientific journals, which usually arrived months to a year after publication, if they arrived at all. These journals were expensive and highly specialized, so that only the largest libraries could afford them. Collaborating with a scientist from the West was almost impossible. You had to be independently wealthy, or extremely ambitious, to obtain a position at a Western university to work under a famous scientist. Now it is possible for the most obscure scientist to obtain scientific papers less than a second after they are posted on the Internet, from almost anywhere in the world, for free. And, via the Internet, it is possible to collaborate with scientists in the West whom you have never met.
    THE FUTURE IS UP FOR GRABS
    The future is wide open. As we mentioned, Silicon Valley could become the next Rust Belt in the coming decades, as the age of silicon passes and the torch passes to the next innovator. Which nations will lead in the future? In the days of the Cold War, the superpowers were those nations that could wield military influence around the world. But the breakup of the Soviet Union has made it clear that in the future the nations that will rise to the top will be those that build their economies, which in turn depends on cultivating and nourishing science and technology.
    So who are the leaders of tomorrow? The nations that truly grasp thisfact. For example, the United States has maintained its dominance in science and technology in spite of the fact that U.S. students often score dead last when it comes to essential subjects like science and math. Proficiency test scores in 1991, for example, showed thirteen-year-old students in the United States ranking fifteenth in math and fourteenth in science, just above Jordanian students, who ranked eighteenth in both categories. Tests taken since then annually confirm these dismal numbers. (It should also be pointed out that this ranking corresponds roughly to the number of days that students were in school. China, which ranked number 1, averaged 251 days of instruction per year, while the United States averaged only 178 days per year.)
    It seems like a mystery that, despite these awful numbers, the United States continues to do well internationally in science and technology, until you realize that much of the U.S. science comes from overseas, in the form of the “brain drain.” The United States has a secret weapon, the H1B visa, the so-called genius visa. If you can show that you have special talents, resources, or scientific knowledge, you can