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

passions that might have gripped their ancestors mean little to them if their goal is to have a suburban house with two cars. While their ancestors might have celebrated the day their sons went off to war, one of their main concerns now is to get them into a good college. And for people who enviously watch other people rise, they will wonder when their time will come. Kenichi Ohmae, a former senior partner of McKinsey & Company, writes, “ People will inevitably start to look around them and ask why they cannot have what others have. Equally important, they will start to ask why they were not able to have it in the past.”
    • The economy, not weapons, is the new criterion for a superpower. The rise of the EU and NAFTA underscores an important point: with the end of the Cold War, it is clear that a world power can maintain its dominant position mainly through economic might. Nuclear wars are simply too dangerous to fight, so it is economic might that will largely determine the destiny of nations. One contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the economic stress of competing militarily with the United States. (As the advisers to President Ronald Reagan once commented, the strategy of the United States was to spend Russia into a depression, that is, increase U.S. military expenditure so that the Russians, with an economy less than half the size of the United States’, would have to starve their own people to keep up.) In the future, it is clear that a superpower can maintain its status only through economic might, and that in turn stems from science and technology.
    •A planetary culture is emerging, based on youth culture (rock and roll and youth fashion), movies (Hollywood blockbusters), high fashion (luxury goods), and food (mass-market fast-food chains). No matter where you travel, you can find evidence of the same cultural trends in music, art, and fashion. For example, Hollywood carefully factors in global appeal when it estimates the success of a potential blockbuster movie. Movies with cross-cultural themes (such as action or romance), packed with internationally recognized celebrities, are the big moneymakers for Hollywood, evidence of an emerging planetary culture.
      We saw this after World War II when, for the first time in human history, an entire generation of young people possessed enough disposable income to alter the prevailing culture. Formerly, children were sent into the fields to toil with their parents once they hit puberty. (This is the origin of the three-month summer vacation. During the Middle Ages, children were required to do backbreaking work in the fields during summer as soon as they were of age.) But with rising prosperity, the postwar baby boom generation left the fields to head to the streets. Today, we see the same pattern taking place in country after country, as economic development empowers youth with ample disposable incomes. Eventually, as most of the people of the world enter the middle class, rising incomes will filter down to their youth, fueling a perpetuation of this planetary youth culture.
      Rock and roll, Hollywood movies, etc., are in fact prime examples of how intellectual capitalism is replacing commodity capitalism. Robots for decades to come will be incapable of creating music and movies that can thrill an international audience.
      This is also happening in the world of fashion, where a handful of brand names are extending their reach worldwide. High fashion, once reserved for the aristocracy and the extremely wealthy, is rapidly proliferating around the world as more people enter the middle class and aspire to some of the glamour of the rich. High fashion is no longer the exclusive province of the privileged elite.
      But the emergence of a planetary culture does not mean that local cultures or customs will be wiped out. Instead, people willbe bicultural. On one hand, they will keep their local cultural traditions alive (and the Internet guarantees that these regional customs will survive forever). The rich cultural diversity of the world will continue to thrive into the future. In fact, certain obscure features of local culture can spread around the world via the Internet, gaining them a worldwide audience. On the other hand, people will be fluent in the changing trends that affect global culture. When people communicate with those from another culture, they will do so via the global culture. This has