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

New York if there were no friction. One can imagine that an advanced civilization will be able to perform vastly moretasks with less energy than we use today. This means that we might be able to put numerical limits on the entropy produced by an advanced civilization.
    MOST DANGEROUS TRANSITION
    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.
    However, once we make the transition to a Type I civilization, we will have many centuries to settle our differences. As we saw in earlier chapters, space colonies will continue to be extremely expensive into the future, so it is unlikely that a significant fraction of the world’s population will leave to colonize Mars or the asteroid belt. Until radically new rocket designs bring down the cost or until the space elevator is built, space travel will continue to be the province of governments and the wealthy. For the majority of the earth’s population, this means that they will remain on the planet as we attain Type I status. This also means that we will have centuries to work out our differences as a Type I civilization.
    THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM
    We live in exciting times. Science and technology are opening up worlds to us that we could previously only dream about. When looking at the future of science, with all its challenges and dangers, I see genuine hope. We will discover more about nature in the coming decades than in all human history combined—many times over.
    But it wasn’t always that way.
    Consider the words of Benjamin Franklin, America’s last great scientist/statesman, when he made a prediction not just about the next centurybut about the next thousand years. In 1780, he noted with regret that men often acted like wolves toward one another, mainly because of the grinding burden of surviving in a harsh world.
    He wrote:
     
    It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.
     
    He was writing at a time when peasants were scratching a bleak existence from the soil, when ox-drawn carts brought rotting produce to the market, when plagues and starvation were a fact of life, and only the lucky few lived beyond the age of forty. (In London in 1750, two-thirds of children died before they reached the age of five.) Franklin lived in a time when it appeared hopeless that one day we might be able to solve these age-old problems. Or, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
    But today, well short of Franklin’s thousand years, his predictions are coming to pass.
    This faith—that reason, science, and intellect would one day free us of the oppression of the past—was echoed in the work of the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1795
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind,
which some claim is the most accurate prediction of future events ever written. He made a wide variety of predictions, all of which were quite heretical, but all of which came true. He predicted that the colonies of the New World would eventually break free from Europe and then advance rapidly by benefiting from the technology of Europe. He predicted the end of slavery everywhere. He predicted that farms would greatly increase the amount and quality of the food they produced per acre. He predicted that science would increase rapidly and benefit mankind. He predicted that we would be free of the grind of daily life and have more leisure time. He predicted that birth control would one day be widespread.
    In 1795, it seemed hopeless that these