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

that, although Verne was not a scientist himself, he constantly sought out scientists, peppering them with questions about their visions of the future. He amassed a vast archive summarizing the great scientific discoveries of his time. Verne, more than others, realized that science was the engine shaking the foundations of civilization, propelling it into a new century with unexpected marvels and miracles. The key to Verne’s vision and profound insights was his grasp of the power of science to revolutionize society.
    Another great prophet of technology was Leonardo da Vinci, painter, thinker, and visionary. In the late 1400s, he drew beautiful, accurate diagrams of machines that would one day fill the skies: sketches of parachutes, helicopters, hang gliders, and even airplanes. Remarkably, many of his inventions would have flown. (His flying machines, however, needed one more ingredient: at least a 1-horsepower motor, something that would not be available for another 400 years.)
    What is equally astonishing is that Leonardo sketched the blueprint for a mechanical adding machine, which was perhaps 150 years ahead of its time. In 1967, a misplaced manuscript was reanalyzed, revealing his idea for an adding machine with thirteen digital wheels. If one turned a crank, the gears inside turned in sequence performing the arithmetic calculations. (The machine was built in 1968 and it worked.)
    In addition, in the 1950s another manuscript was uncovered which contained a sketch for a warrior automaton, wearing German-Italian armor, that could sit up and move its arms, neck, and jaw. It, too, was subsequently built and found to work.
    Like Jules Verne, Leonardo was able to get profound insights into thefuture by consulting a handful of forward-thinking individuals of his time. He was part of a small circle of people who were at the forefront of innovation. In addition, Leonardo was always experimenting, building, and sketching models, a key attribute of anyone who wants to translate thinking into reality.
    Given the enormous, prophetic insights of Verne and Leonardo da Vinci, we ask the question: Is it possible to predict the world of 2100? In the tradition of Verne and Leonardo, this book will closely examine the work of the leading scientists who are building prototypes of the technologies that will change our future. This book is not a work of fiction, a by-product of the overheated imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter, but rather is based on the solid science being conducted in major laboratories around the world today.
    The prototypes of all these technologies already exist. As William Gibson, the author of
Neuromancer
who coined the word
cyberspace,
once said, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”
    Predicting the world of 2100 is a daunting task, since we are in an era of profound scientific upheaval, in which the pace of discovery is always accelerating. More scientific knowledge has been accumulated just in the last few decades than in all human history. And by 2100, this scientific knowledge will again have doubled many times over.
    But perhaps the best way to grasp the enormity of predicting 100 years into the future is to recall the world of 1900 and remember the lives our grandparents lived.
    Journalist Mark Sullivan asks us to imagine someone reading a newspaper in the year 1900:
     
    In his newspapers of January 1, 1900, the American found no such word as radio, for that was yet twenty years in from coming; nor “movie,” for that too was still mainly of the future; nor chauffeur, for the automobile was only just emerging and had been called “horseless carriage. …” There was no such word as aviator. … Farmers had not heard of tractors, nor bankers of the Federal Reserve System. Merchants had not heard of chain-stores nor “self-service”; nor seamen of oil-burning engines. … Ox-teams could still be seen on country roads. … Horses or mules for trucks were practicallyuniversal. … The blacksmith beneath the spreading chestnut-tree was a reality.
     
    To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000. In 1893, as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, seventy-four well-known individuals were asked to predict what life would be like in the next 100 years. The one problem was that they consistently underestimated the rate of progress of