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

conclude that each child reduces their wealth.
    Second, as countries industrialize, as in China and India, this creates a middle class that wants fewer children, as in the industrialized West. And third, the education of women, even in poor countries like Bangladesh, has created a class of women who want fewer children. Because of an extensive educational plan, the birthrate in Bangladesh has gone down from 7 to 2.7, even without large-scale urbanization or industrialization.
    Given all these factors, the UN has continually revised its figures about future population growth. Estimates still vary, but the world population may hit 9 billion by 2040. Although the population will continue to increase, the rate of growth will eventually slow down and level off. Optimistically, it may even stabilize at around 11 billion by 2100.
    Normally, one might consider this to be beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. But it depends on how one defines carrying capacity, because there might be another green revolution in the making.
    One possible solution to some of these problems is biotechnology. In Europe, bioengineered foods have earned a bad reputation that may last for an entire generation. The biotech industry simultaneously marketed herbicides to farmers as well as herbicide-resistant crops. To the biotech industry, this meant more sales, but to the consumer, this meant more poisons in their food, and the market quickly imploded.
    In the future, however, grains such as “super-rice” may enter the market, that is, crops specifically engineered to thrive in dry, hostile, and barren environments. On moral grounds, it would be difficult to oppose the introduction of crops that are safe and can feed hundreds of millions of people.
    RESURRECTING EXTINCT LIFE-FORMS
    But other scientists are not just interested in extending human life span and cheating death. They are interested in bringing back creatures from the dead.
    In the movie
Jurassic Park,
scientists extract DNA from the dinosaurs, insert it into the eggs of reptiles, and bring dinosaurs back to life. Although usable DNA from dinosaurs has so far never been found, there are tantalizing hints that this dream is not totally far-fetched. By the end of this century, our zoos may be populated by creatures that ceased walking the surface of the earth thousands of years ago.
    As we mentioned earlier, Robert Lanza took the first major step by cloning banteng, an endangered species. It would be a shame, he feels, if this rare ox dies out. So he is considering another possibility: creating a new cloned animal, but of the opposite sex. In mammals, the sex of an organism is determined by the X and Y chromosomes. By tinkering with these chromosomes, he is confident he can clone another animal from this carcass, except of the opposite sex. In this way, zoos around the world could enjoy watching animals from long-dead species have babies.
    I once had dinner with Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and author of
The Selfish Gene,
who takes this a step further. He speculates that one day we might be able to resurrect a variety of life-forms that are not just endangered but also have been long extinct. He first notes that every twenty-seven months, the number of genes that have been sequenced doubles. Then he calculates that in the coming decades it will cost only $160 to fully sequence anyone’s genome. He envisions a time when biologists will carry a small kit with them and then, within minutes, be able to sequence the entire genome of any life-form they encounter.
    But he goes further and theorizes that, by 2050, we will be able to construct the entire organism from its genome alone. He writes, “ I believe that by 2050, we shall be able to read the language [of life]. We shall feed the genome of an unknown animal into a computer which will reconstruct not only the form of the animal but the detailed world in which its ancestors … lived, including their predators or prey, parasites or hosts, nesting sites, and even hopes and fears.” Quoting from the work of Sydney Brenner, Dawkins believes that we can reconstruct the genome of the “missing link” between humans and the apes.
    This would be a truly remarkable breakthrough. Judging from the fossil and DNA evidence, we separated from the apes about 6 million years ago.
    Since our DNA differs from that of chimpanzees by only 1.5 percent, in the future a computer program should be able to analyze our DNA and thechimpanzee’s