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

ruling over crushed, impoverished people. But at the end of the movie, a group of farsighted scientists, armed with powerful superweapons, begin to restore order. Civilization finally rises again from the ashes. In one scene, a child is taught the brutal history of the twentieth century and learns about something called colds. What is a cold, she asks? She is told that colds were something that were cured a long time ago.
    Maybe not.
    Curing all diseases has been one of our most ancient goals. But even by 2100, scientists will not be able to cure all diseases, since diseases mutate faster than we can cure them, and there are too many of them. We sometimes forget that we live in an ocean of bacteria and viruses, which existed billions of years before humans walked the surface of the earth, and will exist billions of years after
Homo sapiens
is gone.
    Many diseases originally came from animals. This is one of the prices we paid for the domestication of animals, which began roughly 10,000 years ago. So there is a vast reservoir of diseases lurking in animals that will probably outlast the human race. Normally, these diseases infect only a handful of individuals. But with the rise of large cities, these communicable diseases could spread rapidly among the human population, reaching critical mass and creating pandemics.
    For example, when scientists analyzed the genetic sequence of the flu virus, they were surprised to find its origin: birds. Many birds can carry variations of the flu virus without any effects. But then pigs sometimes act as genetic mixing bowls, after eating bird droppings. And then farmers often live near both. Some speculate that this is the reason the flu virus often comes from Asia, because farmers there engage in polyfarming, i.e., living in close proximiy to both ducks and pigs.
    The recent H1N1 flu epidemic is only the most recent wave of bird flu and pig flu mutations.
    One problem is that humans are continually expanding into new environments, cutting down forests, building suburbs and factories, and in the process encountering ancient diseases lurking among the animals. Because the human population is continuing to expand, this means that we expect to find more surprises coming out of the forest.
    For example, there is considerable genetic evidence that HIV began as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which originally infected monkeys but then jumped to humans. Similarly, the hantavirus affected people in the Southwest as they encroached on the territory of prairie rodents. Lyme disease, which is spread largely by ticks, has invaded the suburbs of the Northeast because people now build houses close to the forests where the ticks live. The Ebola virus probably affected tribes of humans back in antiquity, but it was only with the coming of jet travel that it spread to a larger population and made the headlines. Even Legionnaires’ disease is probablyan ancient one that spawned in stagnant water, but it was the proliferation of air-conditioning units that spread this disease to the elderly on cruise ships.
    This means that there will be plenty of surprises to come, with new waves of exotic diseases dominating the headlines of the future.
    Unfortunately, cures for these diseases may be late in coming.
    For example, even the common cold currently has no cure. The plethora of products found in any drugstore for it treats only the symptoms, rather than killing the virus itself. The problem is that there are probably more than 300 variations of the rhinovirus that causes the common cold, and it is simply too expensive to create a vaccine for all 300.
    The situation for HIV is much worse, since there may be thousands of different strains. In fact, HIV mutates so rapidly that, even if you can develop a vaccine for one variety, the virus will soon mutate. Devising a vaccine for HIV is like trying to hit a moving target.
    So while we will cure many diseases in the future, probably we will always have some disease that can evade our most advanced science.
    BRAVE NEW WORLD
    By 2100, when we will have control over our genetic destiny, we have to compare our fate with the dystopia laid out by Aldous Huxley in his prophetic novel
Brave New World,
which is set in the year 2540. The book caused universal shock and dismay when it was first published in 1932.
    Yet more than seventy-five years later, many of his predictions have already come to pass. He scandalized British society when he wrote about test tube