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

babies, when recreation and procreation would be separated, and when drugs became commonplace, yet today we live in a world where in vitro fertilization and birth control pills are taken for granted. (The only major prediction he made that has not come to pass is human cloning.) He envisioned a hierarchical world where doctors deliberately clone brain-damaged human embryos, which grow up to become servants of the ruling elite. Depending on the level of mental damage, they could be ranked into the Alphas, who are perfect and destined to rule, down to the Epsilons, who are little more than mentally retarded slaves. So technology, instead of liberating humanity from poverty, ignorance, and disease, has becomea nightmare, enforcing an artificial and corrupt stability at the expense of enslaving an entire population.
    Although the novel was accurate in many ways, Huxley did not anticipate genetic engineering. If he had known about this technology, then he might have worried about another problem: Will the human species split into fragments, with fickle parents and devious governments meddling with the genes of our children? Parents already dress their kids in outlandish outfits and make them compete in silly contests, so why not change the genes to fit the parents’ whims? Indeed, parents are probably hardwired by evolution to give every benefit to their progeny, so why not tamper with their genes as well?
    As an elementary example of what might go wrong, consider the lowly sonogram. Although doctors innocently introduced the sonogram to help with pregnancies, this has led to a massive epidemic of abortions of female fetuses, especially in the countrysides of China and India. One study in Bombay found that 7,997 out of 8,000 aborted fetuses were female. In South Korea 65 percent of all third-born children are male. The generation of children whose parents chose this gender-based abortion will soon be of marriageable age, and millions will find that there are no females to be found. This in turn could cause enormous social dislocation. Peasants who wanted only boys to carry on their name will find that they have no grandchildren.
    And in the United States, there is rampant misuse of human growth hormone (HGH), which is often touted as a cure for aging. Originally, HGH was intended to correct hormone deficiencies in children who were too short. Instead, HGH has grown into a huge underground industry based on questionable data concerning aging. In effect, the Internet has created a huge population of human guinea pigs for specious therapies.
    So, given the chance, people will often misuse technology and create an enormous amount of mischief. What happens if they get hold of genetic engineering?
    In a worst-case scenario, we might have the nightmare imagined by H. G. Wells in his classic science fiction novella
The Time Machine,
when the human race, in the year 802,701 AD, splits into two distinct races. He wrote, “Gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that mygraceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”
    To see what variations of the human race are possible, simply look at the household dog. Although there are thousands of breeds of dogs, all originally descended from C
anis lupus,
the gray wolf, which was domesticated roughly 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Because of selective breeding by their human masters, dogs today come in a bewildering variety of sizes and shapes. Body shape, temperament, color, and abilities have all been radically altered by selective breeding.
    Since dogs age roughly seven times faster than humans, we can estimate that about 1,000 generations of dogs have existed since they separated from wolves. If we apply this to humans, then systematic breeding of humans might split the human race into thousands of breeds in only 70,000 years, although they would be of the same species. With genetic engineering, this process could conceivably be vastly accelerated, to a single generation.
    Fortunately, there are reasons to believe the speciation of the human race will not happen, at least not in the coming century. In evolution, a single species usually splits apart if it separates geographically into two separate breeding populations. This happened, for