Tomorrow's Science Today

Human brains have evolved to predict the future. We take into account what happened yesterday, consider what’s going on today, and make plans for tomorrow. But our predictive models are only based on what we know, and to some extent what we can imagine. Lurking outside our ken is a host of unknown unknowns. Not that this stops our imaginative fancies. I fully admit to enjoying speculating about the future, both an art and a science.

 

I’ve been reading The Skeptics’ Guide to the Future by the Novellas (Steven, Bob & Jay), published last year, subtitled: “What Yesterday’s Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow”. The book is divided into five parts: (1) a brief introduction to futurism, (2) near futures based on present technology, (3) more speculative further future technologies, (4) outer space travel, and (5) sci-fi tech and its potential reality or lack thereof. In today’s post I’ll briefly discuss (2) and (3).

 

In terms of peering ahead at the coming decades, I agreed with the authors on much of their speculations. We should expect to see some of their proposed advances in genetic manipulation, stem-cell technology, robotics, wearable tech, and energy advances. Before reading this book, I was personally skeptical about the future of brain-machine interfaces, but the authors make a good case for advances in one direction: brain-to-device. I remain skeptical about the opposite direction: device-to-brain. While they thought that general A.I. was within reach, I disagree. And I think that’s because I think general A.I. and device-to-brain advances go together, and this is a truly “hard” problem.

 

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on “Two-Dimensional Materials and the Stuff the Future Will Be Made Of”. It begins with a historical sweep from stone to concrete to glass to iron and steel. I’d forgotten how important the Hall-Peroult process was for purifying aluminium – what a wonderfully versatile metal! It’s so ubiquitous that I forget how remarkable it is. The authors then discuss composites, nanostructured materials, metamaterials, and of course graphene. Reading this chapter made me want to completely overhaul my G-Chem course. I could make it so much more interesting than it is now – if I can just take the step to ditch the textbook and not shy away from the mounds of extra prep work it will take me to do a total redesign. G-Chem 1 could be about molecular architecture, and G-Chem 2 could be about powering life on our planet and beyond!

 

The two-hundred-year look-ahead of speculative future technologies include taming fusion energy, mature nanotechnology (in material science, manufacturing and medicine), synthetic life, room-temperature superconductors, and space elevators. Given my research interests in the origin of life, I was familiar with the current science on synthetic life (still in its infancy). The authors ask the question “why would we make artificial life when we could evolve or genetically engineer conventional life?” Their suggested answer: “to have a greater level of control and more open-ended possibilities… competing technologies...” and they speculate that marrying this with future narrow A.I. might be an expected route for efficient and enhanced design. I think room-temperature superconductors would be huge, but getting there will be challenging if it’s even possible. Especially since it would likely require a bunch of rare and expensive metals to scale up. We’ll see what the future holds!