MONMOUTH, ILLINOIS (June 30, 2023) —
"The purpose of this book is to help start the debate that will determine how this century unfolds." — Michio Kaku, author of the 2011 book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
Everybody can make predictions about the future. The fun part is waiting a few months, or years, or even decades, and then checking back on those statements to see if the predictors really knew what they were talking about it.
For example, consider this all-time blooper from 1889: Charles H Duell, commissioner of the United States Patent Office, was widely quoted as stating, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Oops.
In his 2011 book, Kaku made some very bold claims, but he did so by digging far deeper into his subject matter than Duell apparently did. Physics of the Future was based on interviews with more than 300 top scientists.
Eleven years ago, I interviewed five scientists — Monmouth professors Ken Cramer, Chris Fasano, James Godde, Ashwani Kumar, and Logan Mayfield — to see what they thought of some of Kaku's predictions.
Recently, I sat down with four of those same science professors — Cramer, Fasano, Godde, and Mayfield — as well as newcomer Michael Solontoi to see what progress has been made in the past eleven years and if life in 2100 has come into any type of sharper focus. It's not as far away as one would think; a freshman on Monmouth's campus today will be in their mid-90s (perhaps the new mid-70s?) when the next century begins.
It's certainly difficult to pin down what might transpire over the course of the better part of a century. Picture that the year is 1823, and how dramatically the world would change by 1900. Or it's 1923, and although automobiles and airplanes were present by then, flying to the moon or surfing the internet was not on many people's radar. Heck, radar itself wasn't invented until 1935.
So it seems a safe bet that scientific knowledge will continue to grow leaps and bounds through 2100 and beyond. The Monmouth professors were asked what might be possible as that knowledge grows and, importantly, what the ramifications of some of the future developments will be.
Applying ethics to technology
When he was interviewed for this article, Fasano had just returned from the 2023 leadership meeting of the American Physical Society. The physics professor, who serves as secretary for the Prairie Section of the APS, was quoted in the prior "Life in 2100" article as saying "Theoretical physicists are my people, but they will say almost anything."
What Fasano had to say on the topic of the future, essentially, is that yes, there will assuredly be many scientific developments over the course of the remainder of the 21st century, but they'll come with a caveat.
"Technology isn't done in a vacuum," he said. "It doesn't exist that way. There are real risks, troublesome risks, that accompany it. For us at Monmouth College, it's an opportunity in the way we teach STEM."
Fasano pointed to several examples, including micro-machines being injected into our bodies that he spoke about eleven years ago, as well as quantum computing, which could potentially solve problems that are too complex for classical computing.
"There's a huge amount of money being put into progress with quantum computing," he said. "It's unclear how far they've gotten. But there are all types of implications — commercial, industrial, proprietary. The stakes are very high. It changes everything if one exists. It introduces some very exciting possibilities, but it also introduces some very dangerous possibilities."
Some of those exciting possibilities, said Fasano, are developments in weather forecasting, drug-development, and even traffic-control. The dangers, he said, include invasion of personal privacy, such as cracking the cryptography of your credit cards.
"Who gets access to it? What are the restrictions? And who decides that?" Fasano asked. "Quantum computing is very exciting. It's important to remember that technology is neither good nor evil. It's what we're going to do with it that makes it one or the other. And that's why it's incredibly important to have a liberal arts education — to be able to see the big picture and make decisions that will take a broad view of the factors into consideration."
On a related note is artificial intelligence (which Mayfield discusses in depth in the final installment of this series).
"ChatGPT is in the news right now, and it's a perfect example of the possibilities and the dangers that come with new technology," said Fasano. "It enables things you couldn't do before, but it doesn't mean we should be doing those things we couldn't do before."
For example, the new AI can write software, but also malware. It could transform the workplace but, potentially, do so in ways that take away many human jobs.
COVID and our health
Although several movies have addressed the topic of widespread viruses or plagues, Fasano pointed out, "Eleven years ago, we didn't see COVID coming."
One of the many questions the pandemic raised, he said, was, "'How do we fairly distribute technology? Who gets treated and who doesn't? Who do we spend time on to protect?' COVID showed that we have some serious flaws when it comes to those types of ethical questions."
Micro-machines are another example.
"We will have micro-machines available to us, but we'll have to answer, 'What are the ethical implications of injecting these machines into people?'" said Fasano. "These are hard questions, and we'll have to think hard about it. The technology is coming along nicely. But when should we do it? As the technology develops, it becomes more real. It's not science-fiction anymore."
When Kaku envisioned life in 2100, cancer was no longer an issue, as society would have access to daily body scans that would detect the presence of the disease in its absolute infancy. Developing a "cure" wouldn't be necessary, as cancer could simply be nipped in the bud, time and again.
"Cancer is pretty complicated," said Fasaon. "It's probably not a single disease. So, while more diagnostic information anytime is always better, I don't know how long it will take to get to that point. And it produces more ethical concerns. Let's say it shows you have a predisposition to cancer. Then what? Can your insurance company require a particular type of prevention, and they won't cover you in the future if you don't do it? So, it becomes what do you do with the information you can act on? And what do you not do? It's not a technology problem, per se. It's much harder than a technology problem."
PART TWO
Nuclear fusion
On December 5, scientists at the National Ignition Facility announced they had reached "a breakthrough in nuclear fusion" by producing a reaction with an energy gain.
At this year's American Physical Society meeting, Monmouth physics professor Chris Fasano said there was "considerable discussion about the manner in which the nuclear-fusion announcement was made. It bothered me, and at the meeting, I learned it bothered a lot of other people, too. To call it a 'breakthrough' is misleading. 'Milestone' would've been better. Fusion is still a long way away. Put it this way, I wouldn't be investing in any fusion companies right now. The energy used was a factor of ten times larger than what was created. So, it was a milestone, but you're not getting energy out of this. It's still a factor of ten away. So, there was a false sense of advancement, not that it wasn't a great thing. But it's not what people think it meant."
Fasano acknowledged it will likely be a productive innovation in the future, but that future is likely much farther away than optimists believe.
"When I was a kid in the '70s, fifty years ago, fusion was ten years away," he said. "When I was studying at Notre Dame in the '80s, fusion was ten years away. When I was pursuing my PhD in the '90s at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, fusion was ten years away. When I came to Monmouth College in 1998. . . well, you see where I'm going with this. It's a stunningly hard problem. When physicists and engineers say it's a hard problem, you should pay attention to that. Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Eventually, yes. But there are a lot of steps. A prototype reactor would need to produce more energy that it uses, but we can't even see a prototype. And then we'd have to have a working, usable power-generating system. These are both big steps."
And then comes another real-world problem that would accompany the not-yet invented technology. A tongue-in-cheek simplification of that problem, said Fasano, is, “’You'd have to make something that Homer Simpson can run.' The fusion reactors have to be something that can be run by normal people."
What Fasano would invest in is nuclear energy, in general.
"If you say everybody has to have an electric car, that would double the electricity that would have to be generated," he said. "But making that order doesn't take into account the distribution of that electricity. If everybody had just one electric car, my block here in Monmouth, Illinois, couldn't handle it. I don't really see how that works. I'm not against it. Sure, Teslas are really cool cars. But I'm not sure how that scales. Solar and wind are niche markets. If you need a lot of electricity that's reliable, there's really only one choice. People don't want to hear it, but it's nuclear. We have to keep working on it. The stakes are high."
Speaking of electric cars
Eleven years ago, biology professor Ken Cramer referenced the Nissan Leaf, which could go sixty to seventy miles on a charge.
"Today, the mileage range has grown to about 360, and it's working its way up to 500," said Cramer, who drives an EV when he's not riding his bicycle to the office. "And you're seeing more and more charging stations everywhere. There's one in the Quad Cities and one in Peoria. There's one in Mt Pleasant, Iowa. It used to be Iowa City was the closest in that direction, and Bloomington-Normal was the closest one going east. . . All the major car manufacturers have EVs, and some have pledged to go completely electric."
Picturing a day in the life in 2100, Michio Kaku wrote, "Your magnetic car takes off silently, floating on a cushion of magnetism created by the superconducting pavement."
Could that really happen?
"That sounds like what high-speed rail is like in China," said Cramer. "That takes a lot of infrastructure, and we aren't investing in that in the US right now."
But it could happen. As Fasano said in his remarks, "Things are always slower than you'd thought they be. That's the usual track. Or the way they turn out is not the way you thought."
Three hundred years ago, in the 1720s, there were developments that would eventually lead, roughly 100 years later, to the founding of America's first passenger and freight railway. And then, of course, rail travel took off from there. Perhaps the concept of cars floating on cushions of magnetism, being driven by your regular, average person, is not that far-fetched, after all.
PART THREE
Renewable energy
In the original "life in 2100" article, biology professor Ken Cramer was the voice on sources of energy, and he admitted to a prediction that hasn't occurred — at least not yet.
"I was wrong about the price of oil going up," he said. "We keep finding other places to get oil."
But it's still just as important as ever to find alternatives, said Cramer.
"People are buying into solar. The prices are coming down dramatically. I bought some panels seven years ago, and they're half as much today as they were then. It's growing way faster than coal. Renewables in new operations are exceeding fossil fuels."
Cramer pointed to a New York Times article titled "The Shift to Renewable Energy is Speeding Up" that was published the week he was interviewed. In it, the author quoted research by BloombergNEF that showed "investments in low-carbon energy 'reached parity' with capital aimed at expanding fossil fuels." The article also observed that the war in Ukraine is "pushing countries to ramp up renewable-energy projects for the sake of energy security."
But the article also pointed out — and Cramer would agree — that "the shift away from fossil fuels isn't happening fast enough to stay within relatively safe boundaries of climate change."
"I talked about solar and wind energy last time, which are growing really rapidly and outperforming coal on a cost basis, but I didn't talk about climate change, which was an oversight," he said. "Will those renewables grow fast enough, is the question. I'm still skeptical about fusion power. They keep making tiny advances. If it can happen, it's not going to be enough to reverse climate change."
While addressing climate change this time, Cramer referred to warnings of what a two-degree [Celsius] rise in the global temperature will mean.
"We're at 1.2 right now, and it's a given we'll get to 1.5," he said. "I don't want to be too pessimistic, but if I were younger, I'd be really worried. You're already seeing the effects with all these billion-dollar disasters. The number of those disasters has gone up dramatically, and they've had tremendous consequences. New Orleans still hasn't fully recovered from Katrina, and that was in 2005. Houston keeps getting hit, and all the floods in California. Any one of those alone isn't a problem, necessarily, but it's how serious they are collectively. The extremes are getting more extreme. Man, I don't know what's going to happen when we get to 2 degrees."
A development that could help slow that steady temperature rise, he said, is "huge, gigantic wind turbines off the coast. It wouldn't affect a place like Monmouth, but it would serve the coastline, where there's lots of population. Of course, you always have people who worry about what those turbines will do to the views from their Cape Cod homes."
What would affect Monmouth, he said, is the discussed development of a "260-acre solar farm outside of Monmouth that would provide enough energy for 7,000 homes, which is more than enough for Monmouth. That kind of stuff is happening more and more. It's a consistent revenue source, and solar can be dispersed. Solar panels also produce more in winter than you'd think."
Issues that need to be addressed with solar and wind power, he said, include getting more people trained to fix wind turbines and how to recycle solar panels after their approximate thirty-year life span is complete.
"Last time, I also talked about companies going to more and more extreme measures to get coal," said Cramer. "That's not happening as much anymore. It's not cost-effective. The energy returned on the energy invested — that margin keeps getting smaller and smaller. The technology is amazing, but it would be crazy to keep doing it."
Cancer, COVID, and cautionary tales
"The Holy Grail of biology might be the cure for cancer," said biology professor James Godde. "But cancer is such a broad term, and it covers a lot of stuff. I don't know if there is a cure for all of it."
As mentioned earlier in this series, author Michio Kaku proposes that the cure comes from the ability to catch cancer individually and at its earliest infancy through daily body scans.
"The possibility of a daily MRI is not the craziest thing," said Godde. "Technically, if the costs plummet and it's a tiny cost, it could work. And if the machine was good enough, you could do it yourself."
But Godde also envisions a future where the cost drops enough to benefit some of society, but not all of it, echoing the concerns that Chris Fasano raised earlier.
"Another thing that has to be fixed for the technology to be beneficial to everybody is there has to be some level of equality with regard to financial standing," said Godde. "Wealthy people might be able to afford an MRI every day and have access to it to prevent cancer, but the less well-off will still get cancer. So, will there be more financial equality in the future? I don't know. Will socialism be involved?"
Beyond '23andMe'
Over the years, Godde has been a go-to source when developments in genome sequencing occur. He addressed that topic, as well.
"It's still not routine that people get their genome sequenced. It's still pretty costly. I think now it can be done for about $1,000."
After doing a quick mid-interview internet search, Godde actually saw the price listed at between $300 and $700, while another search showed that about thirty million people — out of roughly nine billion on the planet — have done it. Both figures surprised him.
"That's still a pretty small percentage [1 in 300], but it's higher than I thought. I assume they're talking about full sequencing and not just '23andMe,' which is only fragments of the sequencing. So, it might be pretty mainstream. But just because you have the sequence of your roughly three billion base-pairs, that doesn't answer everything. But there are some things that scientists could zero in on, such as a propensity to get this illness or be susceptible to this disease."
It sounds good in theory, Godde said, but putting the information into practice might be a different story.
"More information is usually good, but the question is, if you knew all the stuff you needed to do to live longer, would you do it, even if it means giving up a lot of what you enjoy? For example, we know we're not supposed to eat a lot of fatty foods, but it doesn't stop a lot of people from doing it. So, there will likely be a tendency for people to think, 'I might as well enjoy myself.'"
And Godde also raised a realistic concern — viruses such as COVID aren't fond of raising the white flag and surrendering.
"It seems like COVID is here to stay," he said. "A vaccine that would cover all these different things — that would be a game-changer. But viruses don't go away easily — to even exist, they've had to keep getting better and better at getting by our defense systems."
A real Jurassic Park?
Related to DNA and genome sequencing is Kaku's prediction that scientists could bring back an extinct animal, such as the saber-toothed tiger.
"If you know the genome of it, you can probably recreate it and then inject it into the eggs of a similar organism," said Godde. "So, for a saber-toothed tiger, a regular old tiger could carry the young. It's certainly possible. Of course, movies have shown us that it's normally a terrible idea. But we're not known as a society to steer away from terrible ideas. And if there's money to be made, people might look beyond the cautionary tales. I just saw a headline yesterday about a leopard that escaped from the Dallas Zoo. As soon as you have one of these recreated animals in a zoo, they can escape, too."
PART FOUR
Space exploration
In the first series of faculty interviews concerning "Life in 2100," physics professor Ashwani Kumar shared Michio Kaku's optimism that a space elevator could be constructed by the end of the century, greatly reducing the cost of future launches into outer space.
Kumar's physics colleague Michael Solontoi doesn't share that optimism, but he was willing to go out on a limb on a few other scenarios.
"The place for a space elevator is a sci-fi movie," said Solontoi. "There's no realistic projection for a space elevator. If one gets built, color me shocked."
But Solontoi said progress in space is inevitable. In fact, he and his team have counted on scientific progress while working on the major telescope project at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile.
"The project [which is expected to begin in the fall of 2024] will generate an absurd amount of data," he said. "We couldn't handle the data management now, but we're banking there will be better solutions by the time the data starts coming in."
Solontoi then posed a question.
"Until recently, do you know the fastest way to move a terabyte of data? FedEx. It was faster to ship it overnight than it was to wait for the data transfer to download."
When it comes to making predictions on what will be possible in space by 2100, Solontoi attempted to walk the fine line between what might develop through the pace of technology and discovery and being able "to back up what I say."
"I'm optimistic there will be very, very large telescopes, or at least large ones made out of lots of smaller ones," he said. "So, within thirty to forty years, I'm confident in saying we'll have a clearer understanding of the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus. The James Webb Telescope will resolve a number of issues, and it will serve as a test tool for the next generation, just like the Hubble Telescope was for ours.
"But I will say that, in 100 years, people will be living permanently in another world. We already have people staying on the space station, so I think it's realistic that they'll be on the moon by 100 years from now. The moon first, then maybe Mars. After all, 100 years ago we were barely past the Wright brothers. So, Wright brothers to today in 100 years, to people on Mars in another 100 years. Why not?"
Since Solontoi's area of expertise is the solar system, he stayed relatively close to home with his next prediction.
"We will have found evidence of past life on Mars and/or there could be life on Neptune and Uranus," he said. "We'll have probes and sensors that are capable of making those discoveries. It would be an amazing discovery. I would be surprised, but not shocked."
He figured such findings will come later than sooner.
"Space exploration takes time," said Solontoi. "It takes almost twenty years to get to Uranus. And before that, it takes years to fund the probe you're launching and years to build it."
Solontoi also guessed that by 2100 scientists will have resolved dark energy — a theoretical repulsive force that counteracts gravity and causes the universe to expand at an accelerating rate — "but we'll still be puzzled by dark matter," a nonluminous material that is postulated to exist in space and could take any of several forms.
Humankind's heritage
"The sky is really humankind's heritage," said Solontoi. "It's the one thing that we do exactly the same way as our ancient ancestors did. We look up at the sky and we wonder. You and your great-great-great grandfather Ug the caveman were doing the same thing. From the first city of Catalhoyuk, to ancient Egypt, to the Romans and classic Greece, to your children, we've all looked at the same sky."
It's mostly the same sky, although advances during the past few decades have added a few new objects, said Solontoi, who also echoed his colleague Chris Fasano's concerns about the price of progress.
"Soon, one out of every ten things we see in the sky will be a satellite," he said. "Is that acceptable?"
And what happens when two of those things go bump in the night?
"Those objects are moving at 25 times the speed of sound — Mach several dozen," said Solontoi. "When they collide, they don't do it gently. There would be hundreds and thousands of bits of shrapnel. There was some damage to a window on the International Space Station, and it was caused by an object the size and mass of a paint chip. If you had one of those collisions, it could lead to a giant shell of shrapnel and you couldn't move anything through it because it would get damaged. Am I saying that will happen? No. But it is possible."
In addition to foreseeing a space elevator, Kaku also predicted that nanotechnology would lead to the ability to launch thousands of smaller things.
"People are already doing that, but the more stuff that gets launched into orbit, the harder my job becomes," said Solontoi. "They had to change the color scheme on Space X's little disaster-in-waiting, Starlink, because every time one went overhead, you've destroyed the exposure of what you're tracking, because they're stupid bright."
Air traffic controllers help make sure aircraft stay relatively far apart in the sky. The same might soon be needed in space, said Solontoi.
"Space is less regulated than maritime practices. It used to be just the United States and Russia, but now multiple nations are involved, and some are more saber-rattle-y than others. Plus, you have profit-minded corporations involved. Before we can talk about launching more things, there needs to be a better plan. If not, we could be in a world of hurt. It's like what we've done with some fish populations or forests — someone needs to put together a plan, or things could be wiped out."
That said, Solontoi did offer one other prediction regarding space exploration.
"Someone will launch an interstellar probe using solar sail technology," he said. "You can push something using light. Using a laser, you can push something, and that can be done in space with a giant sail that's propelled using the sun's light."
PART FIVE
Artificial intelligence
The changes that Michael Solontoi discussed regarding advancements in outer space will all take time, and the year 2100 may actually be too soon for many of them to come to fruition. That is the opposite of developments in artificial intelligence, which are occurring at a mind-blowing pace.
"It's almost ludicrous to make predictions with AI," said Monmouth computer science professor Logan Mayfield. "The kind of pace that the technology is being developed is pretty astounding."
Consider this: Humans had the upper hand when it came to playing the ancient strategy game Go for around 2,500 years. But fed only very basic rules information, a computer recently taught itself to play at a world-class master level in a remarkably short time span.
"Using reinforcement learning, it progressed from nothing to master level in just three days, which is wild stuff," said Mayfield.
Or this: In the decade since Mayfield was first interviewed about life in 2100, AI has certainly had its share of headlines. But the development of ChatGPT, a form of AI released a mere seven months ago, is well on its way toward generating one billion [that's with a "b"] Google search hits. It stood at 783 million in late June.
"AI is big business," said Mayfield. "It's barreling along with discoveries, and there are real problems that could arise from it. It's not clear when or how we'll step back and have a conversation about it."
In his wide-ranging discussion on the pros and cons of AI, Mayfield expressed a pair of sentiments shared earlier by his faculty colleagues on other futuristic issues — one regarding "who will have access" to the artificial intelligence and the other being "it could be good or bad, depending on what people do with it."
He also focused some of his thoughts on a pair of common activities - baseball and driving.
"Automated vehicles will become more and more commonplace," he said. "It's easy to underestimate the impact that will have."
The first domino to fall in the automated driving world, Mayfield believes, will be knocked over by companies.
"I feel pretty confident we'll have automated commercial driving. We're already seeing it, and the technology is getting better and better. And there are ramifications to that with things like roadside infrastructure. With an automated driver, trucks don't need to stop for sleep. You'll have less of a need for truck stops and hotels. These are life-changing impacts."
Further down that road, so to speak, Mayfield said the self-driving revolution could lead to businesses that allow a human to get behind the wheel and experience the nostalgia of driving.
"There'll be places you can go and actually drive a car," he said. "I can see that becoming a thing."
As time marches on toward 2100, that consumer could be driving for the first time, experiencing what it was like in "the old days" they'd only heard stories about, much like how we think of the way our 19th-century ancestors traveled on horseback and in stagecoaches.
Human employees striking out?
It was around the time of the stagecoach's heyday in the United States that professional baseball captured the attention of the general public. Starting in the 1860s, the sport was known as "America's pastime."
Calling it that at any point during the first two decades of the 21st century, though, would be inaccurate, and it's an example of what can happen when technology and analytics take center stage and the "human element" is lessened or eliminated.
Cognizant of the decrease in fan interest and of plays that made the sport so beloved, several rules were changed for the 2023 season of Major League Baseball, including a ban on the analytics-driven "shift" of fielders.
"We perhaps went too far, so we're changing it back to a presentation of baseball that we like," said Mayfield.
He said MLB rule makers have a pending decision that is much like the choices being dictated by ChatGPT and automated driving.
"They're already experimenting with automated umpires for balls and strikes in the minor leagues, although it's not a huge success," said Mayfield, who sported a St Louis Cardinals hat during his interview. "If you take away umpires, you take away a human part of the game. And that's what we're seeing in other areas as well — taking human beings out of more and more tasks."
Mayfield referenced Player Piano, the 1952 book by Kurt Vonnegut. In the author's début novel, widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, engineers, and managers, who all keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines.
"It's incredibly relevant to right now," said Mayfield. "That might be one of the real changes in society — the jobs we take away. We might find out that people really need to work," a lesson that was reinforced during the chaotic first few months of the COVID pandemic.
Another sci-fi plot Mayfield referenced was the Pixar movie WALL-E, set in 2805. Some 700 years earlier — or right around our target year of 2100 — rampant consumerism, corporate greed, and environmental neglect had turned Earth into a garbage-strewn wasteland.
"Machines do all the stuff for us, and we sit around in a chair, getting fat," he said of the plot of the 2008 movie. "If we don't have to do anything for ourselves, we become ignorant slobs. What happens to us when our cleverness takes all these jobs away? That's the challenge — to live in the way we like and to do stuff, even though we have the technology to not do it."
Mayfield also addressed the doomsday scenario with AI, a nightmare depicted in the 2004 Will Smith movie, I, Robot, when robots mobilize against humanity.
"Many fear that AI creations are conscious, but we're not there yet," he said. "But we are automating things we didn't think we could automate. We're getting pretty good at it, and the pace is moving right along."
In 1962, the animated series The Jetsons débuted, envisioning a century into the future. One of the characters was Rosie, the Jetson family's robotic maid and housekeeper.
"It's more and more probable that we'll have that — people buying their maid," said Mayfield. "Roomba will get a real serious upgrade, which is wild, in and of itself."
The professor hesitated to make any other predictions about how life in 2100 might look. In the world of artificial intelligence, trying to look ahead just a few years is a hard enough task. After all, one of the page-one hits for that ChatGPT Google search was "ChatGPT: How to use the AI tool that's changing everything."
The technology that is quite possibly "changing everything" wasn't even a thing at this time a year ago.
"We could do this exercise again in five years and laugh at what we came up with today," said Mayfield.
