People alive now are living in the midst of
what may be seen as the most extraordinary three or four centuries
in human history.
—JULIAN SIMON
Where there is no vision, the people
perish.
—PROVERBS 29:18
In mythology, the gods lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals. The Greek gods frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse gods who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the gods by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization?
All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization. This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos. Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate.
Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by analyzing the history of energy.
RANKING CIVILIZATIONS
When professional historians write history, they view it through the lens of human experience and folly, that is, through the exploits of kings and queens, the rise of social movements, and the proliferation of ideas. Physicists, by contrast, view history quite differently.
Physicists rank everything, even human civilizations, by the energy it consumes. When applied to human history, we see that for countless millennia, our energy was limited to 1/5 horsepower, the power of our bare hands, and hence we lived nomadic lives in small, wandering tribes, scavenging for food in a harsh, hostile environment. For eons, we were indistinguishable from the wolves. There were no written records, just stories handed down from generation to generation at lonely campfires. Life was short and brutish, with an average life expectancy of eighteen to twenty years. Your total wealth consisted of whatever you could carry on your back. Most of your life, you felt the gnawing pain of hunger. After you died, you left no trace that you had ever lived at all.
But 10,000 years ago, a marvelous event happened that set civilization into motion: the Ice Age ended. For reasons that we still do not understand, thousands of years of glaciation ended. This paved the way for the rise of agriculture. Horses and oxen were soon domesticated, which increased our energy to 1 horsepower. Now one person had the energy to harvest several acres of farmland, yielding enough surplus energy to support a rapidly expanding population. With the domestication of animals, humans no longer relied primarily on hunting animals for food, and the first stable villages and cities began to rise from the forests and plains.
The excess wealth created by the agricultural revolution spawned new, ingenious ways to maintain and expand this wealth. Mathematics and writing were created to count this wealth, calendars were needed to keep track of when to plant and harvest, and scribes and accountants were needed to keep track of this surplus and tax it. This excess wealth eventually led to the rise of large armies, kingdoms, empires, slavery, and ancient civilizations.
The next revolution took place about 300 years ago, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the wealth accumulated by an individual was not just the product of his hands and horse but the product of machines that could create fabulous wealth via mass production.
Steam engines could drive powerful machines and locomotives, so that wealth could be created from factories, mills, and mines, not just fields. Peasants, fleeing from periodic famines and tired of backbreaking work in the fields, flocked to the cities, creating the industrial working class. Blacksmiths and wagonmakers were eventually replaced by autoworkers. With the coming of the internal combustion engine, a person could now command hundreds of horsepower. Life expectancy began to grow, hitting forty-nine in the United States by the year 1900.
Finally, we are in the third wave, where wealth is generated from information. The wealth of nations is now measured by electrons circulating around the world on fiber-optic cables and satellites, eventually dancing across computer screens on Wall Street and other financial capitals. Science, commerce, and entertainment travel at the speed of light, giving us limitless information anytime, anywhere.
TYPE I, II, AND III CIVILIZATIONS
How will this exponential rise in energy continue into the coming centuries and millennia? When physicists try to analyze civilizations, we rank them on the basis of the energy they consume. This ranking was first introduced in 1964 by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, who was interested in probing the night sky for signals sent from advanced civilizations in space.
He was not satisfied with something as nebulous and ill defined as an “extraterrestrial civilization,” so he introduced a quantitative scale to guide the work of astronomers. He realized that extraterrestrial civilizations may differ on the basis of their culture, society, government, etc., but there was one thing they all had to obey: the laws of physics. And from the earth, there was one thing that we could observe and measure that could classify these civilizations into different categories: their consumption of energy.
So he proposed three theoretical types: A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming the sliver of sunlight that falls on their planet, or about 1017 watts. A Type II civilization is stellar, consuming all the energy that their sun emits, or 1027 watts. A Type III civilization is galactic, consuming the energy of billions of stars, or about 1037 watts.
The advantage of this classification is that we can quantify the power of each civilization rather than make vague and wild generalizations. Since we know the power output of these celestial objects, we can put specific numerical constraints on each of them as we scan the skies.
Each type is separated by a factor of 10 billion: a Type III civilization consumes 10 billion times more energy than a Type II civilization (because there are roughly 10 billion or more stars in a galaxy), which in turn consumes 10 billion times more energy than a Type I civilization.
According to this classification, our present-day civilization is Type 0. We don’t even rate on this scale, since we get our energy from dead plants, that is, from oil and coal. (Carl Sagan, generalizing this classification, tried to get a more precise estimate of where we ranked on this cosmic scale. His calculation showed that we are actually a Type .7 civilization.)
On this scale, we can also classify the various civilizations we see in science fiction. A typical Type I civilization would be that of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, where an entire planet’s energy resources have been developed. They can control all planetary sources of energy, so they might be able to control or modify the weather at will, harness the power of a hurricane, or have cities on the oceans. Although they roam the heavens in rockets, their energy output is still largely confined to a planet.
A Type II civilization might include Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets (without the warp drive), able to colonize about 100 nearby stars. Their technology is barely capable of manipulating the entire energy output of a star.
A Type III civilization may be the Empire in the Star Wars saga, or perhaps the Borg in the Star Trek series, both of which have colonized large portions of a galaxy, embracing billions of star systems. They can roam the galactic space lanes at will.
(Although the Kardashev scale is based on planets, stars, and galaxies for its classification, we should point out the possibility of a Type IV civilization, which derives its energy from extragalactic sources. The only known energy source beyond our galaxy is dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the matter and energy of the known universe, while the world of stars and galaxies makes up only 4 percent of the universe. A possible candidate for a Type IV civilization might be the godlike Q in the Star Trek series, whose power is extragalactic.)
We can use this classification to calculate when we might achieve each of these types. Assume that world civilization grows at the rate of 1 percent each year in terms of its collective GDP. This is a reasonable assumption when we average over the past several centuries. According to this assumption, it takes roughly 2,500 years to go from one civilization to the next. A 2 percent growth rate would give a transition period of 1,200 years.
But we can also calculate how long it would take for our planet to attain Type I classification. In spite of economic recessions and expansions, booms and busts, we can mathematically estimate that we will attain Type I status in about 100 years, given an average rate of our economic growth.
FROM TYPE O TO TYPE I
We see evidence of this transition from Type 0 to Type I every time we open a newspaper. Many of the headlines can be traced to the birth pangs of a Type I civilization being born right in front of our eyes.
• The Internet is the beginning of a Type I planetary telephone system. For the first time in history, a person on one continent can effortlessly exchange unlimited information with someone on another continent. In fact, many people already feel they have more in common with someone on the other side of the world than with their next-door neighbor. This process will only accelerate as nations lay even more fiber-optic cables and launch more communications satellites. This process is also unstoppable. Even if the president of the United States tried to ban the Internet, he would be met only with laughter. There are almost a billion personal computers in the world today, and roughly a quarter of humanity has been on the Internet at least once.
• A handful of languages, led by English, followed by Chinese, are rapidly emerging as the future Type I language. On the World Wide Web, for example, 29 percent of visitors log on in English, followed by 22 percent in Chinese, 8 percent in Spanish, 6 percent in Japanese, and 5 percent in French. English is already the de facto planetary language of science, finance, business, and entertainment. English is the number-one second language on the planet. No matter where I travel, I find that English has emerged as the lingua franca. In Asia, for example, when Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese are in a meeting, they use English to communicate. Currently, there are about 6,000 languages being spoken on earth, and 90 percent of them are expected to become extinct in the coming decades, according to Michael E. Krauss, formerly of the University of Alaska’s Native Language Center. The telecommunications revolution is accelerating this process, as people living in even the most remote regions of the earth are exposed to English. This will also accelerate economic development as their societies are further integrated into the world economy, thereby raising living standards and economic activity.
Some people will bemoan the fact that some ancestral languages will no longer be spoken. But on the other hand, the computer revolution will guarantee that these languages are not lost. Native speakers will add their language and their culture to the Internet, where they will last forever.
• We are witnessing the birth of a planetary economy. The rise of the European Union and other trade blocs represents the emergence of a Type I economy. Historically, the peoples of Europe have fought blood feuds with their neighbors for thousands of years. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, these tribes would continue to slaughter one another, eventually becoming the feuding nations of Europe. Yet today, these bitter rivals have suddenly banded together to form the European Union, representing the largest concentration of wealth on the planet. The reason these nations have abruptly put aside their famous rivalries is to compete with the economic juggernaut of nations that signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the future, we will see more economic blocs forming, as nations realize that they cannot remain competitive unless they join lucrative trading blocs.
We see graphic evidence of this when analyzing the great recession of 2008. Within a matter of days, the shock waves emanating from Wall Street rippled through the financial halls of London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Today, it is impossible to understand the economics of a single nation without understanding the trends affecting the world economy.
• We are seeing the rise of a planetary middle class. Hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and elsewhere are entering its ranks, which is perhaps the greatest social upheaval in the last half century. This group is savvy about cultural, educational, and economic trends affecting the planet. The focus of this planetary middle class is not wars, religion, or strict moral codes, but political and social stability and consumer goods. The ideological and tribal passions that might have gripped their ancestors mean little to them if their goal is to have a suburban house with two cars. While their ancestors might have celebrated the day their sons went off to war, one of their main concerns now is to get them into a good college. And for people who enviously watch other people rise, they will wonder when their time will come. Kenichi Ohmae, a former senior partner of McKinsey & Company, writes, “People will inevitably start to look around them and ask why they cannot have what others have. Equally important, they will start to ask why they were not able to have it in the past.”
• The economy, not weapons, is the new criterion for a superpower. The rise of the EU and NAFTA underscores an important point: with the end of the Cold War, it is clear that a world power can maintain its dominant position mainly through economic might. Nuclear wars are simply too dangerous to fight, so it is economic might that will largely determine the destiny of nations. One contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the economic stress of competing militarily with the United States. (As the advisers to President Ronald Reagan once commented, the strategy of the United States was to spend Russia into a depression, that is, increase U.S. military expenditure so that the Russians, with an economy less than half the size of the United States’, would have to starve their own people to keep up.) In the future, it is clear that a superpower can maintain its status only through economic might, and that in turn stems from science and technology.
• A planetary culture is emerging, based on youth culture (rock and roll and youth fashion), movies (Hollywood blockbusters), high fashion (luxury goods), and food (mass-market fast-food chains). No matter where you travel, you can find evidence of the same cultural trends in music, art, and fashion. For example, Hollywood carefully factors in global appeal when it estimates the success of a potential blockbuster movie. Movies with cross-cultural themes (such as action or romance), packed with internationally recognized celebrities, are the big moneymakers for Hollywood, evidence of an emerging planetary culture.
We saw this after World War II when, for the first time in human history, an entire generation of young people possessed enough disposable income to alter the prevailing culture. Formerly, children were sent into the fields to toil with their parents once they hit puberty. (This is the origin of the three-month summer vacation. During the Middle Ages, children were required to do backbreaking work in the fields during summer as soon as they were of age.) But with rising prosperity, the postwar baby boom generation left the fields to head to the streets. Today, we see the same pattern taking place in country after country, as economic development empowers youth with ample disposable incomes. Eventually, as most of the people of the world enter the middle class, rising incomes will filter down to their youth, fueling a perpetuation of this planetary youth culture.
Rock and roll, Hollywood movies, etc., are in fact prime examples of how intellectual capitalism is replacing commodity capitalism. Robots for decades to come will be incapable of creating music and movies that can thrill an international audience.
This is also happening in the world of fashion, where a handful of brand names are extending their reach worldwide. High fashion, once reserved for the aristocracy and the extremely wealthy, is rapidly proliferating around the world as more people enter the middle class and aspire to some of the glamour of the rich. High fashion is no longer the exclusive province of the privileged elite.
But the emergence of a planetary culture does not mean that local cultures or customs will be wiped out. Instead, people will be bicultural. On one hand, they will keep their local cultural traditions alive (and the Internet guarantees that these regional customs will survive forever). The rich cultural diversity of the world will continue to thrive into the future. In fact, certain obscure features of local culture can spread around the world via the Internet, gaining them a worldwide audience. On the other hand, people will be fluent in the changing trends that affect global culture. When people communicate with those from another culture, they will do so via the global culture. This has already happened to many of the elites on the planet: they speak the local language and obey local customs but use English and follow international customs when dealing with people from other countries. This is the model for the emerging Type I civilization. Local cultures will continue to thrive, coexisting side by side with the larger global culture.
• The news is becoming planetary. With satellite TV, cell phones, the Internet, etc., it becomes impossible for one nation to completely control and filter the news. Raw footage is emerging from all parts of the world, beyond the reach of censors. When wars or revolutions break out, the stark images are broadcast instantly around the world as they happen in real time. In the past, it was relatively easy for the Great Powers of the nineteenth century to impose their values and manipulate the news. Today, this is still possible, but on a much reduced basis because of advanced technology. Also, with rising education levels around the world, there is a much larger audience for world news. Politicians today have to include world opinion when they think about the consequences of their actions.
• Sports, which in the past were essential in forging a tribal and then a national identity, are now forging a planetary identity. Soccer and the Olympics are emerging to dominate planetary sports. The 2008 Olympics, for example, were widely interpreted as a coming-out party for the Chinese, who wanted to assume their rightful cultural position in the world after centuries of isolation. This is also an example of the Cave Man Principle, since sports are High Touch but are entering the world of High Tech.
• Environmental threats are also being debated on a planetary scale. Nations realize that the pollution they create crosses national boundaries and hence can precipitate an international crisis. We first saw this when a gigantic hole in the ozone layer opened over the South Pole. Because the ozone layer prevents harmful UV and X-rays from the sun from reaching the ground, nations banded together to limit the production and consumption of chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerators and industrial systems. The Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 and successfully decreased the use of the ozone-depleting chemicals. Building on this international success, most nations adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to address the threat of global warming, which is an even greater threat to the environment of the planet.
• Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet. During most of human history, it was common for people to live out their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. It was easy for unscrupulous leaders to manipulate their people, who had little to no contact with other peoples. But today, one can go around the globe on a modest budget. Backpacking youths of today who stay in budget youth hostels around the world will become the leaders of tomorrow. Some people decry the fact that tourists have only the crudest understanding of local cultures, histories, and politics. But we have to weigh that against the past, when contact between distant cultures was almost nonexistent, except during times of war, often with tragic results.
• Likewise, the falling price of intercontinental travel is accelerating contact between diverse peoples, making wars more difficult to wage and spreading the ideals of democracy. One of the main factors that whipped up animosity between nations was misunderstanding between people. In general, it is quite difficult to wage war on a nation you are intimately familiar with.
• The nature of war itself is changing to reflect this new reality. History has shown that two democracies almost never wage war against each other. Almost all wars of the past have been waged between nondemocracies, or between a democracy and a nondemocracy. In general, war fever can be easily whipped up by demagogues who demonize the enemy. But in a democracy, with a vibrant press, oppositional parties, and a comfortable middle class that has everything to lose in a war, war fever is much more difficult to cultivate. It is hard to whip up war fever when there is a skeptical press and mothers who demand to know why their children are going to war.
There will still be wars in the future. As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once said, “War is politics by other means.” Although we will still have wars, their nature will change as democracy is spread around the world.
(There is another reason why wars are becoming more difficult to wage as the world becomes more affluent and people have more to lose. Political theorist Edward Luttwak has written that wars are much more difficult to wage because families are smaller today. In the past, the average family had ten or so children; the eldest inherited the farm, while the younger siblings joined the church, the military, or sought their fortunes elsewhere. Today, when a typical family has an average of 1.5 children, there is no more surplus of children to easily fill the military and the priesthood. Hence, wars will be much more difficult to wage, especially between democracies and third-world guerrillas.)
• Nations will weaken but will still exist in 2100. They will still be needed to pass laws and fix local problems. However, their power and influence will be vastly decreased as the engines of economic growth become regional, then global. For example, with the rise of capitalism in the late 1700s and early 1800s, nations were needed to enforce a common currency, language, tax laws, and regulations concerning trade and patents. Feudal laws and traditions, which hindered the advance of free trade, commerce, and finance, were quickly swept away by national governments. Normally, this process might take a century or so, but we saw an accelerated version of this when Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, forged the modern German state in 1871. In the same way, this march toward a Type I civilization is changing the nature of capitalism, and economic power is gradually shifting from national governments to regional powers and trade blocs.
This does not necessarily mean a world government. There are many ways a planetary civilization could exist. It is clear that national governments will lose relative power, but what power will fill the vacuum will depend on many historical, cultural, and national trends that are hard to predict.
• Diseases will be controlled on a planetary basis. In the ancient past, virulent diseases were actually not so dangerous because the human population was very low. The incurable Ebola virus, for example, is probably an ancient disease that infected just a few villages over thousands of years. But the rapid expansion of civilization into previously uninhabited areas and the rise of cities mean that something like Ebola has to be monitored very carefully.
When the population of cities hit several hundred thousand to a million, diseases could spread rapidly and create genuine epidemics. The fact that the Black Plague killed perhaps half the European population was an indication, ironically, of progress, because populations had reached critical mass for epidemics and shipping routes connected ancient cities around the world.
The recent outbreak of the H1N1 flu is thus a measure of our progress as well. Perhaps originating in Mexico City, the disease spread quickly around the globe via jet travel. More important, it took only a matter of months for the nations of the world to sequence the genes of the virus and then create a vaccine for it that was available to tens of millions of people.
TERRORISM AND DICTATORSHIPS
There are groups, however, that instinctively resist the trend toward a Type I planetary civilization, because they know that it is progressive, free, scientific, prosperous, and educated. These forces may not be conscious of this fact and cannot articulate it, but they are in effect struggling against the trend toward a Type I civilization. These are:
• Islamic terrorists, who would prefer to go back a millennium, to the eleventh century, rather than live in the twenty-first century. They cannot frame their discontent in this fashion, but, judging from their own statements, they prefer to live in a theocracy where science, personal relations, and politics are all subject to strict religious edicts. (They forget that, historically, the greatness and scientific and technological prowess of the Islamic civilization were matched only by its tolerance of new ideas. These terrorists do not understand the true source of the greatness of the Islamic past.)
• Dictatorships that depend on keeping their people ignorant of the wealth and progress of the outside world. One striking example was the demonstrations that gripped Iran in 2009, where the government tried to suppress the ideas of the demonstrators, who were using Twitter and YouTube in their struggle to carry their message to the world.
In the past, people said that the pen was mightier than the sword. In the future, it will be the chip that is mightier than the sword.
One of the reasons the people of North Korea, a horribly impoverished nation, do not rebel is because they are denied all contact with the world, whose people, they believe, are also starving. In part, not realizing that they do not have to accept their fate, they endure incredible hardship.
TYPE II CIVILIZATIONS
By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the weather, ice ages can be avoided or altered. Meteors and comets can be also be deflected. Even if their sun goes supernova, the people will be able to flee to another star system, or perhaps prevent their star from exploding. (For example, if their sun turns into a red giant, they might be able swing asteroids around their planet in a slingshot effect in order to move their planet farther from the sun.)
One way in which a Type II civilization may be able to exploit the entire energy output of a star is to create a gigantic sphere around it that absorbs all the sunlight of the star. This is called a Dyson sphere.
A Type II civilization will probably be at peace with itself. Since space travel is so difficult, it will have remained a Type I civilization for centuries, plenty of time to iron out the divisions within their society. By the time a Type I civilization reaches Type II status, they will have colonized not just their entire solar system but also the nearby stars, perhaps out to several hundred light-years, but not much more. They will still be restricted by the speed of light.
TYPE III CIVILIZATIONS
By the time a civilization reaches Type III status, it will have explored most of the galaxy. The most convenient way to visit the hundreds of billions of planets is to send self-replicating robot probes throughout the galaxy. A von Neumann probe is a robot that has the ability to make unlimited copies of itself; it lands on a moon (since it is free of rust and erosion) and makes a factory out of lunar dirt, which creates thousands of copies of itself. Each copy rockets off to other distant star systems and makes thousands more copies. Starting with one such probe, we quickly create a sphere of trillions of these self-replicating probes expanding at near the speed of light, mapping out the entire Milky Way galaxy in just 100,000 years. Since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, there is plenty of time in which these civilizations may have risen (and fallen). (Such rapid, exponential growth is also the mechanism by which viruses spread in our body.)
There is another possibility, however. By the time a civilization has reached Type III status, its people have enough energy resources to probe the “Planck energy,” or 1019 billion electron volts, the energy at which space-time itself become unstable. (The Planck energy is a quadrillion times larger than the energy produced by our largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. It is the energy at which Einstein’s theory of gravity finally breaks down. At this energy, it is theorized that the fabric of space-time will finally tear, creating tiny portals that might lead to other universes, or other points in space-time.) Harnessing such vast energy would require colossal machines on an unimaginable scale, but if successful they might make possible shortcuts through the fabric of space and time, either by compressing space or by passing through wormholes. Assuming that they can overcome a number of stubborn theoretical and practical obstacles (such as harnessing sufficient positive and negative energy and removing instabilities), it is conceivable that they might be able to colonize the entire galaxy.
This has prompted many people to speculate about why they have not visited us. Where are they? the critics ask.
One possible answer is that perhaps they already have, but we are too primitive to notice. Self-replicating von Neumann probes would be the most practical way of exploring the galaxy, and they do not have to be huge. They might be just a few inches long, because of revolutionary advances in nanotechnology. They might be in plain view, but we don’t recognize them because we are looking for the wrong thing, expecting a huge starship carrying aliens from outer space. More than likely, the probe will be fully automatic, part organic and part electronic, and will not contain any space aliens at all.
And when we do eventually meet the aliens from space, we may be surprised, because they might have long ago altered their biology using robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
Another possibility is that they have self-destructed. As we mentioned, the transition from Type 0 to Type I is the most dangerous one, since we still have all the savagery, fundamentalism, racism, and so on of the past. It is possible that one day, when we visit the stars, we may find evidence of Type 0 civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I (for example, their atmospheres may be too hot, or too radioactive, to support life).
SETI (SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE)
At the present time, the people of the world are certainly not conscious of the march toward a Type I planetary civilization. There is no collective self-awareness that this historic transition is taking place. If you take a poll, some people might be vaguely aware of the process of globalization, but beyond that there is no conscious awareness that we are headed to a specific destination.
All this might suddenly change if we find evidence of intelligent life in outer space. Then, we would immediately be aware of our technological level in relation to this alien civilization. Scientists in particular would be intensely interested in which types of technologies this alien civilization has mastered.
Although one cannot know for sure, probably within this century we will detect an advanced civilization in space, given the rapid advances in our technology.
Two trends have made this possible. First is the launching of satellites specifically designed to find small, rocky extrasolar planets, the COROT and Kepler satellites. The Kepler is expected to identify up to 600 small, earthlike planets in space. Once these planets have been identified, the next step is to focus our search for intelligent emissions from these planets.
In 2001, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen began donating funds, now more than $30 million, to jump-start the stalled SETI program. This will vastly increase the number of radio telescopes at the Hat Creek installation, located north of San Francisco. The Allen Telescope Array, when fully operational, will have 350 radio telescopes, making it the most advanced radio telescope facility in the world. While in the past astronomers have scanned little more than 1,000 stars in their search for intelligent life, the new Allen Array will increase that number by a factor of 1,000, to a million stars.
Although scientists have been searching vainly for signals from advanced civilizations for almost fifty years, only recently have these two developments given a much-needed boost to the SETI program. Many astronomers believe that there was simply too little effort and too few resources devoted to this project. With this influx of new resources and new data, the SETI program is becoming a serious scientific project.
It is conceivable that we may, within this century, detect signals from an intelligent civilization in space. (Seth Shostak, the director of the SETI Institute in the Bay Area, told me that within twenty years, he expects to make contact with such a civilization. That may be too optimistic, but it is safe to say that within this century it would be strange if we did not detect signals from another civilization in space.)
If signals are found from an advanced civilization, it could be one of the most significant milestones in human history. Hollywood movies love to describe the chaos this event might unleash, with prophets telling us that the end is near, with crazy religious cults going into overtime, etc.
The reality, however, is more mundane. There will be no need for immediate panic, since this civilization may not even know that we are eavesdropping on their conversations. And if they did, direct conversations between them and us would be difficult, given their enormous distance from us. First, it may take months to years to fully decode the message, and then to rank this civilization’s technology, to see if it fits the Kardashev classification. Second, direct communication with them will probably be unlikely, since the distance to this civilization will be many light-years away, too far for any direct contact. So we will be able only to observe this civilization, rather than carry on any conversation. There will be an effort to build gigantic radio transmitters that can send messages back to the aliens. But in fact, it may take centuries before any two-way communication is possible with this civilization.
NEW CLASSIFICATIONS
The Kardashev classification was introduced in the 1960s, when physicists were concerned about energy production. However, with the spectacular rise of computer power, attention turned to the information revolution, where the number of bits processed by a civilization became as relevant as its energy production.
One can imagine, for example, an alien civilization on a planet where computers are impossible because their atmosphere conducts electricity. In this case, any electrical device will soon short-circuit, creating sparks, so that only the most primitive forms of electrical appliances are possible.
Any large-scale dynamo or computer would quickly burn out. We can imagine that such a civilization might eventually master fossil fuels and nuclear energy, but their society would be unable to process large amounts of information. It would be difficult for them to create an Internet or a planetary telecommunications system, so their economy and scientific progress would be stunted. Although they would be able to rise up the Kardashev scale, it would be very slow and painful without computers.
Therefore, Carl Sagan introduced another scale, based on information processing. He devised a system in which the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z, correspond to information. A Type A civilization is one that processes only a million pieces of information, which corresponds to a civilization that has only a spoken language but not a written one. If we compile all the information that has survived from ancient Greece, which had a flourishing written language and literature, it is about a billion bits of information, making it a Type C civilization. Moving up the scale, we can then estimate the amount of information that our civilization processes. An educated guess puts us at a Type H civilization. So therefore, the energy and information processing of our civilization yields a Type .7 H civilization.
In recent years, another concern has arisen: pollution and waste. Energy and information are not enough to rank a civilization. In fact, the more energy a civilization consumes and the more information it spews out, the more pollution and waste it might produce. This is not an academic question, since the waste from a Type I or II civilization might be enough to destroy it.
A Type II civilization, for example, consumes all the energy that is produced by a star. Let us say that its engines are 50 percent efficient, meaning that half the waste it produces is in the form of heat. This is potentially disastrous, because it means that the temperature of the planet will rise until it melts! Think of billions of coal plants on such a planet, belching huge amounts of heat and gases that heat the planet to the point that life is impossible.
Freeman Dyson, in fact, once tried to find Type II civilizations in outer space by searching for objects that emit primarily infrared radiation, rather than X-rays or visible light. This is because a Type II civilization, even if it wanted to hide its presence from prying eyes by creating a sphere around itself, would inevitably produce enough waste heat so that it would glow with infrared radiation. Therefore he suggested that astronomers search for star systems that produce mainly infrared light. (None, however, were found.)
But this raises the concern that any civilization that lets its energy grow out of control may commit suicide. We see, therefore, that energy and information are not enough to ensure the survival of the civilization as it moves up the scale. We need a new scale, one that takes efficiency, waste heat, and pollution into account. A new scale that does is based on another concept, called entropy.
RANKING CIVILIZATIONS BY ENTROPY
Ideally, what we want is a civilization that grows in energy and information, but does so wisely, so that its planet does not become unbearably hot or deluged with waste.
This was graphically illustrated in the Disney movie Wall-E, where in the distant future we have so polluted and degraded the earth that we simply left the mess behind and lead self-indulgent lives in luxury cruise ships drifting in outer space.
Here’s where the laws of thermodynamics become important. The first law of thermodynamics simply says that you can’t get something for nothing, i.e., there is no free lunch. In other words, the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is constant. But as we saw in Chapter 3, the second law is the most interesting and, in fact, may eventually determine the fate of an advanced civilization. Simply put, the second law of thermodynamics says that the total amount of entropy (disorder or chaos) always increases. This means that all things must pass; objects must rot, decay, rust, age, or fall apart. (We never see total entropy decrease. For example, we never see fried eggs leap from the frying pan and back into the shell. We never see sugar crystals in a cup of coffee suddenly unmix and jump into your spoon. These events are so exceedingly rare that the word “unmix” does not exist in the English—or any other—language.)
So if civilizations of the future blindly produce energy as they rise to a Type II or III civilization, they will create so much waste heat that their home planet will become uninhabitable. Entropy, in the form of waste heat, chaos, and pollution, will essentially destroy their civilization. Similarly, if they produce information by cutting down entire forests and generating mountains of waste paper, the civilization will be buried in its own information waste.
So we have to introduce yet another scale to rank civilizations. We have to introduce two new types of civilizations. The first is an “entropy conserving” civilization, one that uses every means at its disposal to control excess waste and heat. As its energy needs continue to grow exponentially, it realizes that its energy consumption may change the planetary environment, making life impossible. The total disorder or entropy produced by an advanced civilization will continue to soar; that is unavoidable. But local entropy can decrease on their planet if they use nanotechnology and renewable energy to eliminate waste and inefficiency.
The second civilization, an “entropy wasteful” civilization, continues to expand its energy consumption without limit. Eventually, if the home planet becomes uninhabitable, the civilization might try to flee its excesses by expanding to other planets. But the cost of creating colonies in outer space will limit its ability to expand. If its entropy grows faster than its ability to expand to other planets, then it will face disaster.
FROM MASTERS OF NATURE TO CONSERVATORS OF NATURE
As we mentioned earlier, in ancient times we were passive observers of the dance of nature, gazing in wonder at all the mysteries around us. Today, we are like choreographers of nature, able to tweak the forces of nature here and there. And by 2100, we will become masters of nature, able to move objects with our minds, controlling life and death, and reaching for the stars.
But if we become masters of nature, we will also have to become conservators of nature. If we let entropy increase without limit, we will inevitably perish by the laws of thermodynamics. A Type II civilization, by definition, consumes as much energy as a star, and hence the surface temperature of the planet will be scorching hot if entropy is allowed to grow unabated. But there are ways to control entropy growth.
For example, when we visit a museum and see the huge steam engines of the nineteenth century, with their enormous boilers and carloads of black coal, we see how inefficient they were, wasting energy and generating enormous amounts of heat and pollution. If we compare them to a silent, sleek electric train, we see how much more efficiently we use energy today. The need for gigantic coal-burning power plants, belching huge amounts of waste heat and pollution into the air, can be vastly reduced if people’s appliances are energy efficient via renewable energy and miniaturization. Nanotechnology gives us the opportunity to reduce waste heat even further as machines are miniaturized to the atomic scale.
Also, if room temperature superconductors are found in this century, it means a complete overhaul of our energy requirements. Waste heat, in the form of friction, will be greatly reduced, increasing the efficiency of our machines. As we mentioned, the majority of our energy consumption, especially transportation, goes into overcoming friction. That is why we put gasoline into our gas tanks, even though it would take almost no energy to move from California to New York if there were no friction. One can imagine that an advanced civilization will be able to perform vastly more tasks with less energy than we use today. This means that we might be able to put numerical limits on the entropy produced by an advanced civilization.
MOST DANGEROUS TRANSITION
The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores.
However, once we make the transition to a Type I civilization, we will have many centuries to settle our differences. As we saw in earlier chapters, space colonies will continue to be extremely expensive into the future, so it is unlikely that a significant fraction of the world’s population will leave to colonize Mars or the asteroid belt. Until radically new rocket designs bring down the cost or until the space elevator is built, space travel will continue to be the province of governments and the wealthy. For the majority of the earth’s population, this means that they will remain on the planet as we attain Type I status. This also means that we will have centuries to work out our differences as a Type I civilization.
THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM
We live in exciting times. Science and technology are opening up worlds to us that we could previously only dream about. When looking at the future of science, with all its challenges and dangers, I see genuine hope. We will discover more about nature in the coming decades than in all human history combined—many times over.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Consider the words of Benjamin Franklin, America’s last great scientist/statesman, when he made a prediction not just about the next century but about the next thousand years. In 1780, he noted with regret that men often acted like wolves toward one another, mainly because of the grinding burden of surviving in a harsh world.
He wrote:
It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.
He was writing at a time when peasants were scratching a bleak existence from the soil, when ox-drawn carts brought rotting produce to the market, when plagues and starvation were a fact of life, and only the lucky few lived beyond the age of forty. (In London in 1750, two-thirds of children died before they reached the age of five.) Franklin lived in a time when it appeared hopeless that one day we might be able to solve these age-old problems. Or, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
But today, well short of Franklin’s thousand years, his predictions are coming to pass.
This faith—that reason, science, and intellect would one day free us of the oppression of the past—was echoed in the work of the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1795 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which some claim is the most accurate prediction of future events ever written. He made a wide variety of predictions, all of which were quite heretical, but all of which came true. He predicted that the colonies of the New World would eventually break free from Europe and then advance rapidly by benefiting from the technology of Europe. He predicted the end of slavery everywhere. He predicted that farms would greatly increase the amount and quality of the food they produced per acre. He predicted that science would increase rapidly and benefit mankind. He predicted that we would be free of the grind of daily life and have more leisure time. He predicted that birth control would one day be widespread.
In 1795, it seemed hopeless that these predictions would be fulfilled.
Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Condorcet both lived in a time when life was short and brutal and science was still in its infancy. Looking back at these predictions, we can fully appreciate the rapid advances made in science and technology, which created enough bounty and wealth to lift billions out of the savagery of the past. Looking back at the world of Franklin and Condorcet, we can appreciate that, of all the creations of humanity, by far the most important has been the creation of science. Science has taken us from the depths of the swamp and lifted us to the threshold of the stars.
But science does not stand still. As we mentioned earlier, by 2100, we shall have the power of the gods of mythology that we once worshipped and feared. In particular, the computer revolution should give us the ability to manipulate matter with our minds, the biotech revolution should give us the ability to create life almost on demand and extend our life span, and the nanotech revolution may give us the ability to change the form of objects and even create them out of nothing. And all this may eventually lead to the creation of a planetary Type I civilization. So the generation now alive is the most important ever to walk the surface of the earth, for we will determine if we will reach a Type I civilization or fall into the abyss.
But science by itself is morally neutral. Science is like a double-edged sword. One side of the sword can cut against poverty, disease, and ignorance. But the other side of the sword can cut against people. How this mighty sword is wielded depends on the wisdom of its handlers.
As Einstein once said, “Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be; and beyond its realm, value judgments remain indispensable.” Science solves some problems, only to create others, but on a higher level.
We saw the raw, destructive side of science during World Wars I and II. The world witnessed in horror how science could bring on ruin and devastation on a scale never seen before, with the introduction of poison gas, the machine gun, firebombings of entire cities, and the atomic bomb. The savagery of the first part of the twentieth century unleashed violence almost beyond comprehension.
But science also allowed humanity to rebuild and rise above the ruin of war, creating even greater peace and prosperity for billions of people. So the true power of science is that it enables us and empowers us—giving us more options. Science magnifies the innovative, creative, and enduring spirit of humanity, as well as our glaring deficiencies.
KEY TO THE FUTURE: WISDOM
The key, therefore, is to find the wisdom necessary to wield this sword of science. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” In my opinion, wisdom is the ability to identify the crucial issues of our time, analyze them from many different points of view and perspectives, and then choose the one that carries out some noble goal and principle.
In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” Unlike information, it cannot be dispensed via blogs and Internet chatter. Since we are drowning in an ocean of information, the most precious commodity in modern society is wisdom. Without wisdom and insight, we are left to drift aimlessly and without purpose, with an empty, hollow feeling after the novelty of unlimited information wears off.
But where does wisdom come from? In part, wisdom comes from reasoned and informed democratic debate from opposing sides. This debate is often messy, unseemly, and always raucous, but out of the thunder and smoke emerges genuine insight. In our society, this debate emerges in the form of democracy. As Winston Churchill once observed, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”
So democracy is not easy. You have to work at it. George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”
Today, the Internet, with all its faults and excesses, is emerging as a guardian of democratic freedoms. Issues that were once debated behind closed doors are now being dissected and analyzed on a thousand Web sites.
Dictators live in fear of the Internet, terrified of what happens when their people rise up against them. So today, the nightmare of 1984 is gone, with the Internet changing from an instrument of terror into an instrument of democracy.
Out of the cacophony of debate emerges wisdom. But the surest way to enhance vigorous, democratic debate is through education, for only an educated electorate can make decisions on technologies that will determine the fate of our civilization. Ultimately, the people will decide for themselves how far to take this technology, and in what directions it should develop, but only an informed, educated electorate can make these decisions wisely.
Unfortunately, many are woefully ignorant of the enormous challenges that face us in the future. How can we generate new industries to replace the old ones? How will we prepare young people for the job market of the future? How far should we push genetic engineering in humans? How can we revamp a decaying, dysfunctional educational system to meet the challenges of the future? How can we confront global warming and nuclear proliferation?
The key to a democracy is an educated, informed electorate that can rationally and dispassionately discuss the issues of the day. The purpose of this book is to help start the debate that will determine how this century unfolds.
FUTURE AS A FREIGHT TRAIN
In summary, the future is ours to create. Nothing is written in stone. As Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves ….” Or, as Henry Ford once said, perhaps less eloquently, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
So the future is like a huge freight train barreling down the tracks, headed our way. Behind this train is the sweat and toil of thousands of scientists who are inventing the future in their labs. You can hear the whistle of the train. It says: biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and telecommunications. However, the reaction of some is to say, “I am too old. I can’t learn this stuff. I will just lie down and get run over by the train.” However, the reaction of the young, the energetic, and the ambitious is to say, “Get me on that train! This train represents my future. It is my destiny. Get me in the driver’s seat.”
Let us hope that the people of this century use the sword of science wisely and with compassion.
But perhaps to better understand how we might live in a planetary civilization, it may be instructive to live out a day in the year 2100, to see how these technologies will affect our daily lives as well as our careers and our hopes and dreams.