One of our leading scientists reports back from the world’s laboratories on the concepts and technology that will shape our lives and our world between now and 2100. Excerpted from “Dr. Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future,” March 28, 2011.

MICHIO KAKU, Host, “Science Fantastic”; Professor of Physics, City College of New York; Author, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

 

I’m going to give you a guided tour through the future as told to me by 300 of the world’s top scientists that I’ve interviewed. Prediction, of course, is very difficult. That great philosopher of the Western world, Yogi Berra, once said, “Prediction is awfully hard to do, especially if it’s about the future.”

But I’m a physicist. We invented the laser; we invented the transistor; we helped to create the first computer; we wrote the World Wide Web; we created television, radio, radar, the MRI machine, the space program, the GPS system. And now we physicists are inventing the 21st century.

In my life I’ve had two passions and two role models. First, when Einstein died, everyone was talking about the fact that he couldn’t finish his greatest achievement. I said to myself, “Why couldn’t he finish it? It was a homework assignment, right? Why didn’t he ask his mother? What’s the big deal?” The big deal was that it was supposed to be the theory of everything. An equation that would “read the mind of God.” I said to myself, “That’s for me.”

But I had another role model. On Saturdays I used to watch TV and watch “Flash Gordon.” Rocket ships, aliens, cities in the sky – that’s for me, too. But then I began to realize something. First, I didn’t have muscles and blonde hair, and second, it was the scientists that made it work. The scientists invented the rocket ship, the ray gun and the invisibility shield. Then I began to realize something very important: science, especially physics, is the key to the future. You can’t build rocket ships, you can’t build ray guns, and you can’t have invisibility shields unless you understand the physics behind those things.

 

Verne’s future

Back in 1863, Jules Verne [wrote] From the Earth to the Moon. You know what? He got the size of the space capsule right to within 10-percent accuracy. He said Florida would be the place where we launch the moon rocket. He said that it would take three days to go to the moon and it would come back and splash in the ocean. He got everything right except the propulsion system, because rockets wouldn’t be invented for many a decade.

Some people would say, “That’s a fluke; Jules Verne got lucky predicting the next 100 years.” Well, in 1863 he wrote another novel about the next 100 years in Paris. It was called Paris in the 20th Century. The book was so preposterous and so fantastic they couldn’t publish it. What did Jules Verne predict that was so incredible no one believed him? When most people lived in shacks, he predicted glass skyscrapers. When long-distance travel meant getting on a horse, if you were rich, he predicted gasoline automobiles; long-distance telecommunication in an era when long distance-telecommunication was yelling at your neighbor. He predicted fax machines and something like the Internet.

How could he get it so accurate? Because every time a scientist would come through Paris, he would sit down with them and pump them for information. He was well versed in all of the sciences of 1863. So I said to myself, “Why don’t I sit down with all the scientists who are inventing the future in their laboratories?” No one can predict the future. The best you can do is interview the people who are building the future.

Imagine the world of the 1900s. What would the world of 1900 look like to our grandparents and great-grandparents? How would they view us? Let’s be blunt about this. Life expectancy in the 1900s was in the forties. You were born, you grew up and you died. Most people were dirt farmers back then. High tech was the telegraph, if you were rich, and long distance travel meant the horse, if you had the money.

Now, let’s say they could see you right now. You have rockets, car engines with 200 horsepower, atomic bombs and the electrification of the entire planet. How would your grandparents view you today? They would say you were a wizard with rockets, jet planes, electricity and bombs.

Lets say you could talk to your grandkids and great-grandkids in the year 2100. How would you view them? Remember that science accelerates, it doesn’t progress linearly. The amount of knowledge we create roughly doubles every 10 years. So how would you view your own flesh and blood living in the year 2100? You would view them as gods.

Remember from high school the gods of mythology? Zeus would think of something and it would come to be; by thinking, he could create objects, move objects. There are perks to being a god. Venus had a perk; if you were Venus you’d have a perfect body. Apollo had a chariot. Yes, we will have flying cars by 2100. There is also Pegasus; flying horses and animals that are beyond today’s technology are also a possibility.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What I’m going to try to tell you today is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from divinity. When you learn about Greek mythology, you learn that most of the gods were fools. They spent their time creating mischief. So when we have the power of the gods, will we have the wisdom of Solomon needed to wield this divine power?

Let us predict what a computer will look like in the next 20, 50 and 100 years. There is something called Moore’s Law, which simply states that a computer’s power doubles every 18 months. On your birthday, you get a card that sings “Happy Birthday” to you; that card has more computing power than the whole of the allied forces in 1945 combined. Hitler, Eisenhower would have killed to get that chip, and what do you do with it? You throw it away. In 2020, computer chips will be about 1,000 times cheaper, more powerful than they are today. That means a chip will cost about a penny.

Ask yourself a simple question: Where do we find electricity today? Electricity is in the floor, in the walls and in the ceiling; electricity is everywhere and nowhere. Where is running water? Running water is under our feet, in the walls and in the ceiling; running water is everywhere and nowhere. How do you pay for it? You meter it. You meter electricity, which is invisible, and you meter running water. That’s the future of the computer. The computer will disappear; it will go into the fabric of our life. It will be everywhere and nowhere, and we will meter it in the cloud.

Then after 2020, the Moore’s Law curve collapses, which means that Silicon Valley could become a Rust Belt in 2020.

Every decade we have a revolution. In the ’60s, computers were mainframes: huge, gigantic computers the size of a room. In the ’70s, computers were mini computers the size of my podium. In the ’80s, it was a PC. In the ’90s, the Internet dominated our discussion. Then, in the 2000s, it was ubiquitous computing, and chips left the computer. When a chip goes into a telephone, it becomes a cell phone. When a chip goes into a typewriter, it becomes a word processor. So ubiquitous computing is when chips disappear into the environment.

In the 2010-decade, we will have advanced sensors that can detect cancer 10 years before a cancer forms; beyond that, [we’ll have] the power of a god and mind control over computers.

 

Staying connected

Let’s talk about what the Internet will look like in the future. First of all, the Internet of the next 10 years will be in your glasses. Your glasses will have the ability to recognize people’s faces. So the next time you run into somebody, you won’t have to say, “Who is this person?” Your glasses will say, “It’s Jim, stupid. How many times do I have to tell you? You met him at last year’s conference.” If your friend speaks Chinese, no problem; your glasses will translate Chinese into English as they speak. This is also available today.

So Internet glasses will be trendy in the future. Kids will say, “What? You don’t have the latest Internet glasses? You can’t download the movies you want in your glasses?” Models will showcase Internet glasses, and they’ll become an artifact of high fashion.

There is a problem here: let’s say you don’t wear glasses. What do you do? If you don’t wear glasses, then you put them in your contact lens. In the future when you have the Internet in your contact lens, you blink and you go online. Who will buy these contacts lenses first? College students who are taking their final exams will line up to get these things. They’ll say, “What? You had to memorize all the sines and cosines? You had to memorize all the amino acids? Why bother? You can look them up anyway.”

The second people to buy these things will be artists, because you’ll be able to create anything you want simply by waving your hands. Who else will buy these contacts lenses? Architects. Today it takes weeks to build models of your apartment house, towers and buildings, and if you want to change it, you can forget it, because it will take another few weeks to rearrange all the units. In the future you’ll simply blink and rearrange these things with your hands.

In other words, for you “Star Trek” fans, this is the holodeck. You’ll be able to recreate any environment by blinking. Tourists will simply love these things. The Chinese are taking a huge step in this direction. Outside of Beijing, there is the Summer Palace that is now being animated, so as you walk the grounds you see what it looked like in the 1800s before it was burned down by the French and the British.

The military is now looking into this. I flew down to Fort Benning in Georgia with a film crew from the Science Channel. I put on a helmet with an eyepiece and saw the entire battlefield, with friendly forces, enemy forces and airplanes. All of it was in my eyepiece.

Now, virtual reality is for children. Children like virtual reality because they can fight against aliens, flying saucers and stuff like that. Adults will have augmented reality. This is how we will live in the next 10 or 20 years. Augmented reality is when you impose virtual information on top of reality, so you always know whom you are talking to, because the biography of the person always appears. This comes in very handy. In The Terminator, remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger would find his prey? His eyepiece would lock onto John Connor and make a printout of his biography. That’s how we will live in the future. You will always know who you’re looking at, whom you’re talking to, what they’re talking about, because it’s translated and interpreted on the fly.

The uses of this are enormous. Not only can you see people’s biographies and subtitles, but you’ll also have X-ray vision. Lets say you’re a fighter pilot on a very expensive fighter jet, and the enemy flies underneath you. At that point you are blind, and you’re dead meat. The enemy is now beneath you and behind you. In the future, we will put a TV camera underneath the airplane, the camera will shoot the image right into your camera lens and you’ll be able to see right between your legs. This is X-ray vision.

When a chip jumps into your wristwatch, it becomes an Internet wristwatch. We can put the entire Internet in your wristwatch. When a chip jumps into a telephone, it becomes a cell phone, but we all know that the cell phone has a tiny keyboard. In the future you will simply scroll out of your cell phone intelligent paper. A huge, intelligent, flexible screen will come out with a giant keyboard. This is called flexible paper. Every dot on the screen [will be] a transistor, an organic light-emitting diode.

It’s also the future of wallpaper. Our grandkids will wonder, “How did grandma and grandpa live in a world where everything was dumb? Wallpaper was wallpaper and everything was stupid.” Intelligent wallpaper is coming. It’s flexible and has the power of chips, because chips only cost a penny. Have you ever tried to remove wallpaper from a room? I did once, and I’ll never do it again in my life. In the future, you’ll simply go to the wall and say, “Wall, change color.” Redecorating your house has never been simpler.

Today, pictures in your wallet do nothing. They just sit there in your wallet and look stupid. But in the future, pictures will move in your wallet – because chips only cost a penny. And what will your living room of the future look like? We will have 360-degree wall screens surrounding us.

Now, some people don’t like the Internet, because they say it’s cold and mechanical. Some people don’t like technology because it’s dehumanizing to them. When the Internet was first created by the Pentagon, it wasn’t made just so teenagers could Facebook each other. It was a military weapon, a male-dominated military weapon created to win a war against Russia. It was male, but now the Internet is female. It’s about 51-percent female, in fact. It’s about touching people; it’s no longer about dominating the Soviet Union. In 1989, as the Soviet bloc was breaking up, the National Science Foundation gave away this Internet for free, a military weapon was given away for free and changed world history.

Everything’s smarter

TV sets will have 3D movies without those clunky glasses. A TV screen has many vertical lines, and each vertical line is a prism. This vertical line splits the image in half; one half goes to your left eye and one half goes to your right eye. That’s how you get 3D television without glasses.

What about the office of the future? We will have penny disposable scrap computers. That sounds impossible, right? How can a computer be scrap unless it’s obsolete? It’s because chips will cost a penny; therefore, you’ll scribble on something and then throw it away. As you go from room to room, the scribble follows you; your file follows you as you go from room to room, because your software is in the cloud. Software becomes more important than hardware, because hardware is disposable.

Cars of the future will be driverless, because GPS will take over and drive your car. Driverless cars already exist; in fact, I had a chance to drive one. BBC Television put me in [one]. Here I was with two hands on the steering wheel driving this car when the cameraman says, “OK, let go.” I let go of the steering wheel and the car drove itself. There is radar in the fender. This is actually safer than a human being. Human beings get drunk, human beings fall asleep, human beings like to drag race, and human beings like to show off. Computers never show off, never get drunk and never fall asleep, so these computer-navigated, driverless cars are actually safer than human beings.

That was the next 10 to 20 years when chips escape into the environment and change our life. But what happens midcentury? Midcentury computers will be so powerful that we will control them with the mind. Just like the movie Surrogates, with Bruce Willis, where we mentally control robots or, of course, Avatar, where we mentally control clones.

Telepathy and telekinesis, they are the powers of a god. Only gods can move objects with their minds; only gods can control things with their minds – that is, until the computer revolution. With the computer revolution, we can make toys that read your mind. Boys or girls can put a helmet on their heads that will interpret radio signals, which are emitted from the brain, and then from that energize toys.

This reminds me of one of my favorite “Star Trek” episodes. On “Star Trek” they land on a planet where there is Apollo, the Greek god. The crew of the Enterprise is overwhelmed because 23rd-century technology is useless against a god. But then they say to themselves, “Wait a minute, there is no such thing as a god. This guy must have a power source.” So they locate the power source. He mentally controls the power source, and the power source does all the magic tricks. They destroy the power source and Apollo the god becomes a mortal. And that’s how we’re going to do it. All of us will have a power source; we’ll access it mentally and it will carry out our wishes.

How does it work? You can put a chip in somebody’s brain, someone who is paralyzed, in fact; that chip is connected to a laptop computer and that person can manipulate the laptop. He can write emails and surf the web, even if he is totally immobilized. At Brown University they can take a stroke victim who is, for all intents and purposes, a vegetable that cannot communicate and has tremendous brain damage, put a chip in this person’s brain, and now this person can surf the web. In Japan they go even further than that. You can take humans, put sensors on the human’s head that understand brain patterns and hook it up to a robot.

Unfortunately, we don’t have these robots in Japan now cleaning up the reactor accident. Wouldn’t it be great if we had these worker-controlled robots working in lethal radiation fields making repairs? We don’t have that today because this is still very experimental. If we had this today, we could clean up the mess very rapidly.

We can also use them as a form of mind reading, to a degree. When you tell the truth, the brain doesn’t light up under MRI scans. But when you tell a lie, you have to know the truth, create the lie, then you have to check the consistency of the lie with all the other lies you’ve been telling all these years, and that is a lot of brain power. Your mind lights up like a Christmas tree.

In my book I make hundreds of predictions. Every single one based on a prototype or a demonstration of principle, because I’m not a science-fiction writer. I want hard-nosed facts.

 

Question and answer session with JOHN ZIPPERER, vice president of media & editorial at The Commonwealth Club

 

ZIPPERER: An audience member asks, Will we be able to read minds in the future?

KAKU: We have a certain degree of mind reading even today, because we can read the MRI scans and detect patterns. In Japan, not only do they want to read minds, but they want to photograph dreams. Now, that might sound impossible, but we’ve actually made the first steps in the [scientific] literature to photograph a dream. Some people might have seen Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Inception, and that’s not out of the question.

Here is how you do it: You show a pixel of light to a person and the optical part of their brain lights up; one dot, one pixel, one pattern. Then you move that pixel until, sooner or later, you find the patterns in the back of the brain corresponding to all possible locations of the pixel. Then you put two pixels, and sure enough the locations in the brain are the sum of the two patterns. This means that if you show a collection of pixels, the computer can tell what you’re looking at by looking at your brain scan. So they tested it. They took a patient, they gave them lights in a different pattern – a star or a “U” or a circle – and the computer correctly identified it. The place where you dream is the same place where you see things optically so, in the [research] paper, they said their next step is to photograph a dream.

ZIPPERER: We have a question about energy, but I want to first take it to something you’ve been in the news discussing quite a bit lately: the nuclear crisis in Japan. Could you give us an update on where it is now and what you think is happening next?

KAKU: The reactors are hanging by a thread right now. Radiation levels are near-lethal in Unit 2. If you stand near the radioactive water in Unit 2, you will come down with enough radiation in one hour to give you radiation sickness – hemorrhaging, vomiting, nausea. If you stay there for six hours, the first deaths will start.

But where is the radiation coming from? We think it’s coming from core damage, which also means there’s probably a crack in the containment structure and the vessel, allowing radioactive water to go into the environment. We’re not sure, because it’s so radioactive, a human can’t go in very long to take pictures.

There’s a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is that the brave firemen can keep shooting hosewater to keep the core and the spent fuel ponds covered with water at any given time. Then it’ll take a few years to clean up the mess.

The worst-case scenario is that radiation escalates, workers have to evacuate [because] it’s too dangerous for workers to work there. Then you’re in freefall; without the firemen shooting hosewater into the reactors, the reactor heats up, boils off its water and then, exposed, you have a hydrogen gas explosion or a heat explosion that blows the whole thing apart, and it’s Chernobyl all over again. The nightmare could be even worse than Chernobyl. We have three nuclear power stations that are in various stages of melting down.

My solution to the problem is: Do what Gorbachev did in 1986. Gorbachev, realizing that the utility people could not handle the crisis, called out the Red Air Force and they buried the sucker in sand, concrete and boric acid – 5,000 tons worth. I would suggest that the prime minister of Japan remove the utility from leadership, bring in the Japanese air force with helicopters and sand and boric acid and concrete, and bury the reactors in a sarcophagus of concrete. That’s the last resort, but I think we’re coming close to that last resort pretty soon.

ZIPPERER: People have been re-evaluating nuclear power since the crisis began. An audience member asks: What alternative sources of producing energy do you support?

KAKU: Nuclear energy is the Faustian bargain. Faust was the mythical figure who sold his soul to the devil for unlimited power. The Japanese have made that Faustian bargain. They don’t have much oil, they don’t have much coal, they don’t have much hydro. So they’ve thrown the dice with nuclear energy, but they fooled themselves with how dangerous nuclear energy potentially is.

ZIPPERER: So how long do we have to wait until there is a safe, highly productive alternative?

KAKU: Fossil fuels are quite efficient. Pound for pound, oil and gasoline have more energy than a car battery, because gasoline represents concentrated sunlight since the time of the dinosaurs. Very efficient. But, every year, fossil fuels go up in price, because it’s erratic and we’re dependent upon the Middle East. But solar and hydrogen go down every year in cost. In about 10 years’ time, the two curves will cross. When they cross, there will be a sea change, because at that point, it’s economical, it’s profitable to go solar, but not now. Solar power is about twice as expensive, depending on how you count, than oil or coal.

Beyond that, by 2030 fusion power becomes an option, where seawater is the basic fuel.