Visions of Utopia

I want to live in a utopia. I want a world of peace, where all people can thrive and pursue lives that are fulfilling to them. Is this just a dream? A fantasy? People have tried to create perfect societies before, but they have always wound up with their own problems, and some went to hell on the road paved with good intentions. Maybe the idea of a perfect world is incoherent; as they say, one man’s heaven is another man’s hell. But that doesn’t mean we should give up. We may not be able to reach a mythical utopia, but at we can work to make the world better than it is, and dreams and visions can give us something to aim for. Perhaps instead of utopias, it would be better to call them “extremely good societies.” So today, we are going to look at a number of things we might hope to find in an extremely good society.

Source: Wikipedia

To begin with, not everything is relative. There are different kinds of fulfillment, which are meaningful to different degrees to different people, but a model that works pretty well is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is represented as a pyramid, with physiological needs like food and shelter at the bottom, and attaining one’s true potential at the top. Some say each level requires all the levels below it to be filled before it can be worked on, but I think it more true to say the lower on the hierarchy a need is, the more distress it provokes when it is not met, and the higher on the hierarchy a need is, the more fulfilling it is when it is met. Those who have great community and have all their social needs met, but who struggle for the basic physiological needs, might live happy, if difficult, lives. And those who have all of their physiological and security needs met, but struggle with the higher needs, may live easy and comfortable, yet be bored out of their minds. I think it fair to use how well and for how many people the hierarchy of needs is filled as a first approximation to measure how good a society is.

So now let’s look at some things we might find in an extremely good society. Some of these may be incompatible with one another. Some may be feasible in the near future, while others require radical change. We’re not looking to build the One True Utopia, we’re just imagining some things that might be found in some kind or other of extremely good society. So let us begin.

A healthy balance of individualism and collectivism
In the United States, the prevailing thought is that we should each be our own person, work hard for our own benefit, not rely on others, and succeed in life through our own blood, sweat, and tears. We contrast this with countries with dictators or ruling communist parties, and say, “look how bad it is for those collectivists, who have to live their lives in service of the State.” Yet it seems to me there is a clear third option, a healthier kind of collectivism mixed with individualism. Instead of seeing ourselves as loners elbowing our way forward in the world, or as tools in service of an empire, we see ourselves as part of a national and/or global community. Collectively, we build our society to be a positive, encouraging environment, making it easy and rewarding for individuals to seek fulfillment.

A Shift from work to hard fun
Right now, the basic dignity of having one’s physiological needs met is contingent upon one of four things: selling one’s time to earn a living, mooching off family or friends, becoming dependent on stigma-laden welfare programs, or getting lucky and having a bunch of money fall into your lap. In the future, when the resources needed to fulfill people’s basic needs are more efficiently distributed, we can hope things will be cheap enough that people will need to work less, either by fewer days in the week, fewer hours per day, or by it becoming optional to have a job. This would free up time to pursue hard fun activities, letting people grow and learn skills that are interesting and fulfilling to them, rather than being forced to spend their energy as cogs in the market.

By Eddie Quinones on Flickr

Of course, many people would still put their time and energy into work, because, frankly, money is great. With money, you can buy a bigger house, fancy stuff, and show off to your friends. Or, you can use it for important causes like reducing poverty, scientific research, buffering against existential risk, building infrastructure, creating a business to supply a need, and all kinds of things. If people spend their time pursuing hard fun, then many people will still pursue money, because to them, earning money and using it for things they care about is hard fun.

Less dopamine overdose and advertisements
Let’s face it; in modern-day capitalism, we are bombarded with ads and subtle manipulations to make us indulge in all kinds of things we would otherwise neither want nor need. From sugar to toys to sex to junk food, we’re pumped full of dopamine and induced to endlessly crave more, more, more. In an extremely good society, we would emphasize the need for long-term fulfillment over the desire for immediate gratification. Healthy food would be more abundant and offered up for display in stores, while the junk food would be tucked away in the corners. Social media and pornography would take on a tone of kindness and emotional support, rather than being optimized to maximize clicks and ad revenue. And speaking of ads, there would be a lot fewer, and those we had would direct us to resources to easily find things we really want and need, rather than butting into our awareness to try to make us crave things we never would have wanted otherwise.

By the way, if you are interested in partaking in some legal civil disobedience against the dehumanizing side of capitalism, you may want to consider using an adblock extension on your browser. It’s free, and once you try it, you may realize you never knew how refreshing a life with drastically fewer ads could be.

The ability to have grown-up conversations about emotions, including sexuality
In our society, especially among men, we are taught that our emotions are our own problems to deal with, and that we shouldn’t let them affect our work. If this isn’t outright said, it is heavily implied. Yet emotions are often not trivial things that can be easily dealt with in private. Much of the time they require support from friends, family, and authority figures. We should, then, move societally toward a place where we can more comfortably open up with our emotional struggles, and not be so quick to dismiss others who do so as attention-seeking or lazy.

This is very strongly seen in the realm of sexuality, where, in America at least, we simultaneously see two conflicting extremes of social expectation. On one pole, we are expected to pretend sexual desire does not exist except in an institutionally recognized monogamous relationship called marriage. This expectation is put higher on women. On the opposite pole, we are expected to be ravenous for sex, pursue it aggressively, and use it as a competition for status. This affects mostly men. Both of these, however, are a struggle for both men and women. Progress can be made on both these problems by reducing the taboo on sex, and thus reducing the allure of its forbiddenness and the sense of rebellion associated with it. We would also expect better education and safety methods, reducing the risks of STDs and the need for adoption and abortion.

Easy access to reliable information
In the age of the internet, information is so abundant we don’t know what to do with it. This is a problem, because it makes finding true and reliable information a hassle. In an extremely good society, official sources of information like the census bureau or scientific encyclopedias will be presented in ways that are more easy for the average person to read, with plenty of charts and graphs available with a few simple clicks. Search engines will continue to get better at showing what people are looking for, and make the most reliable sources easy to find, perhaps in drop-down lists. Easy-to-follow, multi-channel instructions for how to find jobs and pursue interests will be abundant, in contrast with the marginally helpful blog posts that searches present today.

No skeletons in the closet
When considering utopia, it is important that it be a real utopia, not just a facade. The prosperity we show must be real, and we can’t shove people who don’t fit our image into prisons, slander them with national media, or burden them with so much work they can’t think straight. We also wouldn’t have laws preventing abuse and injustice from being exposed, like these. A house is not valuable if we dress up its rotting frame with nice carpets and wallpaper; we want the house to be top quality through and through.

A renewable economy
When we throw something away, it doesn’t just disappear. It goes into a landfill, or a river, or the ocean. Over time, trash piles up. Nature gets polluted, and resources get used up. It is clear this cannot go on forever. In an extremely good society, we would use resources in such a way that our waste can be recycled back into new resources. Instead of the input being raw materials and the output being garbage, the input would be sunlight on Earth, and the output would be Earth’s heat radiated away into space, and everything we use would cycle in the middle.

A post-scarcity economy
Food isn’t free. That’s because it takes a lot of work to produce the amount of food needed to feed everyone. But when was the last time you paid for air? There’s no need. It’s everywhere. We just breath it without thinking about it. That’s because, in economic terms, food is scarce, and air is abundant. But food doesn’t always have to be scarce. When the methods of producing and distributing a commodity become so robust that everyone has easy and free or nearly free access to them, that commodity is said to be post-scarcity. In many places, water is post-scarcity. We just open the tap or the drinking fountain, and out it comes.

In the future, energy may become post-scarcity when we figure out good nuclear fusion reactors. Raw materials may become post-scarcity once we develop a good space infrastructure and start mining asteroids. Over time, as technology, infrastructure, and social progress get better, we can hope the rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy will become progressively less and less scarce.

One possible avenue toward post-scarcity is the Patreon model. Artists, educators, and content creators of all kinds produce work that is available to all for free, giving people the option of donating an amount per month of their choosing out of gratitude. For many independent creators, this works really well, and there is a vast wealth of every kind of art and entertainment you can imagine floating around for free on the internet. It may be possible for this model to extend to other industries as well.

A flourishing natural environment
We are in the middle of one of the great extinctions of geological history, and it’s because of, well, humans. I’m not just talking about the industrial revolution, though that’s part of it. Our ancestors have been hunting species to extinction and grazing grassy plains into deserts for hundreds of thousands of years.

At first, this may make us feel sad or ashamed. But we shouldn’t be. We are merely among the first few generations to know about this problem, which means we are also among the first who have had the opportunity to try to solve it. And even if you aren’t overly concerned about saving the whales and pandas, a healthy ecosphere with lots of biodiversity is good for humans in many ways. In an extremely good society, we can expect to find nature flourishing everywhere.

By WinterE229 (Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

Preparation for and prevention of catastrophes
Right now, it is the way of the land for laws, safety regulations, and disaster preparations to be done in response to catastrophes that have already struck. Take the COVID-19 pandemic that is at its height in the United States at the time this post is written. There is a shortage of masks among doctors. Why? Because hospitals didn’t stockpile them beforehand in case of a pandemic outbreak. Here’s the thing: we knew something like this could happen, and how to prepare for it, but we didn’t do it. Maybe it was to cut corners and save money, or maybe it was because we were working on all kinds of problems in the present, so future problems that may or may not occur didn’t seem as immediate. Either way, we can expect extremely good societies to have a wise view of risk assessment and preparation at the national level.

Thirty years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proposed the idea that history is over, and the best possible type of society has been found in liberal democratic capitalism. But history is not over. As we have seen, there are plenty of ways society could become better. Maybe the labels of “liberal,” “democratic,” and “capitalism” can be applied to some kinds of extremely good societies, but history is very much still in motion. Right now, you and I have the opportunity to play a part in the course of history, and help steer it toward an extremely good society. So let’s dream. Let’s imagine. And let’s look for real, feasible ways to turn those dreams into reality.

Awesome Energy Sources of the Near and Far Future

Energy. It is the magic ingredient that makes the difference between an empty, lifeless universe and one teeming with action. Whether it is by eating food to fuel our bodies, producing electricity to power our homes, or atoms fusing together in the cores of stars, energy is what makes everything possible.

In our ever-growing world, we use more and more energy, both as individuals and as societies. Energy production and technological progress go hand in hand. Sometimes, inventions of new methods of generating power, like the steam engine, lead to a boom in growth. Other times, a growing economy builds up the resources to transition to new kinds of energy. We are in the midst of one such transition right now, with solar, wind, and other types of renewable energy creeping up to take the place of fossil fuels. But what about the future? Are there other ways of generating power in large amounts that we have yet to invent?

The answer is a definite yes. Thanks to modern physics, we know of many ways to store and produce energy that are possible, but beyond our current technology or the resources.

Nuclear Fission
Before we go there, I want to nod to an underappreciated method of generating power that modern physics has gifted us, and which already exists: nuclear fission.

Now when many people hear “nuclear,” they think “bombs.” But it’s really referring to the energy stored in the bonds between the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms. If you look at the periodic table of the elements, you will see that all of the elements are numbered from 1 to 118 (as of when this post was published). This number is the number of protons in the atom’s nucleus. There are also neutrons, but those aren’t counted on the periodic table. Since saying “protons and neutrons” can get tiring, when they are referred to together, they are called nucleons.

The energy in the masses of the nucleons and the bonds between them is different for each atom. From Hydrogen, the energy per nucleon goes down, until we reach iron. After iron, the energy per nucleon goes back up. This means that if elements heavier than iron break apart, they release energy. This is called nuclear fission, and we already harness it in nuclear power plants around the world.

Nuclear fission is not very popular, because people associate it with harmful radiation. However, nuclear reactors are actually among the safest ways to generate power. There are an enormous number of safety procedures, many of them redundant, to protect everyone inside and near the plant from radiation, and to prevent meltdowns. The number of people who have died from nuclear reactors in the 70 years they have been around is less than 100.

However, there is a downside. Nuclear power may kill basically nobody today, but the risk goes up over time. This is because when uranium is fissioned, it leaves behind nuclear waste, radioactive material that is dangerous to stand near. Some of this can be used or purified, but some of it just has to be stored away in special warehouses for ten thousand years until it becomes safe. In the meantime, we continue to use more energy, nuclear power plants keep getting built, and the waste keeps piling up. So nuclear fusion has many advantages, and much less risk than people think, but the risks it does have last a long time.

Nuclear Fusion
On the opposite side of the periodic table from fission, we get nuclear fusion. Fusion occurs when two atoms come together to create a larger atom. If the product is iron or anything lighter, energy is released. The sun and stars get their power by fusing hydrogen and some other elements in their cores.

Nuclear fusion requires extreme temperatures and extreme pressures. Our best reactor design is the tokamak, which uses strong magnetic fields to confine super hot hydrogen plasma in a donut shape. However, we have not yet built a tokamak that can generate more energy than is used to heat the plasma, so commercial fusion remains a technology of the future.

Fusion power would be an incredible prize. It is way more energy-dense than any other power source we have tapped into, including fission. It uses hydrogen, which is three times more common in the universe than all of the other elements combined. There is almost no waste; the product at the end is mostly helium, which is about the least harmful substance in the universe. And if something goes wrong and the containment is broken, there is no meltdown. The machine just shuts off.

There is a lot of cynicism in society about fusion power. After all, people have said it is only 20 years away for over 60 years. To the average person, that sounds like no progress has been made. But that is not true; progress has been made, and is still being made today. The problem is that it is hard to predict when research will be finished, because that would require knowing the results ahead of time.

Another reason people are cynical is because fusion seems too good to be true. The fuel for it is everywhere, and it would yield so much energy that compared to the amount we use today it might as well be infinite. It is immensely more friendly toward the environment than fossil fuels or fission. It is such a great positive with so few downsides that it feels too good to be true.

But that kind of thinking is based on human intuition, not on facts. Behind the scenes, fusion research continues to press forward and make progress, and right now there is a tokamak is in the works called ITER, which is designed to produce ten times more energy than it takes. The perception that it is no closer than it has ever been is just an illusion.

What about beyond fusion? Surely in the vast, wide universe there are other power generation options that might become available to us in the far distant future? Why yes, there are.

Solar Satellites
The sun is a giant gravity-powered fusion reactor, and it is putting out enough energy every second to power the entire current world economy for eight trillion (8,000,000,000,000) years.

You read that right. Eight trillion years of human civilization. Every second. Our planet is floating in a sea of practically limitless energy. If only there was a way to go and get it.

In the future, after much technological and economic growth, we might be able to. The idea is to launch satellites into Earth orbit, with giant curved mirrors that focus the sun’s light into a collector, which is hooked up to a laser that would beam the energy to power stations on the Earth’s surface. This will be far more efficient than land-based solar power, because there are no clouds and no night in space, and there is virtually no limit to the number of satellite collectors we could add to the grid.

Now when you think about giant lasers shooting at the Earth, you might worry that they would be used as weapons. However, you need not fear, because there are ways of designing the satellites such that weaponizing them would be impossible. If the output is limited and a sufficiently long laser wavelength chosen, then they won’t be able to hurt anyone or anything.

You can read more about solar satellites at the US Department of Energy website.

Antimatter
So far, we have talked about things that are more or less within the everyday person’s imagination. Now it’s time to take things to the wild parts of physics. In fission and fusion, the energy we get comes from a fraction of the mass getting converted into energy by Einstein’s equation E=mc². But most of the mass is still there after the reaction. Might there be a way for us to get all of it? The answer, is yes. And it might surprise you to learn that there are more ways than one.

90 years ago, the underappreciated physicist Paul Dirac was playing with one of his equations, when he discovered that there should be particles that are exactly like electrons, but with a positive electric charge instead of negative. Positrons. Since then, we have discovered in lab experiments that there are oppositely charged versions of all particles. These negative doppelgangers of matter are called antimatter. And when particles of matter collide with their antimatter counterparts, they are annihilated, and all of their mass turns into energy. In nuclear fusion, only 1% of the mass gets converted into energy. This means that a matter-antimatter power plant would yield a hundred times as much power!

Unfortunately, because antimatter gets destroyed when it touches matter, it is extremely rare. There isn’t enough around to collect and put into reactors. In fact, the vast majority of the antimatter on Earth is created in particle accelerators, taking the same amount of energy to make as we would get from it. So someday in the far future, rather than being an energy source, we might use antimatter as an ultra-high capacity battery.

A cartridge of antimatter the size of a D-cell would carry about 1/10 the energy of an atomic bomb. And it would very easily explode like one too. You can’t just put it in a bottle, because touching the sides of the bottle would make it go boom. The only way to contain antimatter is to use ultra-precise magnets. Needless to say, if we accumulated enough antimatter to run a power plant with, such a plant would be extremely dangerous. So although it is physically possible, I don’t see us or any future civilization using antimatter as a power source.

Micro Black Holes
As I mentioned earlier, there is another way of getting all of that sweet energy locked away in mass: black holes. Specifically, microscopic black holes. You have probably heard that anything that enters a black hole can never get out. That is true, mostly. However, black holes lose mass very slowly by giving off light in a process called Hawking radiation. Maybe I will try to explain it in a future post, but for now, the important thing is that it exists.

Hawking radiation is usually extremely slow. As in, the slowest process in the universe. But the smaller the black hole, the faster and more powerful the radiation. If you have a black hole, say, the size of a proton (the mass of a mountain), it will put out about the same amount of power as a fission plant, and will last for hundreds of billions of years.

I did my calculations at this handy dandy site.

Of course, there are some questions that arise when we talk about using black holes for anything. First of all is safety. It’s a black hole! Won’t it suck in everything around it and cause lots of destruction? Surprisingly, no. The point of no return is called the event horizon, which is what we mean by the “size” of the black hole. In our case, it is a lot smaller than an atom, making it difficult for anything to get trapped inside. However, anyone closer than 50 meters would feel a force from the black hole equivalent to Earth’s gravity, which means we want to give the black hole a lot of room.

Speaking of which, how are we going to hold the black hole? It is as heavy as a mountain and tinier than an atom, so what is stopping it from falling straight through the table, the floor, and to the center of the Earth? One option is to give it a small electric charge, and have it spiral around in a magnetic field. That magnetic field would require quite a lot more power than our mountain-mass black hole would give off, but we could solve this by making the black hole smaller, which would both reduce its mass and give it a higher energy output. However, there is a better option: build the power plant in space. There is no down in space, so the black hole would just float there, coasting along the gravitational landscape along with the ship that carries it.

Another important question is how we get a black hole of that size. The smallest black holes in nature that we know of are around 3 times the mass of the sun, when enough matter falls onto a neutron star to push it past its Schwarzschild radius. Unfortunately, the rest of the universe will have cooled off and died by the time these black holes’ hawking radiation is enough to use as an energy source.

However, only technology is stopping us from making artificial black holes. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity showed us that energy has just as much gravity as mass, so if we shoot powerful enough lasers into a small enough point, a black hole will appear. Of course, we need to generate all of that power in the first place, so like antimatter, micro black holes would probably end up more as batteries than power sources. That is, unless life can figure out a way to survive the googols of years until the naturally-occurring black holes are small enough.

Black Hole Spin
There is another way to use black holes for energy generation. Big black holes, in fact, not microscopic ones. This comes from the fact that black holes have spin. What exactly it means for a black hole to have spin is a very complicated topic, so we’ll save it for another day. You can pretend it means the event horizon is revolving around the center, if that makes it easier. The important thing is that there is energy in the spin, and given the right technology and resources we could get to it.

It might surprise you to learn that gravity does not pull objects together. Instead, Einstein showed us in the General Theory of Relativity that space-time is pulled toward the gravitational source, and objects float along with it. It is like a stick floating on a pond with a drain pipe. The drain does not pull the stick toward it. Rather, the stick floats along with the water toward the drain. There is another effect of gravity predicted by Einstein’s equations, which is rare enough that we have never directly observed it. When an extremely massive object like a black hole spins, the rotation pulls space-time around with it. This is called frame-dragging. If regular gravity is like water flowing toward a drain, frame-dragging is like a whirlpool.

When a black hole spins, its frame-dragging is so strong that it creates a region of space outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where in order to stay still as seen from far away, something has to travel against the black hole’s spin faster than the speed of light. This means that if something dips into the ergosphere without entering the event horizon, it gets a major boost in speed and kinetic energy. This energy comes from the black hole’s rotational kinetic energy, making the black hole’s rotation slow down ever so slightly. Since the object hasn’t passed the event horizon, it can get back out, and we can use its extra kinetic energy for electricity.

The most efficient way to do this would be to build a sphere of mirrors around the black hole, and let light bounce around inside. Every time the light goes through the ergosphere, it picks up some of the black hole’s rotational energy. If there is an opening in the mirror contraption for the light to get out, it becomes an energy fountain. For a visual and entertaining explanation about black hole spin power, check out Kurzgesagt’s video on it.

Unfortunately, extracting a black hole’s rotational energy requires letting some mass fall into the black hole. This is because of something called the Penrose process, which I wish I could explain, but I don’t understand it. The details don’t matter today, though, because it has a bad consequence; the black hole increases in mass, meaning we have to wait longer before it shrinks to sub-atomic size and we can use its Hawking radiation as a power source. It will be a kind of poetic tragedy that the last civilizations in the universe, by taking the energy they need in order to survive, seal away some of the precious energy into a future beyond their grasp. Not to worry, though. Before then, we have billions and trillions and higher-tier-illions of years to figure out how to stick out the long dark purgatory of the black hole era.

In our struggle today to replace fossil fuels with renewables, it's easy to forget that there will be more to the story in the future. As poor countries develop and developed countries get wealthier, our consumption of energy continues to increase exponentially. In another century, we may get vast amounts of energy from space lasers, or from mini-suns we create. Even after all of the stars die, there will still be enough energy to last for a long, long time.

Massive Complexity

Scholars used to marvel at the elegance and mathematical simplicity of the universe. That was before we invented supercomputers.

Simulation of the ejected matter from colliding neutron stars. Credit: NASA

From the days of Newton and Galileo to the middle of the 20th century, science was a mixture of brilliant insight and trial-and-error. Intelligent, learned people would come up with ideas and build experiments to test them. It was a golden age, romanticized by the iconic ideas of the scholar in their study and the tinkerer in their garage, creating new machines and discovering new laws of nature.

In the process, better tools were built. Instruments were invented that were more precise, and could measure more things. A new field of mathematics opened up, statistics, which gave scientists guidance on how to make hypotheses, devise experiments, and interpret data. Then, computers came upon the scene, able to deal with vastly more data than human beings could.

When computers and statistics advanced to the point at the end of the 20th century that the supercomputer was invented, science changed. No longer was it dominated by eccentric individuals writing equations on chalkboards and napkins. Instead, science entered the era of big data, when computers gained the ability to store and analyze billions of data points at once. The change was so dramatic that it would be fitting to say we are in a new era of science, which we might call Phase-II science. Whereas during Phase-I science we could learn about the elegant and simple parts of nature, the tools of Phase-II science let us take a peek into its messiness and complexity.

What makes a system complex? One factor is the number of degrees of freedom it has. Degrees of freedom are ways that a system can change. A lever has one degree of freedom; it can be pulled or pushed. A pencil has six degrees of freedom; it can move in three dimensions, and spin along three axes. Another contributor to complexity is how interconnected the parts of the system are. And another contributor to complexity is how many environmental factors come into play, and how unpredictable they are. There are many more as well.

One type of complex system is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems require exponentially more precision the longer you want to accurately model it. The classic example is the three-body problem, where three stars of similar mass are orbiting each other. The stars will swing around each other wildly and erratically, and even a small change in the initial conditions will lead to drastically different paths.

Another type of complex system is a holistic system. In a holistic system, all of the parts are interconnected in such a way that a change in one part causes changes throughout the entire system. DNA is a holistic system, because a change in a single nucleotide can affect an entire gene, and a change in a single gene can affect the entire body. Brains are holistic systems, because a change in one neural pathway can affect quite a lot about a person’s cognition or memory or other mental processes.

Supercomputers can model some chaotic and holistic systems, and are getting better all the time. But there is one more kind of complex system, which I call massively complex, which not even supercomputers can model accurately. Massively complex systems are complex systems which function in environments that are also complex. Human behavior is a massively complex system, because humans are already complex, and we interact with all manner of unpredictability in our environments every day. Economics and sociology are massively complex, because they are holistic, and they happen in a very large and unpredictable environment.

It is anyone's guess as to whether we will ever be able to model and understand massively complex systems. Maybe we won't, because it is just too complicated. But people might have made that argument about normally complex systems before supercomputers were invented, so we shouldn't be so hasty. Maybe our supercomputers will keep improving until they can model massively complex systems as well as they do normally complex systems today. Or maybe it will require another revolution in computing technology, like quantum computers, ushering in a new era of Phase-III science. Only time will tell, and I am quite excited to see what the future brings.

Predicting the Future

Visions of the Future:
Making Predictions

Ten thousand years ago, humanity transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to farming settlements, towns, and cities. This became known as the agricultural revolution, and is marked in history as the beginning of civilization. Two hundred years ago, the technological power of science was discovered, increasing the production of goods by thousands fold. This was the industrial revolution, and it again changed civilization. Now, we are in the midst of a third revolution, the digital revolution, which started when the use of computers began to spread, and is still in progress today. With every revolution comes a shift in the way people live their lives and view the world. This can be frightening, but by keeping a clear head and drawing on the knowledge we have of history and the enterprises underway today, we can weather the storm and rest in the knowledge that things will probably end up even better than before.

We humans have a tendency when thinking about the future to shrug and say, “who can know what will happen tomorrow?” The weather report is notorious for incorrect predictions, and every single poll was wrong about the most recent U.S. presidential election. But there is nothing magical about the future. It is true we cannot be sure of the details of what will happen tomorrow, but reality is not random. Random is a word that means “something a human brain cannot find a pattern in.” Nothing is truly random; that would be quasi-real. Instead, it is probabilistic. The more you know about how things work, the better you will understand the probabilities, and the better you will be able to predict the future.

Thousands of years ago, a solar eclipse was a mind-bending experience. The sun was not supposed to go dark, so when it did, it was seen as an omen of the most terrible things, such as the end of the world. When they would happen, only the gods knew. But once intelligent and learned people started to chart the paths of the moon and sun through the sky, they gained the ability to predict when the next eclipse would occur. Nowadays, using computers and Newton’s Law of Gravity, we can predict the time and length of a solar eclipse, as well as the track it will take over the Earth, a hundred years in the future, to the exact minute.

In his science fiction series of short stories, Foundation, the author and futurist Isaac Asimov proposed a fictional branch of psychology called psychohistory, which could predict the future of human history with mathematical equations. In the story, the psychologist Hari Seldon is able to predict the fall of the galactic empire and set events in motion so that over a thousand years, a new, grander empire will rise from its ashes. Each of the short stories in the series tells of a turning point in history, a “Seldon crisis,” predicted by Seldon’s model, such as an approaching war or a dictatorship trying to build its own empire, and how it is solved by those who trust in the mathematical power of psychohistory.

The better versed we are in the tools of science and mathematics, the better the educated guesses we can make about the future. The most knowledgeable collaborations of experts today have predictive ability about halfway between solar eclipses and psychohistory. We can make models of complex systems like the Earth’s climate for the next hundred years at a low resolution and an uncertainty of only a few percent. Though we cannot say with certainty what the future of humanity will be like, the more we know about history and philosophy, and the more practiced we are at critical thinking, the clearer it appears.

In this new series, Visions of the Future, I’ll talk about the ways I think things will change in the future as a result of the digital revolution. Some are positive, some are negative, and some depend on whether people can adapt their views. For the series, I make the common sense assumptions that people crave freedom and true knowledge. Because of this, though there might be periods of oppression and backward slippage, the long-term march of history is toward a better standard of living for all.