New Scientist has asked over 70 of the world’s most brilliant and charismatic and modest scientists to forecast what might be the big breakthroughs in their fields over the next 50 years. Some of the many examples that might be of interest to CV readers:
- Alex Vilenkin thinks we might find cosmic strings.
- Gerard ‘t Hooft imagines a deterministic theory that would supercede quantum mechanics.
- Lisa Randall hopes that the LHC will tell us something about the fundamental nature of spacetime.
- Edward Witten thinks that string theory will be fertile, and is excited about extra-solar planets.
- Steven Weinberg would like to see a theory of everything.
- Max Tegmark will be printing T-shirts emblazoned with the aforementioned TOE.
- David Deutsch looks forward to working quantum computers.
- Rocky Kolb and Kip Thorne both predict that we’ll find gravitational waves from inflation.
- Martin Rees wants to know if there was one Big Bang, or many.
- Richard Gott imagines a colony on Mars.
- Lawrence Krauss prevaricates about dark energy.
- Frank Wilczek actually steps up to the plate, predicting superintelligent computers and abundant solar power.
- Steven Pinker thinks it’s all just a trick to make him look foolish.
Hey, wait a minute — even I’m in there! Who knew? Here’s my prognostication:
The most significant breakthrough in cosmology in the next 50 years will be that we finally understand the big bang.
In recent years, the big bang model – the idea that our universe has expanded and cooled over billions of years from an initially hot, dense state – has been confirmed and elaborated in spectacular detail. But the big bang itself, the moment of purportedly infinite temperature and density at the very beginning, remains a mystery. On the basis of observational data, we can say with confidence what the universe was doing 1 second later, but our best theories all break down at the actual moment of the bang.
There is good reason to hope that this will change. The inflationary universe scenario takes us back to a tiny fraction of a second after the bang. To go back further we need to understand quantum gravity, and ideas from string theory are giving us hope that this goal is obtainable. New ways of collecting data about dark matter, dark energy and primordial perturbations allow us to test models of the earliest times. The decades to come might very well be when the human race finally figures out where it all came from.
[Here you can imagine some suitably aw-shucks paragraph in which I appear to be vaguely embarassed at all this talk of “brilliance,” which might be appropriate in describing Weinberg and Witten and ‘t Hooft but certainly doesn’t apply to little old me, who would never have made the cut if it weren’t for my blogging hobby, although I’m not quite sure how Max got in there either, and hey, if anyone wants to protest that I certainly do belong, that’s what comment sections are for. Don’t have time to construct it just now, but you know how it would go.]
Anyone else want to predict what the biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be?
The world’s best known physicist will be an AI.
This reminds me of my time at a now-defunct AI company, which had the motto:
Artificial intelligence is better than none.
Biggest breakthrough? Mind Machine Interfaces are perfected eventually allowing the uploading of human minds to computers. The ensuing social revolution is comparable to that of the invention of language.
Incidentally the distinction between artificial and natural intelligence becomes obsolete.
Ray Kurzweil and Hugo de Garis give their views here.
I agree with de Garis that Kurzweils view is naive.
There will be a blog called “Prespoterous Cosmic Cocktail Party” (written without a keyboard, of course) whose contributors are going to be the “little Sean” and/or “little Jennifer” + parents :-).
I think Kurzweil views are more firmly grounded. he describes what logically has a good probability of happening based on historical technological trends. De Garis is deeply pessimistic and believes the luddites and the tranhumanists will fight a “gigadeath” war. This seems very overstated. The luddites historically have episodically held back progress here and there but never in a lasting significant way. As a result we’re here reading blogs instead of hunting and gathering.
sbar,
de Garis may be exaggerating things. But what I find unrealistic is that somehow the transhumanists will care a lot about biological humans. The transhumanists will have virtually no limits to continue to develop and within a short amount of time they will be so different from us that to them there won’t be much of a difference between humans, chimps, rats etc.
How well do we treat these animals (they are much closer related to us than the transumanist will be to us)?
The broadest over-arching consequence of advances in medicine and technology in general will most likely be that organised religion will die out. I think the reason educated people are less religious is that they appreciate how much of the world is potentially under our own control. This perception will become ever more widespread over the next fifty years as more people come into contact with the consequences of modern understanding of the world around us. Religion will die out not because of any kind of reverse evangelising, but simply because it will become self-evidently stupid to most people.
First a dozen things I think we won’t see in 50 years time:
* Interstellar space travel.
* Mammal-level AI.
* Insect-level robotics.
* Practical large-scale fusion.
* A quantum theory of gravity.
* Long-range weather prediction.
* Elimination of poverty and war.
* Mind uploading.
* Elimination or great reduction of mental illness.
* Humans visit Mars.
* Space elevators.
* Middle-class space tourism.
Five things I think we might see or are likely to see:
* Rich people will extend their life expectancy by 20 or 30 years.
* Among rich and middle-class people, cancer and heart disease will no longer be the major killers that they once were.
* Dark matter will be explained for the most part, but dark energy will remain a mystery.
* SETI will detect some very interesting signals, but scientists will not agree as to whether these signals are intelligent or not.
* Two more Millennium prize problems solved.
Two things I am not sure about at all:
* Practical quantum computers.
* Detection of gravitational waves.
Two things I am very sure about:
* Very unexpected and astonishing discoveries will be made.
* Ray Kurzweil will continue to make ridiculous, outlandish predictions, and people will continue to pay him for it.
Oh, and one more I’m virtually certain about:
* Religion will continue to have a stranglehold over the vast bulk of humanity, especially in countries where poverty is rampant, but even in rich, well-educated societies, although in the latter it will be in a less organised, less traditional form.
I expect that cancer will be unravelled over the next 50 years and the basic outcome will that preventative nutrition and other lifestyle recommendations can eliminate 90% of cancers.
Having read R Penrose’s:What is reality? first, I started reading through the other “Big Questions”, having not completed all the authors writings, I was amazed by Nick Bostrom’s : Do we live in a computer simulation ?
Things start to get complex and confusing having reached the hope’s of Alexander Vilkin, “My hope is that Cosmic strings will be discovered. Strings are relics of the hot,high-energy epoch in the early Universe. They are thin tubes of energy sweeping through space at close to the speed of light. Strings are extremely heavy;1 metre of string can weigh as much as a thousand trillion tonnes. Cosmic strings may or may not exist. They are predicted in many particle physics models.”
If a model “predicts” something, then surely they/it exists?
This paragraph by AV caused me some discomfort: Why is it that some models predict things that cannot be confirmed or unconfirmed?..is Prediction a guarantee, or merely a PROBABILITY, ie neither true or false?
Predictions for 2056 ? there will still be people saying the practical fusion reactors are only fifty years away.
It comes across as an unfunny version of Chevy Chase solemly reminding TV viewers that “Francisco Franco is still dead”.
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It is interesting to note the number of “the most brilliant and charismatic and modest scientists” included who can essentially be described as “many worlders”: Weinberg, Tegmark, Deutsch, Rees and Wilcek.
On this I love Tegmark’s new many different TOE T-shirts theory.
Genetically modified children will be born with repairs to inherited diseases and possibly with enhancements that promote selected tendencies such as those favoring greater skill in sports, art, languages, analytical thinking, etc.
String theory will be fertile? Horse manure is fertile.
Kurzweil is not naive: he just puts forth naive arguments because they sell. He’s smart enough to put his predictions safely into the future.
Now he says the singularity is 2045, seems like people yousta be predicting around 2010. Wonder if we’re ever going to catch it.
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