A Convair Model 118 ConvAirCar takes a test flight in California in November 1947. The flying vehicle never went into production. |
Physicist (and Star Trek expert)
Lawrence Krauss talks about the unpredictability of the future.
The Koyal Group Info Mag Articles - Lawrence
Krauss is a busy man. A theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State
University, Krauss has studied the universe, served on the science policy
committee for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, and crossed paths
with intellectuals like Stephen Hawking and Christopher Hitchens. He has
authored several books, including The Physics of Star Trek. In February 2014,
Krauss took part in an American Association for the Advancement of Science
symposium titled Where's My Flying Car? Science, Science Fiction, and a
Changing Vision of the Future.
So, where is my flying car?
Your flying car is still in the
dreams of people 50 years ago. You can feel bad that we don't have flying cars,
that we're not living in hotels in space, but the real world intervenes.
Certain [technological innovations] are just a lot harder, a lot more
expensive.
At the same time, there's a
flipside: The real things that have happened are much more interesting. The
Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't
have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to
everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the
whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.
When it comes to the things that
people really want in science fiction—like space travel—the simplest things end
up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to
live on Earth.
We hoped for flying cars and got
the Internet instead. What's to blame for the difference between our hopes and
the reality we end up with instead?
I would say [innovations] almost
never come from predictable places. If innovations were predictable, they
wouldn't be discoveries. When people extrapolate into the future, they
extrapolate [from] the known present. If I knew what the next big thing was,
I'd be doing it now.
What have we done to the world?
Climate change. Overpopulation. Global inequity. Perhaps a virus we set loose
from the animal world by displacing so many exotic species, which could wipe us
all out. These all either seem to be here already or looming in our near
future.
The virus thing: I wouldn't stay up
overnight on it. We're pretty robust; we've survived for four and a half
million years.
So what does the future hold?
It looks like we're destroying the
world as we know it. We certainly are entering Earth 2.0. But where that will
go is not clear.
Are you hopeful for the future?
It depends on the day. I'm not very
hopeful that humanity can act en masse to address what are now truly global
problems that require a new way of thinking. As Einstein said when nuclear
weapons were created: "Everything's changed save the way we think."
I think we need to change the way
we think to address these global problems. Will it happen? Maybe kicking and
screaming. My friend, the writer Cormac McCarthy, told me once: "I'm a
pessimist, but that's no reason to be gloomy." In a sense, that's my attitude.
Five hundred years from now, will we be living on Mars?
Maybe. If we do space travel, it
will tend to be one-way trips. Throughout human history, people
have done these ridiculously difficult one-way voyages for one reason: because
where they lived was so awful they were willing to get on a little wooden
vessel that might sink and go across an ocean to some unknown place that they
would probably never return from because it was so crummy where they were.
Maybe we'll do that for ourselves.
We'll make the world so miserable that living in some harsh environment on Mars
might seem attractive.
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