Future of science: 'We will have the

power of the gods'

A leading theoretical physicist has tapped the best scientific brains of the age to provide a
startling vision of the future. Roger Highfield reports
Just before Sir Isaac Newton died, he described how humbled he felt by the thought that he had
glimpsed only a fraction of the potential of the great scientific revolution he had helped to launch:
"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me."
Three centuries later, that great ocean of truth is not so mysterious. According to the theoretical
physicist Professor Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, we are entering an empowered
new era: "We have unlocked the secrets of matter.
We have unravelled the molecule of life, DNA. And we have created a form of artificial
intelligence, the computer. We are making the historic transition from the age of scientific
discovery to the age of scientific mastery in which we will be able to manipulate and mould nature
almost to our wishes."
Among the technologies he believes will change our lives in the coming decades are cars that
drive themselves, lab-grown human organs, 3D television, robots that can perform household
tasks, eye glasses that double as home-entertainment centres, the exploitation of genes that alter
human ageing and the possibility of invisibility and forms of teleportation.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

"We will have the power to animate the inanimate, the

power to create life itself," says Prof Kaku. "We will have the
power of gods. But will we also have the wisdom of
Solomon?"
In a new BBC4 series called Visions of the Future, Prof
Kaku talks to today's pioneers about how we are moving
from being passive observers of nature to its
choreographers. Here are their remarkable speculations
about how the scientific and technological revolution will
transform life and society in the 21st century.
THE FUTURE OF PHYSICS
Teleportation
Prof Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna
"We achieved quantum teleportation 10 years ago, and
we're using it on a regular basis on the information carried
by a system. This information is teleported over to another
system, which assumes exactly that information; therefore it
becomes identical with the original.
"If you dream about teleportation of humans well, we can
dream then all kinds of questions arise, such as: what
does it mean to be me? When someone teleports me and I
know that what is being teleported is information not
matter, not the stuff I'm made of who is it that ends up
over there?"
The next generation of nuclear power
Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith Director, UK Fusion
Programme
"Between 15 and 20 years from now, we will be ready to
start building a fusion power station that will produce
electricity [from nuclear fusion, rather than fission, the
reaction that drives existing nuclear power stations]. After
that, before the middle of the century, we hope to have
large-scale fusion power."
Electricity from Plant life
Dr Andreas Mershin, Centre for Biomedical Engineering,
MIT
"Plants have developed this amazing ability to capture
sunlight and create chemical energy and store it. Now we
can grab the machine the protein inside the plant called
photosystem, which is responsible for generating energy for
the plant and hijack its function to create solar electrical
power. Our goal is to provide an alternative to regular
silicon-based solar panels. What we're trying to do is
produce a material that you can paint on a metallic surface,
expose to light and have some electricity."
Nanobot armies
Dr John Alexander, US Joint Special Operations University
"On the battlefield, nanobots are going to do a lot of things;
they can seek and destroy specific targets, for instance.
You've heard about the 'surgeons' that you can inject into
your bloodstream well, they can go in there to repair a
clogged blood vessel, or they might be able to go in and
punch holes in the blood vessels to destroy an adversary.
The embryonic stages are here today, and a lot of work is
being done."
Unbeatable weapons
Dr Nick Bostrom, Oxford University
"With an advanced form of nanotechnology, it would be
possible to build different kinds of weapons systems for
which it's very difficult to see how an effective defence
would be possible. In my view, the advanced form of
nanotechnology is arguably the greatest existential risk
humanity is likely to confront in this century."
THE FUTURE OF BIOLOGY
A disease-free world
Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist
"We will have the means, within 10 or 15 years, to
reprogram biology away from cancer, away from heart
disease, to really overcome the major diseases that kill us.
We're in the early stages of that now, but our ability to do
this is growing exponentially it's doubling every year."
An end to ageing
Prof Leonard Hayflick, University of California, San
Francisco
"Our conscious recognition of the finitude of our lives is key
to how we live. Virtually every aspect of our lives is
governed by our sense of self and our sense of when we
will age, and, of course, when we will die. One really has to
think seriously about tampering with the ageing process and
what its implications might be."
Perfecting the human body
Prof Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution
"I don't think we should worry so much about whether we
want to live for hundreds of years, but why we would want
to. We need a public debate on exactly why we want our
children to be perfect and whether that would actually be
giving them a happier and more fulfilling life. One end of the
spectrum is that of course we don't want them to be obese
or clinically depressed. On the other hand, I would hope that
people would want their children to be diverse and
interesting and interested in others, rather than everyone
the same and everyone perfect."
Control over human evolution
Joel Garreau, author of Radical Evolution
"For the first time, our technologies are not so much aimed
outward at modifying our environment in the fashion of
agriculture or space travel; increasingly, technologies are
aimed inward, at modifying our minds, our memories, our
metabolisms, our personalities and our kids. And this is not
in some distant, science-fiction future this is now. What's
shocking about this is that if you can do all that, you're
talking about humans becoming the first species to take
control of their own evolution."
Genetically modified genes
Prof David Farb, Boston University, Massachusetts
"Memory enhancement is certainly within the realm of
scientific possibility. And we may be able to alter not just our
intellectual but also our physical abilities. If we could pass
down these genetically enhanced genes, we could evolve in
a different way. We can't afford not to think about this issue
and not to be prepared."
Retuning the brain
Dr Francis Collins, US National Human Genome Research
Institute, Bethesda
"Suppose we develop by our understanding of how the
genome works and therefore how the body works an
approach that would improve memory; what's wrong with
that? Well, it raises the question of who decides what's an
improvement, and is that something that is going to be
available to all or will it be another example of separating
between people who have resources and people who
don't?"
THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING
The virtual family
Jaron Lanier, virtual-reality pioneer
"One notion is that virtual-reality interfaces might simply be
integrated into the human body. We could have a display
built into any of a number of layers within the eye, or into the
optic track or, indeed, into the brain itself.
"But these possibilities raise disturbing questions. What
happens if we assume so many different identities that we
begin to lose our own sense of identity? What happens if we
begin to prefer virtual social networks to our real social
networks? And will the family suffer if we spend more time
with our virtual family than our real one?"
Biological robots
Prof Rodney Brooks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"As a species, we are starting to put our information-
processing technology inside our bodies we're becoming
a little more robotic. At the same time, our technologies are
becoming more biological. Over the next 50 years, we'll see
robots with more biological components and people with
more electronic components.
Superhuman machinery
Paul Saffo, technology forecaster, Stanford University
"There's a good chance that the machines will be smarter
than us. There are two scenarios. The optimistic one is that
these new superhuman machines are very gentle and they
treat us like pets. The pessimistic scenario is they're not
very gentle and they treat us like food."
Artificial intelligence
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence, California
"We have a choice in how we create artificial intelligence.
And you've got to be very sure that a created mind is never
going to want to self-improve and that it's never going to
want to do anything that destroys intelligent life. You've got
to treat that gun as if it's loaded."