I was reading a description of a book called A View From the Year 3000, in which the author, through his 'descendant' 998 years in the future, predicts what the most important technologies over the next millennium will be. I haven't actually read the book, since the University library doesn't have it and I don't feel like ordering it from Amazon, but reading the summary of the book gave me pause for reflection: what did I think the most important technologies over the next millennium would be?
I think how that question is answered depends a lot on from what perspective it is approached. To say a technology is important, does it need to be important from the standpoint of individuals, or society as a whole, or both? If we are looking it at solely from the standpoint of individuals, the most important technology will almost certainly end up being genetic engineering. From the standpoint of society as a whole, space settlement. And from the perspective of both, molecular nanotechnology.
The term 'genetic engineering' carries a lot of negative stigma. Many people regard human DNA as sacred, untouchable. One of the ways this feeling manifests itself can be summed up by the statement (not mine, but unattributed, unfortunately): any fool can copy the works of Shakespeare, but who is fit to improve upon them? This is particularly true amongst religious people, who regard the human genetic code as God's creation in the same way that a student of literature regards the works of Shakespeare. But for a student of evolution, this opinion makes little sense. Natural selection ensures the survival of those traits that assist an organism in reproducing as often and as successfully as possible, and only that. It does not select for the traits that would necessarily be the most beneficial from the standpoint of each organism, but rather for what will let them pass on their genes. Steven Austad's field work studying the lifespans of continental versus island opossums is a striking demonstration of this: because the external mortality forces, in this case predation, were so much higher for continental opossums than for island opossums, the continental opossums had an enormously quickened rate of aging relative to their island cousins, because an organism must be programmed to divide up the resources it has into somatic maintenance, such as repairing the oxidative damage to the DNA that is thought to play a large role in the aging process, or into reproduction. For the continental opossums, selective pressure resulted in nearly all their resources poured into reproducing as quickly as possible, with very little devoted to maintaining their body beyond the bare minimum needed to survive to reproduce, because they were unlikely to survive long enough for somatic maintenance to make sense. The island population experienced the opposite effect, due to low levels of predation, and so lived long, healthy (for opossums, anyway) lives, because they were likely to survive to see several mating seasons, so somatic maintenance made sense from an evolutionary standpoint. (This is called the disposable soma theory of aging.) However, it is important to realize that each individual continental opossum is getting royally shafted by this process. Given the choice, most people (and I'm extrapolating to opossums, which may or may not be inappropriate) would choose to forego having children if it meant they could live vastly longer, healthier lives. But selection doesn't choose for what's the nicest outcome to individuals, it chooses for what allows the greatest number of offspring to survive and reproduce.
And now, after millions of years of this process, whereby many hapless organisms are getting repeatedly screwed into short, miserable lives, we are seeing the beginning of our ability to manipulate the genetic code. Shakespeare, indeed! With an understanding of what caused our genetic code to be the way it is, with all its terrible, often deadly, shortcomings (I rather suspect Huntington's disease victims would be less sympathetic to the view that DNA is sacred and perfect), we can now actually do something about it. The bold promise of genetic engineering is to change our genetics from the most selectively beneficial arrangement (which is what we have now), to the most individually beneficial arrangement. And from the standpoint of each individual human being, this represents something truly astonishing and wonderful: the promise of stopping our gradual decay from the aging process, of ending genetic diseases, of engineering ourselves to give ourselves immunity to the ravages of infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, of making us not just smart enough and strong enough to pass on our genes, but as strong and smart as we want to be. I cannot imagine any more important technology for individual people in the next 1000 years than this.
But from the the viewpoint of society as a whole, the picture changes. It might be great for individual people to be able to live indefinitely, strong, intelligent, and healthy, and while this would be good for humanity on a linear level, space settlement will ultimately be more important. If nothing else, space settlement will ensure humanity's continued survival: a spacefaring society is immune to many of the things that could wipe out a single-planet species, such as asteroid strikes, nuclear war, the nanotechnological 'gray goo,' a bioweapons nightmare, or some other unforeseen horror of the future. In the long run (the very long run), the Sun will go nova. If humanity is not spacefaring by that point, then the game ends. But in the short run, another extremely important aspect of space settlement is that it will have a rejuvenating effect on humanity. On Earth, the frontiers have run out. There is no longer any fabled 'New World' to flee to when the oppression of the old becomes too terrible. There is no place on this planet for new social experiments to be run. Liberal democracy would never have become a worldwide phenomenon if it had not first been tested successfully by the Americans, and that would never have come about without the existence of the so-called New World. Without anything like that left on Earth today, if we do not expand into space, no great experiments like early America could ever take place. (An interesting case can be made that the virtual worlds, such as EverQuest's Norrath and Sims Online, can serve this function, but the utility of these is entirely unproven, particularly since 'virtual' personalities are often quite different from their player, and no one lives solely in a virtual world.) More to the point, the existence of a frontier that is, for all practical purposes, infinite, would ensure that freedom remains a part of human society. The disturbing police-state tendencies of the Drug Warriors in this country notwithstanding, the U.S. is still a pretty free place to live today. We're getting significantly better in some areas, worse in others. On the whole, we're probably improving. The same could be said of many of the Pacific countries: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea. Europe to a lesser extent, although the backsliding there seems to be substantially worse than in the U.S. or the Pacific countries. The world as a whole is enormously freer than it was fifty or sixty-five or a hundred years ago. But this trend won't continue forever. Maybe it will be sooner, maybe later (hopefully much later), but we are going to backslide significantly at some point or another, and depending on how bad we screw up, we could end up with something truly nasty on our hands. Think Joseph Stalin was bad? Imagine him at the head of a world government with all of the military and information technology we have today. Imagine him at the head of a world government with all of the military and information technology that we'll have in a hundred years. Three hundred. A thousand. Freedom could quite literally be extinguished forever.
Now, it could be said that space settlements won't protect against the formation of such a repressive government. That's true, although having a 'safe haven' that political dissidents could flee to, protected by millions of miles of hard vacuum, couldn't hurt. The liberation of the Earth by space settlers in the event of such a world dictatorship is also a possibility, the same way that the U.S. helped liberate Europe and China across the seas. But what I think is really important is that even if such a dictatorship existed on the Earth and stayed that way forever, freedom could continue to exist elsewhere. If the U.S. and the Pacific and every other free country on the Earth eventually became totalitarian nightmares, there could still be freedom off-planet. While it is possible that a 'Solar dictatorship' could exist, I believe that it is impossible for true domination to persist at scales larger than that, due to the sheer distances involved in star travel, which is why freedom would always persist: the migration of free-floating space colonies could proceed indefinitely. It would be as if the European settlers had not found America as it was five hundred years ago, but rather, had found a number of truly uninhabited continents, and after that, had sent ships farther west and found still more uninhabited continents, and still more after that, and more after that, and on and on and on. The opportunities for freedom to thrive would have been endless, and it would have taken root in at least some of the societies that formed. So it will be with spacefaring societies.
Having sung the virtues of genetic engineering and space settlement, I am going to make a sharp twist and predict that the most important technology for both individuals and society will be molecular nanotechnology. Nanotechnology and (specifically) nanotechnological assemblers and mechanosynthesis is the holy grail of manufacturing, a building method that allows us to design things from atoms and molecules up. The application of this to materials science is obvious, but it could have unpredecented impact on medicine as well, through the use of tiny, programmed molecular robots with the ability to repair DNA damage, conduct ultra-exact surgery, clear blocked arteries, destroy tumors, any number of things. The effect on food science would be enormous: agriculture would become wholly optional, as mechanosynthesis of food became possible, then routine. At its core, all foods are, after all, are varying arrangements of molecules. Give assemblers the correct series of steps in which to assemble a steak or a cabbage, and give them a stock mixture, and voila! - food and drink and absolutely anything else you require, for all that we need varies only according to molecular composition. All you need is a stock solution containing the common elements and sufficient energy, and with the boundless power that solar power arrays in space will be able to produce, energy will be effectively unlimited.
The huge impact on individuals that this technology would have is clear (although, I believe, will be less than that of genetic engineering when all is said and done - although perhaps I'm biased, as a student of genetics), but the effect on society will be equally tremendous. An effective end to scarcity! Food, clothing, water, and everything else would be available in unlimited amounts, at the dirt-cheap cost of the energy and the stock solutions needed to utilize the assemblers. Everyone could literally have a microwave-sized appliance on their kitchen counter that would produce everything they would ever need. Creative works and programs for the assemblers would be the only scarce resources left. Work would become optional; a few hours a week would cover the cost of the assembler requirements. People could devote all their time to doing what they actually like to do, rather than slaving away all week to pay the bills. The social impact of such a drastic change would be unequalled by anything seen so far in history.
thus ranteth Pericles v. 2.0 at 1:52 PM | Permalink |
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