Friday 11 July 2003

Pic of the day: So we will probably never have cities in space. But at least we got some pretty good animated series, and an Internet with the capacity to move them across half the globe. That's something, I guess. (Picture from anime Stellvia of the universe.)

The future was yesterday

While sniffing my way around Robert J. Sawyer's large website, I found some pages lying around from 1997-1998, when Discovery Channel Canada had made a series of programs called "2020 vision". There were topics like immortality, teleportation and nanomachines. And Sawyer invoked Clarke's Law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps that is so; but it is just another way of saying (Florence's Law) that all technology is magic for those who don't understand it. It certainly does not mean that anything we can imagine is possible.

Now it is five years since 1998. What has happened since? Well, we've fought a few wars; the world economy is in some trouble; a moderate number of species has gone extinct, and some others are discovered. More people than ever have Internet access, and more than half of the world's e-mail is now spam. We have survived the first onslaught of SARS, a virus with a potential mortality rate of 10-20%. And the start date for creating microscopic black holes in CERN's Large Hadron Collider is pushed forward from 2005 to 2007, thank God.

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So how much closer have we come to immortality? Possibly one step, possibly not. I cannot remember whether the function of telomerase was documented before 1998 or after. But we have so far not found any way to make practical use of this enzyme, which makes it possible for a cell to divide an unlimited number of times without self-destructing. (Some cells in the body already do this.) We have discovered various types of stem cells, and prohibited research on some of them. We have documented that aging can be slowed down by slashing food intake and exercising regularly; a few volunteers are trying this out now, while most are still eating fries in front of the television, waiting for the miracle to come.

Artificial intelligence? It may be just as well that machines don't show any sign of true intelligence; we don't want them to replace us, after all. But the sad truth is that in these 5 years, we have got slightly more realistic graphics in our computer games, and that is it. Moore's Law continues to hold, and the computers double their capacity every 18 months. But they don't do anything new and interesting. They just do the same stuff a bit faster. They still cannot translate from one language to another ... well, they can, but the output is a parody. This is the same state of affairs as in 1998. Voice input is still nearly useless; it is an alternative for people who lack hands, but only if they have a soundproof room. And household robots are still 20 years away, just like in 1960.

Teleportation? Quantum computers? There have been a few more experiments on quantum entanglement; it seems that it is now possible to entangle not just photons but atoms and even small molecules. However, gravity may pose an upper limit on how large objects can be involved in quantum physics. If anything, we are moving further away from the dreams here. We are finding the road blocked.

Genetic engineering? There's currently a popular uprising against genetic modification in much of the world. Genetic experiments on humans are illegal almost everywhere, and most of the world outside North America tries to avoid eating genetically modified food. (This is pretty funny, since even our potatoes and cows are genetically modified ... just using slower and less precise methods. Selective breeding and crossbreeding modify the genes – that's the whole point!) Anyway, genetic engineering has not taken off. Cloning of mammals has proved to result in an inferior second generation, and cloning of primates is still impossible. Which may be just as well, since we seem unable to convince the average citizen that a clone is just a delayed twin.

Do I need to mention interstellar travel? Lately, even unmanned probes to Mars have failed more often than succeeded. Another of the few space shuttles exploded. It seems we will have to stick with Earth for the time being. We are certainly no closer to founding colonies elsewhere than we were in 1998.

Nanotechnology was always a pipe dream. Sure, you can build any object atom by atom; but it is a bad idea if the object is larger than a few thousand atoms. To coordinate the work takes a lot of information processing and transmission, which will suck more energy than traditional methods of production. And remember, you still need the atoms. If you want to make a gold ring, you still have to find gold atoms, and they don't drift around. You could extract them from sea water if you have the patience to wait; but it would take more time and energy than digging gold from the ground and processing it in the normal way. Organic material can be made from common elements in the air and ground ... but we already have nanomachines that do this; they are called plants. They are also almost free and require only very simple maintenance.

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In conclusion, the previous five years have not taken us any closer to the dream world of 2020. Offhand, the one thing I can say we have got are decent flat screen monitors, which we have waited for since my childhood. On the other hand, teleportation seems to be dead. It's dead, Jim! But I feel sure that in 2020, if we are still around, people still expect the miracle to come, 20 years from then. After all, they said the same thing in 1980. I was there, and bear witness.