OPEN MIC:
with Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
Igoing to be up front and declare straight away that it’s notoriously difficult to make predictions – especially about the future. But as it’s the start of a new year, let me throw caution to the wind and dive right into some futurecasting. Computing began thousands of years ago, and it still has massive potential for development. The Antikythera Mechanism was found on a sunken Roman cargo ship. We don’t know who made the complex bronze, geared clockwork, but it could compute tides in the Mediterranean, eclipses and much more. By the mid-20th century, we’d developed huge electronic computers. Today, computers are much more powerful but much smaller. There are already thousands of people with computers implanted in their brains to help them deal with illnesses, such as Parkinson’s disease. This combination of machine and humanity is going to grow ever more complex. Furthermore, in coming years augmented reality will be the norm – our world will be overlaid with data. Artificial intelligence will give us personal devices that can instruct and help us – maybe even become us. Perhaps artificial intelligence will lead to massive unemployment. Then we’ll have to provide a Universal Basic Income for all the people who can no longer find paid work.
Genetics is changing very quickly. Lab-grown meat (factory-produced meat, made without dead animals) will be on your dinner table soon. And we’ll be modifying our DNA using gene-editing tools. On average, among Caucasians, one in 25 people carries the Cystic fibrosis (CF) gene. CF is uncommon in Africa and Asia, with a reported frequency of 1 in 350, 000 in Japan. We will remove it without changing the rest of the DNA. Today’s wonder gene-editing tool is CRISPR, but better ones will come. Mapping of DNA was announced back in the year 2000, but it took until 2018 for it to be quick and cheap enough to be used in emergency medicine. Now we can swiftly diagnose desperately sick newborns with gene mapping. DNA mapping will get cheaper and faster. It will give us new tools for advanced personalised medicine – both for diagnostics and for treatment.
We are already making extraordinary materials with strange properties. Carbon nanotubes are strong enough to support their own weight and create a cable into space 36,000km high. We could run elevators along this cable to zip us into space without the need for rockets. Then there’s 3D printing. Professional 3D printers can make fuel pumps to survive the hellish conditions inside a jet engine, printed in metals, not just cheap plastic. Even domestic 3D printers are moving from plastics into metals. One day soon, your domestic 3D printer will be the size of a microwave oven but will use virtually all of the elements of the periodic table as its “ink”. Your future 3D printer will be able to print you a new smartphone overnight. It’s going to be big!
Basic Science is pure or nonapplied science. By definition, it has no immediate short-term use. But Einstein’s work gave us the GPS navigators in our phones and cars; Stephen Hawkins’ theories gave us Wi-Fi; and the search for subatomic particles gave us the World Wide Web. A big problem for astronomy is that we can “see” only five per cent of the universe, which means most of the universe is “missing”. “Invisible” dark matter makes up 25 per cent of the universe and dark energy makes up 70 per cent. There’s an even bigger problem in subatomic physics which is that, while our best theory (the Standard Model) works, we know it’s wrong, which is a bummer! But I predict we’ll solve these big problems in the not too distant future and, along the way, create new technologies that we cannot even envisage today.
Climate Change is real, and we humans caused the current effects. We can stop climate change, and even reverse it, by removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing less of it to begin with. The only thing stopping us is political inertia. I can’t predict when that inertia will finally abate. The Flynn Effect shows that each generation is about nine IQ points smarter than the previous one. Getting smarter is a great bonus for future us and might help us grapple with that last point.
Currently, we are living in the most peaceful time ever in the history of the human race. If you don’t believe me, let me recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling and The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker as some holiday reading. Maybe future humans will work out how to sort stuff out without fighting. Here’s hoping, though I’m not quite confident enough to predict it.
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney, and has worked as a medical doctor, engineer, physicist and mathematician. He brings science to the airwaves on triple j Mornings, and with his podcast Shirtloads of Science. His latest book Vital Science is in stores now.