2009 : WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

We are entering a new era of personalized medicine.  One size does not fit all. 

One way to change your genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has elegantly shown. Another is to change your lifestyle: what you eat, how you respond to emotional stress, whether or not you smoke cigarettes, how much you exercise, and the experience of love and intimacy.

New studies show that these comprehensive lifestyle changes may change gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months—"turning on" (upregulating) disease-preventing genes and "turning on" (downregulating) genes that promote heart disease, oncogenes that promote breast cancer and prostate cancer, and genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress. These lifestyle changes also increase telomerase, the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. 

As genomic information for individuals becomes more widely available—via the decoding of each person's complete genome (as Venter and Watson have done) or partially (and less expensively) via new personal genomics companies—this information will be a powerful motivator for people to make comprehensive lifestyle changes that may beneficially affect their gene expression and significantly reduce the incidence of the pandemic of chronic diseases. 

In just a few years, we’ll see the first generation of adults whose every breath has been drawn on the grid. A generation for whom every key moment (e.g., birth) has been documented and distributed globally. Not just the key moments, of course, but also the most banal: eating pasta, missing the train, and having a bad day at the office. Ski trips and puppies.

These trips and puppies are not simply happening, they are becoming data, building up the global database of distributed memories. They are networked digital photos – 3 billion on Flickr, 10 billion on Facebook. They were blog posts, and now they are tweets, too (a billion in 18 months). They are Facebook posts, Dopplr journals, Last.FM updates.

Further, more and more of these traces we produce will be passive or semi-passive. Consider Loopt, which allows us to track ourselves, our friends through GPS. Consider voicemail transcription bots that transcribe the voice messages we leave into searchable text in email boxes on into eternity. The next song you listen to will likely be stored in a database record somewhere. Next time you take a phonecam photo, it may well have the event’s latitude and longitude baked into the photo’s metadata.

The sharp upswing in all of this record-keeping – both active and passive – are redefining one of the core elements of what it means to be human, namely to remember. We are moving towards a culture that has outsourced this essential quality of existence to machines, to a vast and distributed prosthesis. This infrastructure exists right now, but very soon we’ll be living with the first adult generation whose entire lives are embedded in it.

In 1992, the artist Thomas Bayrle wrote that the great mistakes of the future would be that as everything became digital, we would confusememory with storage. What’s important about genuine memory and how it differs from digital storage is that human memory is imperfect, fallible, and malleable. It disappears over time in a rehearsal and echo of mortality; our abilities to remember, distort and forget are what make us who we are.

We have built the infrastructure that makes it impossible to forget. As it hardens and seeps into every element of daily life, it will make it impossible to remember. Changing what it means to remember changes what it means to be.

There are a few people with who already have perfect episodic memory, total recall, neurological edge cases. They are harbingers of the culture to come.  One of them, Jill Price, was profiled in Der Spiegel:

"In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. 'I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button.'"

This also describes the life of Steve Mann, passively recording his life through wearable computers for many years. This is an unlikely future scenario, but like any caricature, it is based on human features that will be increasingly recognizable. The processing, recording and broadcasting prefigured in Mann’s work will be embedded in everyday actions like the twittering, phonecam shots and GPS traces we broadcast now. All of them entering into an outboard memory that is accessible (and searchable) everywhere we go.

Today is New Year’s Eve. I read today (on Twitter) that three friends, independent of each other, were looking back at Flickr to recall what they were doing a year ago. I would like to start the New Year being able to remember 2008, but also to forget it.

For the next generation, it will be impossible to forget it, and harder to remember. What will change everything is our ability to remember what everything is. Was. And wasn’t.

Cheap individual genotyping will give a new life to dating services and marriage arrangers. There is a market for sperm and egg donors today, but the information available to consumers about donors is limited. This industry will flourish as individual genotyping costs go down and knowledge of genomics grows.

Potential consumers will be able to evaluate not only whether or not a gamete provider has brown eyes, is tall or short, has a professional degree, but also whether the donor has the appropriate MHC genotypes, long or short androgen receptors, the desired dopamine receptor types, and so on. The list of criteria and the sophistication of algorithms matching consumers and donors will grow at an increasing rate in the next decade.

The idea of a "compatible couple" will have a whole new dimension. Consumers will have information about hundreds of relevant donor genetic polymorphisms to evaluate in the case of gamete markets. In marriage markets there will be evaluation by both parties. Where will all this lead? Three possibilities come immediately to mind:

A. Imagine that Sally is looking at the sperm donor market. Perhaps she is shopping for someone genetically compatible, for example with the right MHC types. She is a homozygote for the 7R allele of the DRD4 genetic locus so she is seeking a sperm donor homozygous for the 4R allele so she won't have to put up with a 7R homozygous child like she was. In other words whether Tom or Dick is a more desirable donor depends on characteristics specific to Sally.

B. But what if Sally values something like intelligence, which is almost completely unidimensional and of invariant polarity: nearly everyone values high intelligence. In this case Sally will evaluate Tom and Dick on simple scales that Sally shares with most other women, Tom will almost always be of higher value than Dick, and he will be able to obtain a higher price for his sperm.

C. Perhaps a new President has red-haired children. Suddenly Sally, along with most other women in the market, wants red-haired children because they are fashionable. Dick, with his red hair, is the sellout star of the sperm market but only for a short time. There is a cohort of children born with red hair, then the fad soon goes away as green eyes, say, become the new hot seller. Dick loses his status in the market and is forced to get a real job.

These three scenarios or any mix of them is a possible future for love and marriage among those prosperous enough to indulge in this market. Scenario A corresponds to traditional views of marriage: for everyone there is someone special and unique. Scenario B corresponds somewhat more closely to how marriage markets really work-every Sally prefers rich to poor, smart to dumb, and a BMW to a Yugo. Scenario C is close to one mechanism of what biologists call sexual selection: male mallards have green heads essentially because it is just the fashion. I would not wager much on which of these scenarios will dominate the coming gamete market but I favor scenario B.

Could we take the next step by breaking down the strict distinction between reality and fiction: NO MORE REALITY!

Society will change when the poor and middle class have easy access to cryonic suspension of their cognitive remains — even if the future technology involved ultimately fails.

Today we almost always either bury dead brains or burn them. Both disposal techniques result in irreversible loss of personhood information because both techniques either slowly or quickly destroy all the brain tissue that houses a person's unique neural-net circuitry. The result is a neural information apocalypse and all the denial and superstition that every culture has evolved to cope with it.

Some future biocomputing technology may extract and thus back-up this defining neural information or wetware. But no such technology is in sight despite the steady advances of Moore's Law doubling of transistor density on computer chips every two years or so. Nor have we cracked the code of the random pulse train from a single neuron. Hence we are not even close to making sense of the interlocking pulse trains of the billions of chattering neurons in a functioning human brain.

So far the only practical alternative to this information catastrophe is to vitrify the brain and store it indefinitely in liquid nitrogen at about -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the best vitrification techniques still produce massive cell damage that no current or even medium-term technology can likely reverse. But the shortcomings of early twenty-first century science and engineering hardly foreclose the technology options that will be available in a century and far less so in a millennium. Suspended brain tissue needs only periodic replacement of liquid nitrogen to wait out the breakthroughs.

Yet right now there are only about 100 brains suspended in liquid nitrogen in a world where each day about 150,000 people die.

That comes to fewer than three suspended brains per year since a 40-year-old and post-Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick hailed the promise of cryonic suspension in his 1968 Playboy interview. Kubrick cast death as a problem of bioengineering: "Death is no more natural or inevitable than smallpox or diphtheria. Death is a disease and as susceptible to cure as any other disease." The Playboy interviewer asked Kubrick if he was interested in being frozen. Kubrick said that he "would be if there were adequate facilities available." But just over three decades later Kubrick opted for the old neural apocalypse when he could easily have afforded a first-class cryonic suspension in quite adequate facilities.

The Kubrick case shows that dollar cost is just one factor that affects the ease of mass access to cryonics. Today many people can afford a brain-only suspension by paying moderate premiums for a life-insurance policy that would cover the expenses. But almost no one accepts that cryonics wager. There are also stigma costs from the usual scolds in the church and in bioethics. There is likewise no shortage of biologists who will point out that you cannot get back the cow from the hamburger.

And there remains the simple denial of the inexorable neural catastrophe. That denial is powerful enough that it keeps the majority of citizens from engaging in rational estate planning. The probate code in some states such as California even allows valid handwritten wills that an adult can pen (but not type) and sign in minutes and without any witnesses. But only a minority of Californians ever executes these handwritten wills or the more formal attested wills. The great majority dies intestate and thus they let the chips fall where the state says they fall.

So it is not too surprising that the overwhelming majority of the doomed believe that the real or imagined transaction costs of brain suspension outweigh its benefits if they think about the matter at all. But those costs will only fall as technology marches on ever faster and as the popular culture adapts to those tech changes. One silver lining of the numbing parade of comic-book action movies is how naturally the younger viewing audience tends to embrace the fanciful information and biotechnology involved in such fare even if the audience lacks a like enthusiasm for calculus.

Again none of this means that brain suspension in liquid nitrogen will ever work in the sense that it leads to some type of future resurrection of the dead. It may well never work because the required neuro-engineering may eventually prove too difficult or too expensive or because future social power groups outlaw the practice or because of many other technical or social factors. But then again it may work if enough increased demand for such brain suspensions produces enough economies of scale and spurs enough technical and business innovation to pull it off. There is plenty of room for skepticism and variation in all the probability estimates.

But just having an affordable and plausible long shot at some type of resurrection here on Earth will in time affect popular belief systems and lengthen consumer time horizons. That will in turn affect risk profiles and consumption patterns and so society will change and perhaps abruptly so. A large enough popular demand for brain suspensions would allow democracies to directly represent some of the interests from potential far-future generations because no one would want themselves or their loved ones to revive and find a spoiled planet. Our present dead-by-100 life spans make it all too easy to treat the planet like a rental car as we run up the social credit cards for unborn debtors.

The cryonics long shot lets us see our pending brain death not as the solipsistic obliteration of our world but as the dreamless sleep that precedes a very major surgery.

Global 21st-century society depends on an 18th-century worldview.  It's an Enlightenment-era model that says the essence of humanity — and our best guide in life — is cool, conscious reason.  Though many have noted, here on Edge and elsewhere, that this is a poor account of the mind, the rationalist picture still sustains institutions that, in turn, shape our daily lives.

It is because we are rational that governments guarantee our human rights: To " use one's understanding without guidance"  (Kant's definition of enlightenment), one needs freedom to inquire, think and speak.  Rationality is the reason for elections (because governments not chosen by thoughtful, evidence-weighing citizens would be irrational). Criminal justice systems assume that impartial justice is possible, which means they assume judges and juries can reason their way through a case.  Our medical system assumes that drugs work for biochemical reasons, applicable to all human bodies — and not the price on the pill bottle makes a difference in its effectiveness.

And free markets presume that all players are avatars of Rational Economic Man: He who consciously and consistently perceives his own interests, relates those to possible actions, reasons his way through the options, and then acts according to his calculations. When Adam Smith famously wrote that butchers, brewers and bakers worked efficiently out of  "regard for their own interest,"  he was doing more than asserting that self-interest could be good.  He was also asserting that self-interest — a long-lasting, fact-based, explicit sense of  "what's good for me" — is possible.

The rationalist model also suffuses modern culture.  Rationalist politics requires tolerance for diversity — we can't reason together if we agree on everything. Rationalist economics teaches the same lesson. If everyone agrees on the proper price for all stocks on the market, then there's no reason for those brokers to go to work. This tolerance for diversity makes it impossible to unite society under a single creed or tradition, and that has the effect of elevating the authority of the scientific method. Data, collected and interpreted according to rigorous standards, elucidating material causes and effects, has become our lingua franca. Our modern notions of the unity of humanity are not premised on God or tribe, but on research results.  We say "we all share the same genes," or " we are all working with the same evolved human nature" or appeal in some other way to scientific findings.

This rationalist framework is so deeply embedded in modern life that its enemies speak in its language, even when they violate its tenets. Those who loathe the theory of evolution felt obligated to come up with "creation science." 

Businesses proclaim their devotion to the free market even as they ask governments to interfere with its workings. Then too, tyrants who take the trouble to rig elections only prove that elections are now a universal standard.

So that's where the world stands today, with banks, governments, medical systems, nation-states resting, explicitly or implicitly, on this notion that human beings are rational deciders.

And of course this model looks to be quite wrong. That's fact is not what changes everything, but it's a step in that direction.

What's killing Rational Economic Man is an accumulation of scientific evidence suggesting people have (a) strong built-in biases that make it almost impossible to separate information's logical essentials from the manner and setting in which the information is presented; and (b) a penchant for changing their beliefs and preferences according to their surroundings, social setting, mood or simply some random fact they happened to have noticed. The notion that "I" can " know" consistently what my " preferences"  are — this is in trouble.  (I won't elaborate the case against the rationalist model as recently made by, among others, Gary Marcus, Dan Ariely, Cass Sunstein, because it has been well covered in the recent Edge colloquium on behavioral economics.) 

What changes is everything is not this ongoing intellectual event, but the next one. 

In the next 10 or 15 years, after the burial of Rational Economic Man, neuroscientists and people from the behavioral disciplines will converge on a better model of human decision-making. I think it will picture people as inconsistent, unconscious, biased, malleable corks on a sea of fast-changing influences, and the consequences of that will be huge for our sense of personhood (to say nothing of sales tricks and marketer manipulations).

But I think the biggest shocks might come to, and through, institutions that are organized on rationalist premises.  If we accept that people are highly influenced by other people, and by their immediate circumstances, then what becomes of our idea of impartial justice? (Jon Hanson at Harvard has been working on that for some time.) How do we understand and protect democracy, now that Jonah Berger has shown that voters are more likely to support education spending just because they happen to cast their ballots in a school? What are we to make of election results, after we've accepted that voters have, at best, "incoherent, inconsistent, disorganized positions on issues," as William Jacoby puts it?  How do you see a town hall debate, once you know that people are more tolerant of a new idea if they're sitting in a tidy room than if they're in a messy one?

How do we understand medical care, now that we know  that chemically identical pills have different effects on people who think their medicine is expensive than they do on patient who were told it was cheap? How should we structure markets after learning that even MBAs can be nudged to see a $7 per item as a fair price — just by exposing them to the number 7 a few minutes before?  What do we do about standardized testing, when we know that women reminded that they're female score worse on a math test than fellow women who were reminded instead that they were elite college students?

Perhaps we need a new Adam Smith, to reconcile our political, economic and social institutions with present-day knowledge about human nature. In any event, I expect to see the arrival of Post-Rational Economic (and Political and Psychological) Humanity. And I do expect that will change everything.

Human beings have an amazingly flexible sense of self. If we don a pair of high resolution goggles showing the point of view from another body, with feedback and control, we perceive ourselves to be that body. As we use rudimentary or complex tools, these quickly become familiar extensions of our bodies and minds. This flexibility, and our indefatigable drive to learn, invent, have fun, and seek new adventure, will lead us down future paths that will dramatically alter human experience and our very nature.

Because we adapt so quickly, the changes will feel gradual. In the next few years solid state memory will replace hard drives, removing the mechanical barrier to miniaturization of our computational gadgetry. Battery size remains as a barrier to progress, but this will improve, along with increased efficiency of our electronics, and we will live with pervasive computational presence. Privacy will vanish. People will record and share their sensorium feeds with the world, and the world will share experiences. Every physical location will be geo-tagged with an overlay of information. Cities will become more pleasant as the internal combustion engine is replaced with silent electric vehicles that don't belch toxic fumes. We'll be drawn in to the ever evolving and persistently available conversations among our social networks. Primitive EEG's will be replaced by magnetoencephalography and functional MRI backed by the computational power to recognize our active thought patterns and translate them to transmittable words, images, and actions. Our friends and family who wish it, and our entire external and internal world, will be reachable with our thoughts. This augmentation will change what it means to be human. Many people will turn away from their meat existence, to virtual worlds, which they will fill with meaning — spending time working on science, virtual constructions, socializing, or just playing games. And we humans will create others like us, but not.

Synthetic intelligence will arrive, but slowly, and it will be different enough that many won't acknowledge it for what it is. People used to think a computer mastering chess, voice recognition, and automated driving would signal the arrival of artificial intelligence. But these milestones have been achieved, and we now consider them the result of brute force computation and clever coding rather than bellwethers of synthetic intelligence. Similarly, computers are just becoming able to play the game of Go at the dan level, and will soon surpass the best human players. They will pass Turing's test. But this synthetic intelligence, however adaptable, is inhuman and foreign, and many people won't accept it as more than number crunching and good programming. A more interesting sign that synthetic intelligence has arrived will be when captchas and reverse Turing tests appear that exclude humans. The computers will have a good laugh about that. If it doesn't happen earlier, this level of AI will arrive once computers achieve the computational power to run real-time simulations of an entire human brain. Shortly after that, we will no longer be the game changers. But by then, humans may have significantly altered themselves through direct biological manipulation.

The change I expect to see that will most affect human existence will come from biohacking: purposefully altering genomes, tissue engineering, and other advances in biology. Humans are haphazardly assembled biological machines. Our DNA was written by monkeys banging away at... not typewriters, but each other, for millions of years. Imagine how quickly life will transform when DNA and biochemistry are altered with thoughtful intent. Nanotechnology already exists as the machinery within our own biological cells; we're just now learning how these machines work, and how to control them. Pharmaceuticals will be customized to match our personal genome. We're going to be designing and growing organisms to suit our purposes. These organisms will sequester carbon, process raw material, and eventually repair and replace our own bodies.

It may not happen within my lifetime, but the biggest game change will be the ultimate synthesis of computation and biology. Biotech will eventually allow our brains to be scanned at a level sufficient to preserve our memories and reproduce our consciousness when uploaded to a more efficient computational substrate. At this point our mind may be copied, and, if desired, embedded and connected to the somatic helms of designed biological forms. We will become branching selves, following many different paths at once for the adventure, the fun, and the love of it. Life in the real world presents extremely rich experiences, and uploaded intelligences in virtual worlds will come outside where they can fly as a falcon, sprint as a cheetah, love, play, or even just breath — with superhuman consciousness, no lag, and infinite bandwidth. People will dance with nature, in all its possible forms. And we'll kitesurf.

Kitesurfing, you see, is a hell of a lot of fun — and kites are the future of sailing. Even though the sport is only a few years old and kite design is not yet mature, kitesurfers have recently broken the world sailing speed record, reaching over 50 knots. Many in the sailing world are resisting the change, and disputing the record, but kites provide efficient power and lift, and the speed gap will only grow as technology improves. Kitesurfing is a challenging dynamic balance of powerful natural forces. It feels wonderful; and it gets even more fun in waves.

All of these predicted changes are extrapolations from the seeds of present science and technology; the biggest surprises will come from what can't be extrapolated. It is uncertain how many of these changes will happen within our lifetimes, because that timescale is a dependent variable, and life is uncertain. It is both incredibly tragic and fantastically inspiring that our generation may be the last to die of old age. If extending our lives eludes us, cryonics exists as a stopgap gamble — Pascal's wager for singularitarians, with an uncertain future preferable to a certain lack of one. And if I'm wrong about these predictions, death will mean I'll never know.

The long-term prospects of our civilization here on Earth are very uncertain. We can be destroyed by an asteroid impact or a nearby supernova explosion, or we can self-destruct in a nuclear or bacteriological war. It is a matter of not if but when the disaster will strike, and the only sure way for humans to survive in the long run is to spread beyond the Earth and colonize the Galaxy. The problem is that our chances of doing that before we are wiped out by some sort of catastrophe appear to be rather bleak.

The Doomsday argument

The probability for a civilization to survive the existential challenges and colonize its galaxy may be small, but it is non-zero, and in a vast universe such civilizations should certainly exist. We shall call them large civilizations.  There will also be small civilizations which die out before they spread much beyond their native planets.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that small civilizations do not grow much larger than ours and die soon after they reach their maximum size. The total number of individuals who lived in such a civilization throughout its entire history is then comparable to the number of people who ever lived on Earth, which is about 400 billion people, 60 times the present Earth population.

A large civilization contains a much greater number of individuals. A galaxy like ours has about 100 billion stars. We don't know what fraction of stars have planets suitable for colonization, but with a conservative estimate of 0.01% we would still have about 10 million habitable planets per galaxy. Assuming that each planet will reach a population similar to that of the Earth, we get 4 million trillion individuals. (For definiteness, we focus on human-like civilizations, disregarding the planets inhabited by little green people with 1000 people per square inch.) The numbers can be much higher if the civilization spreads well beyond its galaxy. The crucial question is: what is the probability P for a civilization to become large? 

It takes 10 million (or more) small civilizations to provide the same number of individuals as a single large civilization. Thus, unless P is extremely small (less than one in 10 million), individuals live predominantly in large civilizations. That's where we should expect to find ourselves if we are typical inhabitants of the universe. Furthermore, a typical member of a large civilization should expect to live at a time when the civilization is close to its maximum size, since that is when most of its inhabitants are going to live. These expectations are in a glaring conflict with what we actually observe: we either live in a small civilization or at the very beginning of a large civilization. With the assumption that P is not very small, both of these options are very unlikely – which indicates that the assumption is probably wrong.

If indeed we are typical observers in the universe, then we have to conclude that the probability P for a civilization to survive long enough to become large must be very tiny. In our example, it cannot be much more than one in 10 million.

This is the notorious "Doomsday argument". First suggested by Brandon Carter about 35 years ago, it inspired much heated debate and has often been misinterpreted. In the form given here it was discussed by Ken Olum, Joshua Knobe, and me.

Beating the odds

The Doomsday argument is statistical in nature. It does not predict anything about our civilization in particular. All it says is that the odds for any given civilization to grow large are very low. At the same time, some rare civilizations do beat the odds.

What distinguishes these exceptional civilizations? Apart from pure luck, civilizations that dedicate a substantial part of their resources to space colonization, start the colonization process early, and do not stop, stand a better chance of long-term survival.

With many other diverse and pressing needs, this strategy may be difficult to implement, but this may be one of the reasons why large civilizations are so rare. And then, there is no guarantee. Only when the colonization is well underway, and the number of colonies grows faster than they are dying out, can one declare a victory. But if we ever reach this stage in colonization of our Galaxy, this would truly be a turning point in the history of our civilization.

Where are they?

One question that needs to be addressed is: why is our Galaxy not yet colonized? There are stars in the Galaxy that are billions of years older than our Sun, and it should take much less than a billion years to colonize the entire Galaxy. So, we are faced with Enrico Fermi's famous question: Where are they? The most probable answer, in my view, is that we may be the only intelligent civilization in the entire observable universe.

Our cosmic horizon is set by the distance that light has traveled since the big bang. It sets the absolute limit to space colonization, since no civilization can spread faster than the speed of light. There is a large number of habitable planets within our horizon, but are these planets actually inhabited? Evolution of life and intelligence require some extremely improbable events. Theoretical estimates (admittedly rather speculative) suggest that their probability is so low that the nearest planet with intelligent life may be far beyond the horizon. If this is really so, then we are responsible for a huge chunk of real estate, 80 billion light years in diameter. Our crossing the threshold to a space-colonizing civilization would then really change everything. It will make a difference between a "flicker" civilization that blinks in and out of existence and a civilization that spreads through much of the observable universe, and possibly transforms it.

What will change everything is radical paradigm shift in the scientific method that opens up horizons beyond the reach of Boolean Logic, Digital Manipulations and Numerical Evaluations.

Due to my advanced age, I am not likely to witness the change.  But I am seeing signs and have my hunches.  These I will briefly spell out.

To change Everything a radical paradigm shift must interrupt the scientific method's race: 

STOP for a moment's reflection; what are you up to?

How do you know your dog would rather be a cat — just because you prefer cats.  Did you asked him, have you figured out how to ask him?

Having figured out how to do something is not enough reason for actually doing it. That's one aspect of the paradigm shift I am expecting; coming from inside the ranks. Evaluation of scientific results and their potential effects on the world as we know it is of particular urgency these days when news are spreading so easily all over the population. Of course we do not want to regress to a system of classified information that generates elitism. Well this problem is creating the, not so new anymore, philosophical discipline of applied Ethics; if only it keeps scientifically well informed and focused down to earth on concrete issues.

The goal of this part of the shift is a tightening of the structure of the whole conglomerate of the sciences and their presentation in the media.

But this brings me to the more radical effect of the shift I am envisaging; a healing effect on the rift between the endeavors that are bestowed the label "scientific" and the proliferation of so-called "alternative" enterprises, many of which are striving to achieve the blessings of scientific grounding by experimentations, theories and statistical evaluations, whether appropriate or not. A true and fruitful symbiosis that leads to a deeper understanding of the meaning of Human Existence than the models of a machine or of a token created by a Superior Being for the mysterious purpose of suffering through life in the service of His Glory.

Where do I expect the decisive push to come from? Possibly from the young discipline of cognitive science, provided psychology, philosophy and physiology are ready to cooperate.  There are shoots rising up all over, but I won't embark on a list. Once the "real thing" is found or constructed it will be recognized. It will have shape and make sense.

The myth of the scientific method as the only approach to reality will become obsolete without loss to man's interaction with this world.  The path to understanding has to be prepared by a direct, still somewhat mysterious approach of hunches and intuitions in addition to direct perceptions and sensations.  Moreover the results of that procedure are useless unless suitably interpreted.

Well, this is as far as I am ready to go with this explanation of a hunch. The alternative to my current vagueness would be rigidity prone to misinterpretation.

As to my own turf, Mathematics, I do not believe there will be any radical change.  Mathematics is a rock of a structure, here to stay. Mathematical insights do not change, they become clearer, dead ends are recognized as such, but what is proved beyond doubt what is cumulative.   

But methodological changes here are in order as well as meta-mathematical and philosophical interpretation of the nature of results. So is the evolution of an ever more lucid language.

I personally believe we'd do well to focus on Mathematical Intuitionism as our Foundations.  Boolean thinking has done its service by now.

To sum up what I am expecting of this paradigm shift are: clarification, simplification and unification of our understanding and with it the emergence of a more lucidly expressive language conducive to the End of Fragmentation of Knowledge.

From the Neolithic revolution to the information age, the major changes in the human condition—none of them changing everything, needless to say—have been consequences of new technologies. There is now a glut of new technologies in the offing that will alter the way we live more rapidly and radically than anything before in ways we cannot properly foresee. I wish I could just wax lyrical about some of the developments we can at least sensibly speculate about, but others will do so more competently. So, let me focus on the painfully obvious that we would rather not think about.

Many new technologies can provide new weapons or new ways to use old ones. Access to these technologies is every day easier. In the near future we should expect, with near certainty, that atomic, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction will be used in a variety of conflicts. The most important change this will bring about is not that so many will die. Hundreds of thousands have died all these years in wars and natural catastrophes, with an unspeakable impact on the population affected, but, alas, massacres and other forms of collective death have been part and parcel of the human condition. This time, however, many of the victims will belong to powerful modern societies that, since the Second World War, have on the whole been spared. People in these societies are, neither less nor more than the usual poorer and powerless victims of massive violence, entitled to live full decent lives, and have a right to fight for this. What may bring about radical changes is that they will be in a much stronger position to exert and possibly abuse this right. Recent large-scale murderous attacks resulted in the acceptance of fewer checks on executive power, limitation of civil rights, preventive warfare, ethnically targeted public suspicion. In the future, people who will have witnessed even direr events at close quarters may well support even more drastic measures. I am not discussing here the rationality of fears to come, or the extent to which they are likely to be biased and manipulated. I just assume that, for good or bad reasons, they will weigh in favor of limitations to the liberties of individuals and to the independence of countries.

One must hope that, in part thanks to the changes brought about by novel technologies, new forms of social and political understanding and action will develop to help address at the root issues that otherwise might give rise to ever more lethal conflicts. Still, while more and more powerful technologies are becoming more and more accessible, there is no reason to believe that humans are becoming commensurately wiser and more respectful of one another's rights. There will be, then, at least in most people's perception, a direct clash between their safety and their liberty and even more between their safety and the liberty of others. The history of this century—our history, that of our children and grandchildren—will in good part be that of the ways in which this clash is played out, or overcome.

Thirteen decades ago, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch led an intellectual revolution referred to as the germ theory of disease, which proposes that many common ailments are caused by microbes. Since then the accepted spectrum of infectious causation has been increasingly steadily and dramatically.  The diseases that are most obviously caused by infection were accepted as such by the end of the 19th century; almost all of them were acute diseases.  Acute diseases with a transmission twist, mosquito-borne malaria for example, were accepted a bit later at the beginning of the 20th century.  Since the early 20th century, the spectrum has been broadened mostly by recognition of infectious causation of chronic diseases.  The first of these had distinctly infectious acute phases, which made infectious causation of the chronic disease more obvious. Infectious causation of shingles, for example, was made more apparent by its association with chicken pox.  Over the past thirty years, the spectrum of infectious causation has been broadened mostly through inclusion of chronic diseases without obvious acute phases.  With years or even decades between the onset of infection and the onset of such diseases, demonstration of infectious causation is difficult. 

Technological advances have been critical to resolving the ambiguities associated with infectious causation of such cryptic infectious causation.  In the early 1990s Kaposi's Sarcoma Associated Herpes Virus was discovered using a molecular technique that stripped away the human genetic material from Kaposi's sarcoma cells and found what remained.  A similar approach revealed Hepatitis C virus in blood transfusions.  In these cases there were strong epidemiological signs that an infectious agent was present.  When the cause was discovered, acceptance did not have to confront the barrier of entrenched opinions favoring other non-infectious causes.  If such special interests are present the evidence has to be proportionately more compelling.  Such is the case for schizophrenia, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and many other chronic diseases, which are now the focus of vehement disagreements.

Advances in molecular/bioinformatic technology are poised to help resolve these controversies.  This potential is illustrated by two discoveries, which seem cutting edge now, but will soon be considered primitive first steps.  About a decade ago, one member of Stanford team scraped spots on two teeth of another team member, and amplified the DNA from the scrapings.  They found sequences that were sufficiently unique to represent more than 30 new species.  This finding hinted at the magnitude of the challenge--tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of viruses and bacteria may need to be considered to evaluate hypotheses of infectious causation. 

The second discovery provides a glimpse of how this challenge may be addressed.  Samples from prostate tumors were tested on a micro-array that contained 20,000 DNA snippets from all known viruses.  The results documented a significant association with an obscure retrovirus related to one that normally infects mice. If this virus is a cause of prostate cancer, it causes only a small portion that occurs in men with a particular genetic background. Other viruses have been associated with prostate cancer in patients without this genetic background. So, not only may thousands of viruses need to be tested to find one correlated with a chronic disease, but even then it may be one of perhaps many different infectious causes.

The problems of multiple pathogens and ingrained predispositions are now coming to a head in research on breast cancer.   Presently, three viruses have been associated with breast cancer: mouse mammary tumor virus, Epstein Barr virus, and human papillomavirus.  Researchers are still arguing about whether these correlations reflect causation.  If they do, these viruses account for somewhere between half and about 95% of breast cancer, depending on the extent to which they act synergistically. Undoubtedly array technology will soon be used to assess this possibility and to identify other viruses that may be associated with breast cancers.

There is a caveat. These technological advancements provide sophisticated approaches to identifying correlations between pathogens and disease.  They do not bridge the gulf between correlation and causation.  One might hope that with enough research all aspects of the pathological process could be understood, from the molecular level up to the whole patient.  But as one moves from molecular to the macro levels, the precision of interpretation becomes confounded by the complex web of interactions that intervene, especially in chronic diseases.   Animal models are generally inadequate for chronic human diseases because the disease in animals is almost never quite the same as the human disease. The only way out of this conundrum, I think, will be to complement the technological advancements in identifying candidate pathogens with clever clinical trials.  These clinical trials will need to use special states, such as temporary immune suppression, to identify those infections that are exacerbated concurrently with exacerbations of the chronic disease in question.  Such correlations will then need to be tested for causation by treatment of the exacerbated infection to determine whether the suppression of the infection is associated with amelioration of the disease.  

Why will this process change things?   For those of us who live in prosperous countries, infectious causes are implicated but not accepted in most common lethal diseases: cancers, heart attacks, stroke, Alzheimer's disease.  Infectious causes are also implicated in the vast majority of nonlethal, incapacitating illness of uncertain cause, such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, and Crohn's disease.  If infectious causes of these diseases are identified medical history tells us that they will tend to be resolved. 

A reasonable estimate of the net effect would be a rise in healthy life expectancy by two or three decades, pushing lifespan up against the ultimate boundary of longevity molded by natural selection, probably an age range between 95 and 105 years.  Being pushed up against this barrier people could be expected to live healthy lives into their 90s and then go downhill quickly.  This demographic transition toward healthy survival will improve productivity, lower medial costs, and enhance quality of life.  In short it will be one of medicine's greatest contributions.

Even with all the scientific and technological advances of the last two millennia and especially of the last century, humankind itself has not really changed.  The stories we read in our most ancient books do not seem alien to us.  On the contrary, the humans who wrote those works had the same needs and desires that we have today, though the means of meeting those needs and of fulfilling those desires may have changed in some of the details.

The human species has managed to survive a great number of truly monumental catastrophes, some naturally caused (floods, droughts, tsunamis, glaciations, etc,) and some the result of its own doing, often with the help of  science and technology (especially in creating the tools of war).  But such calamities did not really "change everything."  (This statement is certainly not meant to minimize the tragedy of the millions of lives lost in these catastrophes.)  Though we worry about the possible dramatic effects that an anthropogenically changed global climate might have, humankind itself will survive such changes (because of its science and technology), though we cannot predict how many people might tragically die because of it.

In terms of "what will change everything" the larger view is what will significantly change humankind itself.  From this human perspective, the last "event" that truly changed everything was over some period of time around 50,000 years ago when evolutionary advances finally led to intelligent humans who left Africa and spread out over the rest of the world, literally changing everything in the entire world.

Prior to that evolutionary advance in Africa, our ancestors' main motivations in life were like any other animal — find food and avoid death until they could reproduce.  After they evolved into intelligent beings their motivations in life expanded.  Although they still pursued food and sex and tried to avoid death, they also spent increasing amounts of time on activities aimed at preventing boredom and making them feel good about themselves.  These motivations have not changed in the succeeding millennia, though the means of satisfying themhave changed often.

How humankind came to be what it is today was a result of natural selection.  Humans survived in the hostile environment around them (and went on to Earthly dominance) because of the evolved improvements in their brains.  One improvement was the development of curiosity and a desire to learn about the environment in which they lived.  But it was not simply a matter of becoming smarter.  The human species survived and succeeded in this world as much because of an evolved need for affection or connection with other human beings, a social bond.  It was both its increased intelligence and its increased social cooperation that led to increasing knowledge and eventually science and technology.  Not all individuals, of course, had the same degree of these characteristics, as shown by the wars and horrendous atrocities that humankind was capable of, but social evolution driven by qualities acquired from the previous species evolution did make progress overall.  The greatest progress and the greatest gain in knowledge only happened when people worked with each other in harmony and did not kill each other.

The evolution of human intelligence and cooperative social bonding tendencies took a very long time, though it seems quite fast when appreciating the incredible complexity of this intelligence and social bonding.  How many genes must have mutated and been naturally selected for to achieve this complexity?  We are here today as both a species and a society because of those gene changes and the natural selection process that over this long time period weeded out the bad changes and allowed the good changes to remain.

Technically, evolution of the human species as a result of natural selection stopped when we became a social animal — when the strong began protecting the weak and when our scientific and technological advances allowed us to extend the lives of those individuals unfortunate enough to have genetic weaknesses that would have killed them.  With humans, artificial selection (selective breeding) was never a serious replacement for natural selection possibility, and as a result there have been no significant changes to the human species since its societies began.

But now, with the recent great advances in genetic engineering, we are in a position to change the human species for the first time in 50,000 years.  We will be able to put new genes in any human egg or sperm we wish.  The children born with these new genes will grow up and pass them on to their children.  The extensive use of this genetic selection (or should we call it anthropogenic selection) will rapidly pass new genes and their corresponding (apparently desired) traits throughout the population.  But what will be the overall consequence?  When selecting particular genes that we want while perhaps not understanding how particular gene combinations work, might we unknowingly begin a process that could change our good human qualities? While striving for higher intelligence could we somehow genetically diminish our capacity for compassion, or our inherent need for social bonding?  How might the human species be changed in the long run?  The qualities that got us here — the curiosity, the intelligence, the compassion and cooperation resulting from our need for social bonding– involve an incredibly complex combination of genes.  Could these have been produced through genetic planning?

Our ever-expanding genetic capabilities will certainly "change everything" with respect to medicine and health, which will be a great benefit.  Our life span will also be greatly extended, a game-changing benefit to be sure, but it will also add to our overpopulation, the ultimate source of so many problems on our planet.  But the ultimate effect may be on the human species itself.  How many generations might it take before the entire human race is significantly altered genetically?  From a truly human perspective, that would really "change everything."

The tricky, slippery word in this question is "expect." There is nothing that I expect to see with 100 percent certainty, and there are some remarkable things that I expect to see with perhaps 10 or 5 percent certainty (but I sure would be excited if that 5 percent paid off). With that bit of preamble, I'd like to lay out my game-changing predictions ranked by order of expectation, starting with the near-sure things and ending with the thrilling hey-you-never-knows.

The real end of oil. Technology will make liquid fuels obsolete — not just petroleum but also alternatives like biodiesel, ethanol, etc. Fossil fuel supplies are too volatile and limited, the fuels themselves far too environmentally costly, and biofuels will never be more than niche players. More broadly, moving around fuels in liquid form is just too cumbersome. In the future, energy for personal transit might be delivered by wire or by beam. It might not be delivered at all — the Back to the Future "Mr. Fusion" device is not so farfetched (see below). But whatever comes next, in another generation or so pumping fuel into a car will seem as quaint as getting out and cranking the engine to get it started. 
Odds: 95 percent.

Dark matter found. The hunt for the Higgs boson is a yawn from my perspective: Finding it will only confirm a theory that most physicists are fairly sure about already. Identifying dark matter particles — either at the Large Hadron Collider or at one of the direct detectors, like Xenon100 — would be much more significant. It would tell us what the other 6/7ths of all matter in the universe consists of, it would instantly rule out a lot of kooky cosmological theories, and it would allow us to construct a complete history of the universe. 
Odds: 90 percent.

Genetically engineered kids. I'm not just talking about screening out major cancer genes or selecting blue eyes; I'm talking about designing kids who can breathe underwater or who have radically enhance mental capabilities. Such offspring will rewrite the rules of evolution and redefine what it means to be human. They may very well qualify as totally new species. From a scientific point of view I think this capability is extremely likely, but legal and ethical considerations may prevent it from happening.
With all that, I put the odds at: 80 percent.

Life detected on an exoplanet. Astronomers have already measured the size, density, temperature, and atmospheric composition of several alien worlds as they transit in front of their parent stars. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope may be able to do the same for earth-size planets. We haven't found these planets yet but it's a shoo-in that the Kepler mission, launching this spring, or one of the ground-based planet searches will find them soon. The real question is whether the chemical evidence of alien life will be conclusive enough to convince most scientists. (As for life on Mars, I'd say the odds are similar that we'll find evidence of fossil life there, but the likelihood of cross-contamination between Mars and Earth makes Martian life inherently less interesting.)
Odds: 75 percent.

Synthetic telepathy. Rudimentary brain prostheses and brain-machine interfaces already exist. Allowing one person to control another person's body would be a fairly simple extension of that technology. Enabling one person to transmit his thoughts directly to another person's brain is a much trickier proposition, but not terribly farfetched, and it would break down one of the most profound isolations associated with the human condition. Broadcasting the overall state or "mood" of a brain would probably come first. Transmitting specific, conscious thoughts would require elaborate physical implants to make sure the signals go to exactly the right place — but such implants could soon become common anyway as people merge their brains with computer data networks.
Odds: 70 percent.

Lifespan past 200 (or 1,000). I have little doubt that progress in fighting disease and patching up our genetic weaknesses will make it possible for people to routinely reach the full human lifespan of about 120. Going far beyond that will require halting or reversing the core aging process, which involves not just genetic triggers but also oxidation and simple wear-and-tear. Engineering someone to have gills is probably a much easier proposition. Still, if we can hit 200 I see no reason why the same techniques couldn't allow people to live to 1,000 or more.
Odds: 60 percent. 

Conscious machines. Intelligent machines are inevitable — by some measures they are already here. Synthetic consciousness would be a much greater breakthrough, in some ways a more profound one than finding life on other planets. One problem: We don't understand how consciousness works, so recreating it will require learning a lot more about what it means to be both smart and self-aware. Another problem: We don't understand what consciousness is, so it's not clear what "smart" and "self-aware" mean, exactly. Gerald Edelman's brain-based devices are a promising solution. Rather than trying to deconstruct the brain as a computer, they construct neural processing from the bottom up, mimicking the workings of actual neurons.
Odds: 50-50.

Geoengineering. We may be able to deal with global warming through a combination of new energy sources, carbon sequestration, and many local and regional adaptations to a warmer climate. All of these will be technologically challenging but not truly "game-changing." It is possible, though, that the climate impact of our environmental follies will be so severe, and the progress of curative scientific research so dramatic, that some of the pie-in-the-sky geoengineering schemes now being bandied about will actually come to pass. Giant space mirrors and sunshades strike me as the most appealing options, both because they would support an aggressive space program and because they are adjustable and correctable. (Schemes that aim to fight carbon pollution with sulfur pollution seem like a frightening mix of hubris and folly.) Geoengineering techniques are also a good first step toward being able to terraform other planets.
Odds: 25 percent.

Desktop fusion. The ITER project will prove that it is possible to spend billions of dollars to construct an enormous device that produces controlled hydrogen fusion at a net loss of energy. A few left-field fusion researchers — most notably the ones associated with Tri-Alpha — are exploring a much more ambitious approach that would lead to the construction of cheap, compact reactors. These devices could in theory take advantage of more exotic, neutron-free fusion reactions that would allow almost direct conversion of fusion energy to electricity. The old dream of a limitless power plant that could fit under the hood of your car or in a closet in your house might finally come true. Since energy is the limiting factor for most economic development, the world economy (and the potential for research and exploration) would be utterly transformed.
Odds: 20 percent.

Communication with other universes. Studies of gravitational wave patterns etched into the cosmic microwave background could soon provide hints of the existence of universes outside of our own. Particle collisions at the LHC could soon provide hints of the existence of higher dimensions. But what would really shake the world would be direct measurements of other universes. How exactly that would work is not at all clear, since any object or signal that crossed over directly from another universe could have devastating consequences; indirect evidence, meanwhile, might not be terribly convincing (eg, looking for the gravitational pull from shadow matter on a nearby brane). I hold out hope all the same. 
Odds: 10 percent

Antigravity devices. Currentphysics theory doesn't allow such things, but from time to time fringe experiments (mostly involving spinning superconducting disks) allegedly turn up evidence for an antigravity phenomenon. Even NASA has invested dribbles of money in this field, hoping that something exciting and unexpected will pop up. If antigravity really exists it would require revising Einstein's general theory of relativity. It would also vindicate all those science-fiction TV shows in which everyone clomps around heavily in outer space. Given how little we know about how gravity works, antigravity or artificially generated gravity don't seem impossible…just highly improbable. 
Odds: 5 percent

ESP verified!Probably the closest thing I've seen to a scientific theory of ESP is Rupert Sheldrake's concept of "morphic fields." Right now there's nary a shred of evidence to support the idea — unless you count anecdotes of dogs who know when their owners are about to return home, and people who can "feel" when someone is looking at them — but Sheldrake is totally correct that such off-the-wall ideas merit serious scientific investigation. After all, scientists investigate counterintuitive physics concepts all the time; why not conduct equally serious investigations of the intuitive feelings that people have all the time? Everything I know about science, and about human subjectivity, says that there's nothing to find here. And yet, when I think of a discovery that would change everything this is one of the first that springs to mind. 
Odds: 0.1 percent

Within my lifetime (or soon thereafter) scientists will finally decode the language of the brain. At present, we understand a bit about the basic alphabet of neural function, how neurons fire, and how they come together to form synapses, but haven't yet pieced together the words, let alone the sentences.  Right now, we're sort of like Mendel, at the dawn of genetics: he knew there must be something like genes (what he called "factors"), but couldn't say where they lived (in the protein? in the cytoplasm?) or how they got their job done. Today, we know that thought has something to do with neurons, and that our memories are stored in brain matter, but we don't yet know how to decipher the neurocircuitry within. 

Doing that will require a quantum leap. The most popular current techniques for investigating the brain, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are far too coarse. A single three dimensional "voxel" in an fMRI scan lumps together the actions of tens or even hundreds of thousands of neurons — yielding a kind of rough geography of the brain (emotion in the amygdala, decision-making in the prefrontal cortex) but little in the way of specifics.  How does the prefrontal cortex actually do its thing? How does the visual cortex represent the difference between a house and a car, or a Hummer and a taxi? How does Broca's area know the difference between a noun and verb?

To answer questions like these, we need to move beyond the broad scale geographies of fMRI and down to the level of individual neurons.

At the moment, that's a big job.  For one thing, in the human brain there are billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them; the sheer amount of data involved is overwhelming. For another, until recently we've lacked the tools to understand the function of individual neurons in action, within the context of microcircuits.

But there's good reason to think all that's about to change. Computers continue to advance at a dizzying pace.  Then there's the truly unprecedented explosion in databases like the Human Genome and the Allen Brain Atlas, enormously valuable datasets that are shared publically and instantly available to all researchers, everywhere; even a decade ago there was nothing like them. Finally, genetic neuroimaging is just around the corner — scientists can now induce individual neurons to fire and (literally) light up on demand, allowing us to understand individual neural circuits in a brand new way.

Technical advances alone won't be enough, though — we'll need a scientist with the theoeretical vision of Francis Crick, who not only helped identify the physical basis of genes — DNA — but also the code by which the individual nucleotides of a gene get translated (in groups of three) into amino acids.  When it comes to the brain, we already know that neurons are the physical basis of thinking and knowledge, but not the laws of translation that relate one to the other.

I don't expect that there will be one single code. Although every creature uses essentially the same translation between DNA and amino acids, different parts of the brain may translate between neurons and information in different ways.  Circuits that control muscles, for example, seem to work on a system of statistical averaging; the angle at which a monkey extends its arm seems, as best we can tell, to be a kind of statistical average of the actions of hundreds of individual neurons, each representing a slightly different angle of possible motion, 44 degrees, 44.1 degrees, and so forth. Alas, what works for muscles probably can't work for sentences and ideas, so-called declarative knowledge like the proposition that "Michael Bloomberg is the Mayor of New York" or the idea that my fight to Montreal leaves at noon. It's implausible that the brain would have vast population of neurons reserved for each specific thought I might entertain ("my flight to Montreal leaves at 11:58 am", "my flight to Montreal leave leaves at 11:59 am", etc). Instead, the brain, like language itself, needs some sort of combinatorial code, a way of putting together smaller pieces (Montreal, flight, noon) into larger elements.

When we crack that nut, when we figure out how the brain manages to encode declarative knowledge , an awful lot is going to change. For one thing, our relationship to computers will be completely and irrevocably altered; clumsy input devices like mice, windows, keyboards, and even heads-up displays and speech recognizers will go the way of typewriters and fountain pens; our connection to computers will be far more direct. Education, too, will fundamentally change, as engineers and cognitive sciences begin to leverage an understanding of brain code into ways of directly uploading information into the brain. Knowledge will become far cheaper than it already has become in the Internet era; with luck and wisdom, we as species could advance immeasurably.

In science, as with most areas, seemingly simple ideas can and have changed everything. Just one hundred and fifty years ago Charles Darwin'sOn the Origin of Species was published and immediately impacted science and society by describing the process of evolution as natural selection but nobody understood why or how this process happened. It took until the 1940's to establish that the substance that carried the inheritable information was DNA. In 1953 an Englishman and an American, Crick and Watson, proposed that DNA is formed as a spiraling ladder — or double helix — with the bases A-T and C-G paired (base pairs) to form the rungs, however no one knew what the code of life actually was.

In the 1960's some of the first secrets of our "genetic code" were revealed with the discovery that the chemical bases should be read in groups of three. These "nucleotide triplets" then defined and coded for amino acids.

In the late 1970's the complete genetic code (5,000 nucleotides) of a phage (a small virus that kills E. coli, a type of bacteria) was read out in sequence by a new technology developed by Fred Sanger from Cambridge. This technology named Sanger sequencing would dominate genetics for the next 25 years.

In 1995 my team read the complete genetic code of the chromosome containing all of the genetic information for a bacterium. The genome of the bacteria that we decoded was over 1.8 million nucleotides long and coded for all the proteins associated with the life of the bacteria. Based on our new methods there was an explosion of new data from decoded genomes of many living species including humans.

Just as Darwin observed evolution in the changes that he saw in various species of finches, land and sea iguanas, and tortoises, the genomics community is now studying the changes in the genetic code that are associated with human traits and disease and the differences among us by reading the genetic code of many humans and comparing them. The technology is changing rapidly where soon it will be common place for everyone to know their own genetic code. This will change the practice of medicine from treating disease after it happens to preventing disease before its onset. Understanding the mutations and variations in the genetic code will clearly help us to understand our own evolution.

Science is changing dramatically again as we use all our new tools to understand life and perhaps even to redesign it. The genetic code is the result of over 3.5 billion years of evolution and is common to all life on our planet. We have been reading the genetic code for a few decades and are gaining in how it programs for life.

In a series of experiments to better understand the genetic code, my colleagues and I developed new ways to chemically synthesize DNA in the laboratory. First we synthesized the genetic code of the same virus that Sanger and colleagues decoded in 1977. When this large synthetic molecule was inserted into a bacterium, the cellular machinery in the bacteria was not only able to read the synthetic genetic code, but the cell was also able to produce the proteins coded for by the DNA. The proteins self assembled to produce the virus particle that was then able to infect other bacteria. Over the past few years we were able to chemically make an entire bacterial chromosome, which at more than 582,000 nucleotides is the largest man-made chemical produced to date.

We have now shown that DNA is absolutely the information-coded material of life by completely transforming one species into another simply by changing the DNA in the cell. By inserting a new chromosome into a cell and eliminating the existing chromosome all the characteristics of the original species were lost and replaced by what was coded for on the new chromosome. Very soon we will be able to do the same experiment with the synthetic chromosome.

We can start with digitized genetic information and four bottles of chemicals and write new software of life to direct organisms to do processes that are desperately needed, like create renewable biofuels and recycle carbon dioxide. As we learn from 3.5 billion years of evolution we will convert billions of years into decades and change not only conceptually how we view life but life itself.

More than a hundred years passed between Columbus' first, confused sighting of America in 1492 and the vanguard of English colonization, at Jamestown in 1607. A shorter interval separates us today from Planck's first confused sighting of the quantum world, in 1899. The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus' Old New World. It is also, in a real sense, much bigger. While discovery of the Old New World roughly doubled the land area available to humans, the New New World exponentially expands the dimension of physical reality.* (For example, every single electron's spin doubles it.) Our fundamental equations do not live in the three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively) infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. It will take us much more than a century to homestead that New New World, even at today's much-accelerated pace.

We've managed to establish some beachheads, but the vast interior remains virgin territory, unexploited. (This time, presumably, there are no aboriginals.) Poking along the coast, we've already stumbled upon transistors, lasers, superconducting magnets, and a host of other gadgets. What's next? I don't know for sure, of course, but there are two everything-changers that seem safe bets:

• New microelectronic information processors, informed by quantum principles—perhaps based on manipulating electron spins, or on supplementing today's silicon with graphene—will enable more cycles of Moore's law, on several fronts: smaller, faster, cooler, cheaper. Supercomputers will approach and then surpass the exaflop frontier, making their capacity comparable to that of human brains. Improved bandwidth will put the Internet on steroids, allowing instant access from anywhere to all the world's information, and blurring or obliterating the experienced distinction between virtual and physical reality.

• Designer materials better able to convert energy from the hot and unwieldy quanta (photons) Sol rains upon us into more convenient forms (chemical bonds) will power a new economy of abundance. Evolution in its patient blindness managed to develop photosynthesis; with mindful insight, we will do better.

As we thus augment our intelligence and our power, a sort of bootstrap may well come into play. We—or our machines, or our hybrid descendants—will acquire the wit and strength to design and construct still better minds and engines, in an ascending spiral.

Our creative mastery over matter, through quantum theory, is still embryonic. The best is yet to come. 
---
*This is established physics, independent of speculations about extra spatial dimensions (which are essentially classical).

Nobody eat animals — not the whole things. Most of us eat animal parts, with a few memorable culinary exceptions. And as we become more aware of the costs of meat — to our health, to our environments, and to the lives of the beings we consume — many of us wish to imagine the pieces apart from the wholes. The meat market obliges. It serves up slices disembodied, drained, and reassembled behind plastic, psychically sealed off from the syringe, saw blade, effluent pool, and all the other instruments of so-called husbandry. But of course this is just cynical illusion.

Imagine, though, that the illusion could come true. Imagine giving in to the human weakness for flesh, but without the growth hormones, the avian flu, the untold millions tortured and gone; imagine the voluptuous tenderness of muscle, finally freed from brutality. You are thinking of cultured meat or in vitro meat, and already it is becoming technologically feasible.

Research on several promising tissue-engineering techniques, being led by scientists in the Netherlands and the United States, has been accelerating since 2000, when NASA cultured goldfish meat as possible sustenance on space missions. Soon it will be within our means to stop farming animals and start growing meat. Call it carniculture.

With the coming of carniculture (a term found in science fiction literature, although, etymologically speaking, "carneculture" might be more correct), meat and other animal products can be made safe, nutritious, economical, energy efficient, and above all, morally defensible. While carniculture may not change everything in the same way agriculture changed everything, certainly it will transform our economy and our relationship to animals.

Grains once roamed free on untamed plains, tomatoes were wild berries in the Andes. And meat once grew on animals.

People want advice on how to get rich –and pay for it. Now how not to go bust does not appear to be valid advice –yet given that over time only a minority of companies do not go bust, avoiding death is the best possible –and most robust --advice. It is particularly good advice after your competitors get in trouble and you can go on legal pillages of their businesses. But few value such advice: this is the reason Wall Street quants, consultants, and investment managers are in business in spite of their charlatanic record. I was recently on TV and some "empty suit" kept bugging me for precise advice on how to pull out of the crisis. It was impossible to communicate my "what not to do" advice –or that my field is error avoidance not emergency room surgery, and that it could be a standalone discipline. Indeed I spent 12 years trying to explain that in many instances no models were better –and wiser –than the mathematical acrobatics we had in finance and it took a monumental crisis to convince people of the point.

Unfortunately such lack of rigor pervades the place where we expect it the least: institutional science. Science, particularly its academic version, never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertizing of its own limits — the reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports –following the right steps to become the "Einstein of Economics" or the "next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.

[In some instances we accept limit of knowledge trumpeting, say, Gödel's "breakthrough" mathematical limits –because it shows elegance in formulation and mathematical prowess – though the importance of such limit is dwarfed by our practical limits in forecasting climate changes, crises, social turmoil, or the fate of the endowment funds that will finance research of such future "elegant" limits].

Let's consider Medicine –which only started saving lives less than a century ago (I am generous), and to a lesser extent than initially advertised in the popular literature, as the drops in mortality seem to arise much more from awareness of sanitation and the (random) discovery of antibiotics rather than therapeutic contributions. Doctors, driven by the beastly illusion of control, spent a long time killing patients, not considering that "doing nothing" could be a valid option –and research compiled by my colleague Spyros Makridakis shows that they still do to some extent. Indeed practitioners who were conservative and considered the possibility of letting nature do its job, or stated the limit of our medical understanding were until the 1960s accused of "therapeutic nihilism". It was deemed so "unscientific" to decide on a course of action based on an incomplete understanding to the human body –to say this is the limit of where my body of knowledge stops.

The very term iatrogenic, i.e., harm caused by the healer, is not well spread -- I have never seen it used outside medicine. In spite of my lifelong obsession with what is called "type 2 error", or false positive, I was only introduced to the concept very recently thanks to a conversation with the essayist Bryan Appleyard. How can such a major idea remained hidden from our consciousness?  Even in medicine, that is, modern medicine, the ancient concept "do no harm"   sneaked-in very late. The philosopher of Science Georges Canguilhem wondered why it was not until the 1950s that the idea came to us. This, to me, is a mystery: how professionals can cause harm for such a long time in the name of knowledge and get away with it. 

Sadly, further investigation shows that these iatrogenics were mere rediscoveries after science got too arrogant by the enlightenment. Alas, once again, the elders knew better –Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs had a built-in respect for limits of knowledge. There is a treatise by the Medieval Arab philosopher and doctor Al-Ruhawi which betrays the familiarity of these Mediterranean cultures with iatrogenics. I have also in the past speculated that religion saved lives by taking the patient away from the doctor. You could satisfy your illusion of control by going to the Temple of Apollo rather than seeing the doctor. What is interesting is that the ancient Mediterraneans may have understood the trade-off very well and have accepted religion partly as a tool to tame such illusion of control.

I will conclude with the following statement: you cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it. Post enlightenment science, and its daughter superstar science, were lucky to have done well in (linear) physics, chemistry and engineering. But, at some point we need give up on elegance to focus on something that was given the short shrift for a very long time: the maps showing what current knowledge and current methods do not do for us; and a rigorous study of generalized scientific iatrogenics, what harm can be caused by science (or, better, an exposition of what harm has been done by science). I find it the most respectable of pursuits.

Game-changing scientific breakthroughs will come with the discovery of evolved psychological circuits for exploiting other humans—through cheating, free-riding, mugging, robbing, sexually deceiving, sexually assaulting, physically abusing, cuckolding, mate poaching, stalking, and murdering.  Scientists will discover that these exploitative resource acquisition adaptations contain specific design features that monitor statistically reliable cues to exploitable victims and opportunities. 

Convicted muggers who are shown videotapes of people walking down a New York City street show strong consensus about who they would choose as a mugging victim.  Chosen victims emit nonverbal cues, such as an uncoordinated gait or a stride too short or long for their height, indicative of ease of victimization.  These potential victims are high on muggability. Similarly, short stride length, shyness, and physical attractiveness provide reliable cues to sexual assaultability.  Future scientific breakthroughs will identify the psychological circuits of exploiters sensitive to victims who give off cues to cheatability, deceivability, rapeability, abusability, mate poachability,cuckoldability, stalkability, and killability; and to groups that emanate cues tofree-ridability and vanquishability.

This knowledge will offer the potential for developing novel defenses that reduce cheating, mugging, raping, robbing, stalking, mate poaching, murdering, and warfare.  On the other hand, because adaptations for exploitation co-evolve in response to defenses against exploitation, selection may favor the evolution of additional adaptations that circumvent these defenses.

Because evolution by selection is a relatively slow process, the acquisition of scientific knowledge about adaptations for exploitation may enable staying one step ahead of exploiters, and effectively short-circuit their strategies.  Some classes of crime will be curtailed. Cultural evolution, however, being fleeter than organic evolution, may enable the rapid circumvention of anti-exploitation defenses.  Defenses, in turn, favor novel strategies of exploitation.  Dissemination of discoveries about adaptations for exploitation and co-evolved defenses may change permanently the nature of social interaction.  Or perhaps, like some co-evolutionary arms races, these discoveries ultimately may change nothing at all.

Why this idea, that any state is not a good state unless there is growth, expansion, re-design...change?

It is deeply embedded in the human psyche to see any situation as mere momentary balance, just waiting for the inevitable change to happen. 
The one constant is always.... change.

However, for the larger scale of human lifetimes, change for change sake is not a worthy mantra. Sometimes stasis, the actual opposite of change, may be the harder achievement, the trickier challenge and yet the nobler cause.

The lengthy quest as we meander through the years is in my view really all about quality of life more than just riches, honors or power.

And there I question the role of society-at-large for me in my own private day-to-day cycles: I am not about to wait for any 'new world', no matter how 'brave', to guide my path towards a fulfilled life.

That differs from some of the learned brains in this distinguished forum: 
Straightforward answers are found in these pages: Climate catastrophy, extra terrestrial life and asteroid collisions are interspersed with solutions 'from the lab': meddling with genes, conjuring up super intelligence and nano-technology, waiting for the singularity of hard A.I., fearing insurgent robots or clamoring for infinite human life span.

Big themes, well said, but somehow...I end up shrugging my shoulders.

Is it that the real future has always turned out unimaginably different than any of the predictions ever offered ?!?  That all the descriptions going past a decade or so have always missed the core nature of the changes by a mile?
That all the descriptions going past a decade or so have always missed the core nature of the changes by a mile? 

My thesis summary: No need to go the far future to talk about change.
We are smack in the middle of it, and have been, for quite a while.

This decade, aptly called 'The Zero Years', already changed everything. The towering collapse of once hallowed personal freedom like mail, phone or banking secrecy was the mere start. 
Where global priorities like Aids research or space travel were allocated budgets in the low billions, we now poker casually with ten trillion to prop up one industry after the next. The very foundations are quivering.

It's not about politics - simply: no one foresaw the magnitude of change ten years ago that we are finding ourselves in the middle of right now. 
No need for an Apophis meteor to blast the planet.

But the theme "Change has already happened" can be positive as well.

It is a near impossibility to define quality of life, a deeply personal set of values, judgements and emotions. But in recent years there have been breakthroughs, a new sense of empowerment, a new degree of functionality for our tools: Research is now immensely powerful, fast, cheap and enjoyable, it used to be a slow, painful and expensive chore. To have the entirety of Britannica, Wikipedia, millions of pages of writings of all ages, find answers to almost any question in seconds, view them on a huge sharp window-to-the-world screen: a pure joy to "work".

Images: memories can be frozen in time, at any occasion, in beautiful detail, collected by the hundreds of thousands.
The few cineastic masterpieces mankind produced, among the wretched majority of trashy abyss, one can now own & watch, rerun & freeze-frame.
Music: all I ever cherished at my direct disposal, tens of thousands of pieces. Bach's lifetime oeuvre, 160 CDs worth, in my pocket even! Consider that just a few generations ago?

A perfect cup of tea, the right bread with great jam,
the Berlin Philharmonic plays NOW, just for ME, exactly THAT
....and will even pause when I pee! 
What more does anyone need ??

Billions of our predecessors would have spontaneously combusted with "instant happiness overdose syndrome" given all these wonderful means,
and I am not even mentioning heated rooms, lit at night, clean showers, safe food, ubiquitous mobility or dentists with anaesthesia.

To change everything should really equate to: let's bring this basic state to the billions of our co-inhabitants on this dystopic dirtball. Now! 
An end to the endless, senseless suffering is the most meaningful goal. Yes, indeed, let's change everything.

Will I see that in my lifetime? Well. I'll see the beginning. 
And there is an optimistic streak in me, hopeful about the human spirit to face insurmountable challenges.

Photonic solar paint that gathers free energy on any surface; transparent photovoltaic film to make every window in any house or vehicle into a steady energy source; general voltaics with 90% efficiency...
Splitting water into hydrogen with ease ( and then hook that to power a desalination machine which can feed the water.. ; ) 
Transmit power wirelessly (as MIT finally did, following Teslas cue).
Thin air "residual energy" batteries powering laptops and cellphones nearly infinitely.... all that is very close and will make an enormous difference - not just in Manhattan, London and Tokyo, but also in Ulaanbaatar, Irian Jaya or the Pantanal.

No need to invoke grand sweeping forces, momentous upheaval, those armies of nano-tech, gene-spliced A.I. robots...

Let's embrace the peace and quiet of keeping things just as they are for a while. Bring them to the rest of the planet. 
Taking the time to truly enjoy them, milking the moment for all it has, really watching, listening, smelling and tasting it all....
...that stasis.....
that changed everything.

Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in his essay "utopistics," about historical choices of the 21th century exploring what are possible better—not perfect—but better societies within the constraints of reality. We travel from dreams that were betrayed to a a world-system in structural crisis which is unpredictable and uncertain towards a new world system which goes beyond the limits of the 19th century paradigm of Liberal Capitalism.

In order to find a new sense of fulfillment, individually and collectively there will be a tendency towards increasing the number of de-commodified institutions. In Wallersteins words "instead of speaking about transforming hospitals and schools into profit-making institutions, let’s work it the other way. I think we move in the direction of de-commodifying a lot of things which we historically commodified. And this could be a very decentralized process. if you look at a lot of movements around the world, local and social movements, what they are objecting to in many ways is commodification." Examples are public libraries which are mostly free or free public galleries.

Artist Gustav Metzger who has pioneered alternative systems of production and circulation of art says " e transform these possibilities in a cooperative manner. We cannot radicalize enough against a radicalizing world. I see the possibility that artists will increasingly take over their own lives their own production in relation to society in a wider sense."

New structures of knowledge are an important aspect of new emerging world-systems. In the late eighteenth century the divorce happened between science and philosophy

Wallerstein says "What will change everything is to question it, to find a new, unified epistemology, whereas the "two cultures" were for 150 to 200 years centrifugal, complexity studies and cultural studies are centripetal, that is, moving towards each other."

English architect Cedric Price pioneered centripetal models of a transdisciplinary art centre and a transdiciplinary school in his visionary projects the Fun Palace and The Potteries Thinkbelt. This does not make him—and this is the paradox—a utopian architect. Much less than Archigram, for example, who has been interested in producing utopian drawings, Cedric Price took a pragmatic position and suggested engineering solutions. The Fun Palace was developed in the late sixties but remained unrealized and can best be described as a model for a trans-disciplinary cultural institution for the 21st Century. It was a complex comprised of various moveable facilities that gave shape to a set of ideas that theatre-producer Joan Littlewood had on how such a trans-disciplinary institution should work. The complex, according to Price, was made to enable self-participatory education and entertainment and was basically limited to a certain time and was seen as a university of the streets, which would be easy for people to visit and would also function as a test site.

Thus projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt applied many ideas of the Fun Palace to a school, a university. The Potteries Thinkbelt was preceded by the Atom project from 1969, which was an atomic education facility spread over a whole city. The education was not to be for one age-group but was seen as a continuous necessity for all members of the community. Thus, this place of learning for all included an industrial education showcase, a home-study station, open teach-toys, open-air servicing, life-conditioners, electronic audio-visual equipment—all of those elements in an atomic way spread over the city.

So the whole city would become what Price called, a "town-brain it set the foundations for the Potteries Thinkbelt, where Price’s research into simple architectural components that build a complex system reached a kind of a peak. There, he drew up not only the hardware, but also an entire program, a major project that had a lot to do with his discussions with the cybernetician Gordon Pask. It also had much to do with the effort to reuse the entire area of Northern Stafordshire, an area of the fading and waning British ceramics industry. This ceramics industry no longer used the railway lines or stations, so Price proposed to establish a university research facility which would be belt-shaped and would go through this whole area using this reactivated infrastructure.

The plan was for a university of about 20,000 students built on a network of rail and motorways, where different stations would become places of knowledge production and where permanent places could move. His was the idea of a "classroom on the move" where you would have all sorts of housing for professors, researchers and students: crates, sprawls, capsules…And when the existing infrastructure would not be enough there would also be inflatables designed by Price and which could be easily and swiftly added. 

The Potteries Thinkbelt and the Fun Palace remain unrealized, but can be revisited now, without the nostalgia of being "projects from the past." They can be seen as instruction models or recipes or triggers for artist and architects to engage with public space and reclaim public space in new and critical ways.

It is quite likely that we will at some point see people starting to make deliberate changes in the way the climate system works. When they do they will change the world — though not necessarily, or only, in the way that they intend to.

"Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

I expect to see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few are going to start to freak out. Some of those who freak will have money to spend, and with money and the participation of a larger cadre of researchers, the science and engineering required for the serious assessment of various geoengineering schemes might be developed fairly quickly.

Why do I think those attempts will change the world? Geoengineering is not, after all, a panacea. It cannot precisely cancel out the effects of greenhouse gases, and it is likely to have knock on effects on the hydrological cycle which may well not be welcome. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs, the best-case outcome is unlikely to be more than a period of grace in which the most excessive temperature changes are held at bay. Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will continue to be necessary. In part that is because of the problem of ocean acidification, and in part because a lower carbon-dioxide climate is vastly preferable to one that stays teetering on the brink of disaster for centuries, requiring constant tinkering to avoid teetering over into greenhouse hellishness.

So geoengineering would not "solve" climate change. Nor would it be an unprecedented human intervention into the earth system. It would be a massive thing to undertake, but hardly more momentous in absolute terms than our replacement of natural ecosystems with farmed ones; our commandeering of the nitrogen cycle; the wholesale havoc we have wrought on marine food webs; or the amplification of the greenhouse effect itself.

But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. It is that it does so on purpose. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their environment will have changed profoundly. The line separating the natural from the artificial is itself an artifice, and one that changes with time. But this change, different in scale and not necessarily reversible, might finish off the idea of the natural as a place or time or condition that could ever be returned to. This would not be the "end of nature" — but it would be the end of a view of nature that has great power, and without which some would feel bereft. The clouds and the colours of the noon-time sky and of the setting sun will feel different if they have become, to some extent, a matter of choice.

And that choice is itself another aspect of the great change: Who chooses, and how? All climate change, whether intentional or not, has different outcomes for different regions, and geoengineering is in many ways just another form of climate change. So for some it will likely make the situation worse. If it does, does that constitute an act of war? An economic offence for which others will insist that reparations should be made? Just one of those things that the stronger do to the weaker?

Critics of geoengineering approaches are right to stress this governance problem. Where they tend to go wrong is in ignoring the fact that we already have a climate governance problem: the mechanisms currently in place to "avoid dangerous climate change", as the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change puts it, have not so far delivered the goods. A system conceived with geoengineering in mind would need to be one that held countries to the consequences of their actions in new ways, and that might strengthen and broaden approaches to emissions reduction, too. But there will always be an asymmetry, and it is an important one. To do something about emissions a significant number of large economies will have to act in concert. Geoengineering can be unilateral. Any medium sized nation could try it.

In this, as in other ways, geoengineering issues look oddly like nuclear issues. There, too, a technological stance by a single nation can have global consequences. There, too, technology has reset the boundaries of the natural in ways that can provoke a visceral opposition. There, too, there is a discourse of transcendence and a tendency to hubris that need to be held in check. And there, too, the technology has brought with it dreams of new forms of governance. In the light of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many saw some sort of world government as a moral imperative, an historical necessity, or both. It turned out not to be, and the control of nuclear weapons and ambitions has remained an ad hoc thing, a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action that is unsatisfactory in many ways though not, as yet, a complete failure. A geoengineered world may end up governed in a similarly piecemeal way — and bring with it a similar open-ended risk of destabilisation, and even disaster.

The world has inertia and complexity. It changes, and it can be changed — but not always quickly, and not necessarily controllably, and not all at once. But within those constraints geoengineering will bring changes, and it will do so intentionally. And that intentional change in the relationship between people and planet might be the biggest change of all.

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!" He was writing about the telegraph, but today we make essentially the same observation about the Internet.

One might suppose that, with all its zillions of transistors and billions of human minds, the world brain would be thinking some pretty profound thoughts. There is little evidence that this is so. Today's Internet functions mostly as a giant communications and storage system, accessed by individual humans. Although much of human knowledge is represented in some form within the machine, it is not yet represented in a form that is particularly meaningful to the machine. For the most part, the Internet knows no more about the information it handles than the telephone system knows about the conversations that take place over its lines. Most of those zillions of transistors are either doing something very trivial or nothing at all, and most of those billions of human minds are doing their own thing.

If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital. Its brain is composed not only of the human buyers and sellers, but also of the trading programs on Wall Street and of the economic models of the central banks. The wires "vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time" are not just carrying messages between human minds, they are participating in the decisions of the world mind as a whole. This unconscious system is the world's hindbrain.

I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism's own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient. Although it has been supercharged by technology, growing in speed and capacity, it has grown little in sophistication. This global hindbrain is subject to mood swings and misjudgments, leading to economic depressions, panics, witch-hunts, and fads. It can be influenced by propaganda and by advertising. It is easily misled. As vital as the hindbrain is for survival, it is not very bright.

What the world mind really needs is a forebrain, with conscious goals, access to explicit knowledge, and the ability to reason and plan. A world forebrain would need the capacity to perceive collectively, to decide collectively, and to act collectively. Of these three functions, our ability to act collectively is the most developed.

For thousands of years we have understood methods for breaking a goal into sub-goals that can be accomplished by separate teams, and for recursively breaking them down again and again until they can be accomplished by individuals. This management by hierarchy scales well. I can imagine that the construction of the pyramids was a celebration of its discovery. The hierarchical teams that built these monuments were an extension of the pharaoh's body, the pyramid a dramatic demonstration of his power to coordinate the efforts of many. Pyramid builders had to keep their direct reports within shouting distance, but electronic communication has allowed us to extend our virtual bodies, literally corporations, to a global scale. The Internet has even allowed such composite action to organize itself around an established goal, without the pharaoh. The Wikipedia is our Great Pyramid.

The collective perception of the world mind is also relatively well developed. The most important recent innovations have been search and recommendation engines, which combine the inputs of humans with machine algorithms to produce a useful result. This is another area where scale helps. Many eyes and many judgments are combined into a collective perception that is beyond the scope of any individual. The weak point is that the result of all this collective perception is just a recommendation list. For the world mind to truly perceive, it will need a way of sharing more general forms of knowledge, in a format that can be understood by both humans and machines. Various new companies are beginning to do just that.

What is still missing is the ability for a group of people (or people and machines) to make collective decisions with intelligence greater than the individual. This can sometimes be accomplished in small groups through conversation, but the method does not scale well. Generally speaking, technology has made the conversation larger, but not smarter. For large groups, the state-of-the-art method for collective decision-making is still the vote. Voting only works to the degree that, on average, each voter is able to individually determine the right decision. This is not good enough. We need an intelligence that will scale with the size of our problems.

So this is the development that will make a difference: a method for groups of people and machines to work together to make decisions in a way that takes advantage of scale. With such a scalable method for collective decision-making, our zillions of transistors and billions of brains can be used to advantage, giving the collective mind a way to focus our collective actions. Given this, we will finally have access to intelligence greater than our own. The world mind will finally have a forebrain, and this will change everything.

My job is to design and build quantum computers, computers that store and process information at the level of individual atoms. Even at the current rapid rates of progress of current computer technology, with the computer components halving in size every two years or less, and computers doubling in power over the same time, quantum computers should not be available for forty years. Yet we are building simple quantum computers today. I could tell you that quantum computers will drastically change the way the world works during our lifetime. But I'm not going to do that, for the simple reason that I have no idea whether it's true or not.

Whether or not they change the world, quantum computers have something to offer to all of us. When they flip those atomic bits to perform their computations, quantum computers possess a several useful features. It's well known that quantum computers, properly programmed, afford their users privacy and anonymity guaranteed by the laws of physics. A less well-known virtue of quantum computers is that everything that they do, they can undo as well. This ability is built into quantum computers at the level of fundamental physical law. At their most microscopic level, the laws of physics are reversible: what goes forward can go backward. (By contrast, at the more macroscopic scales at which classical computers operate, the second law of thermodynamics kicks in, and what is done cannot be undone.) Because they operate at the level of individual atoms, quantum computers inherit those atoms' ability to undo the present, and recall the past.

While quantum computers afford their users protection and anonymity that classical computers cannot, even classical computers can be programmed to share this ability to erase regret, although they currently are not. Although classical computers dissipate heat and operate in and a physically irreversible way, they can still function in a logically reversible fashion: properly programmed, they can un-perform any computation that they can perform. We already see a hint of this digital nostalgia in hard-disk 'time machines,' which restore a disk to its state in an earlier, pre-crash era.

Suppose that we were to put this ability of computers to run the clock backward to the service of undoing not merely our accidental erasures and unfortunate viral infections, but to undoing financial transactions that were conducted under fraudulent conditions? Credit card companies already supply us with protection against theft conducted in our name. Why should not more important financial transactions be similarly guaranteed? Contracts for home sales, stock deals, and credit default swaps are already recorded and executed digitally. What would happen if combined digital finance with reversible computation?

For example, if a logically reversible computer—quantum or classical—were used to record a financial contract and to execute its terms, then at some later point, if the parties were not satisfied with the way those terms were executed, then those terms could be 'un-executed,' any money disbursed, reimbursed, and the contract deleted, as if it had never been. Since finance is already digital, why not introduce a digital time machine: let's agree now that when the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we'll restore everything to a better, earlier time, before we clicked those inauspicious buttons and brought on the blue screen of financial death.

Can it be done? The laws of physics and computation say yes. But what about the laws of human nature? The financial time machine erases profits as well as losses. Will hedge fund managers and Ponzi schemers sign on to turn back the clock if schemes go awry, even if it means that their gains, well-gotten or ill-, will be restored to their clients/victims? If they refuse to agree, then you don't have to give them your money.

I make no predictions, but the laws of physics have been around for a long time. Meanwhile, the only true 'law' of human nature is its intrinsic adaptability. Microscopic reversibility is the way that Nature does business. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from Her to change the way that we do business.

If we understand our minds as we understand the physical world — that will change everything.

Because I've been writing about the history of a particular form of mental activity, I've been especially aware of the limits of what we know about the brain and the mind, this new entrant on the stage of science. Think about it: what we know about the human mind comes from data gathered for little over a hundred years. In actuality, only since mid 20th century do we have anything approximating the sort of activity that we would call a science of the mind. For a half century's work we've done pretty well, but the bald fact is that we have almost no understanding of how the thing that affects all aspects of our lives does its work. The state of our decision making — whether it is about global warming or the human genome, about big bailouts on Wall Street or microfinancing in Asia, about single payer healthcare or not — is what it is because the machine that does all the heavy lifting is something we barely understand. Would we trust the furnace in our house if we understood it as little?

I anticipate that many of the viable candidates for "everything changers" will be striking single events such as encountering new intelligent life, the ability to live forever, and a permanent solution to the problem of the environment. Indeed, any of these will produce enormous change and deserves to be on the list. But if we are to take seriously the question of what will change "everything", then the candidate really has to be something that underlies all other changes, and hence my candidate remains understanding the mind.

From the little we do know, we can say that good people (we, us) are capable of incredible harm to others and even themselves. That daily moral decisions we make are not based on the principles of justice that we think they are, but are often a result of the familiarity and similarity of the other to oneself. These two simple types of bias happen because the mind and its workings remain invisible to us and until we unmask it meanderings, the disparity between what we do and what we think we do will remain murky.

That we have spent no more than a few decades of our entire history scrutinizing the mind should be both frightening and give hope. Whether the question is how we will deal with new life forms when we encounter them, or how we will design our lives as we prepare to live forever, or how we will generate the courage to stop environmental devastation, understanding the mind will change everything.

Currently, the most keenly awaited technological development is an all-purpose artificial intelligence — perhaps even an intelligence that would revise itself and grow at an ever-accelerating rate, until it enacts millennial transformations. Since the invention of artificial minds seventy years ago, computer scientists have felt on the verge of building a generally intelligent machine. Yet somehow this goal, like the horizon, keeps retreating as fast as it is approached. In contrast, we think that an all-purpose artificial intelligence will — for the foreseeable future — remain elusive. But understanding why will unlock other revolutions.

AI's wrong turn? Assuming that the best methods for reasoning and thinking — for true intelligence — are those that can be applied successfully to any content. Equip a computer with these general methods, input some facts to apply them to, increase hardware speed, and a dazzlingly high intelligence seems fated to emerge. Yet one never materializes, and achieved levels of general AI remain too low to meaningfully compare to human intelligence.

But powerful natural intelligences do exist. How do native intelligences — like those found in humans — operate? With few exceptions, they operate by being specialized. They break off small but biologically important fragments of the universe (predator-prey interactions, color, social exchange, physical causality, alliances, genetic kinship, etc.) and engineer different problem-solving methods for each. Evolution tailors computational hacks that work brilliantly, by exploiting relationships that exist only in its particular fragment of the universe (the geometry of parallax gives vision a depth cue; an infant nursed by your mother is your genetic sibling; two solid objects cannot occupy the same space). These native intelligences are dramatically smarter than general reasoning because natural selection equipped them with radical short cuts. These bypass the endless possibilities that general intelligences get lost among. Our mental programs can be fiendishly well-engineered to solve some problems, because they are not limited to using only those strategies that can be applied to all problems.

Lessons from evolutionary psychology indicate that developing specialized intelligences — artificial idiot savants — and networking them would achieve a mosaic AI, just as evolution gradually built natural intelligences. The essential activity is discovering sets of principles that solve a particular family of problem. Indeed, successful scientific theories are examples of specialized intelligences, whether implemented culturally among communities of researchers or implemented computationally in computer models. Similarly, adding duplicates of the specialized programs we discover in the human mind to the emerging AI network would constitute a tremendous leap toward AI. Essentially, for this aggregating intelligence to communicate with humans — for it to understand what we mean by a question or want by a request, it will have to become equipped with accurate models of the native intelligences that inhabit human minds.

Which brings us to another impending transformation: rapid and sustained progress in understanding natural minds.

For decades, evolutionary psychologists have been devoted to perpetrating the great reductionist crime — working to create a scientific discipline that progressively maps the evolved universal human mind/brain — the computational counterpart to the human genome. The goal of evolutionary psychology has been to create high resolution maps of the circuit logic of each of the evolved programs that together make up human nature (anger, incest avoidance, political identification, understanding physical causality, guilt, intergroup rivalry, coalitional aggression, status, sexual attraction, magnitude representation, predator-prey psychology, etc.). Each of these is an intelligence specialized to solve its class of ancestral problems.

The long-term ambition is to develop a model of human nature as precise as if we had the engineering specifications for the control systems of a robot. Of course, both theory and evidence indicate that the programming of the human is endlessly richer and subtler than that of any foreseeable robot.

Still, how might a circuit map of human nature radically change the situation our species finds itself in?

Humanity will continue to be blind slaves to the programs that evolution has built into our brains until we drag them into the light. Ordinarily, we only inhabit the versions of reality they spontaneously construct for us — the surfaces of things. Because we are unaware we are in a theater, with our roles and our lines largely written for us by our mental programs, we are credulously swept up in these plays (such as the genocidal drama of us versus them). Endless chain reactions among these programs leave us the victims of history — embedded in war and oppression, enveloped in mass delusions and cultural epidemics, mired in endless negative sum conflict.

If we understand these programs and the coordinated hallucinations they orchestrate in our minds, our species could awaken from the roles these programs assign to us. Yet this cannot happen if this knowledge — like quantum mechanics — remains forever locked up in the minds of a few specialists, walled off by the years of study required to master it.

Which brings us to another interlinked transformation, which could solve this problem.

If a concerted effort were made, we could develop methods for transferring bodies of understanding — intellectual mastery — far more rapidly, cheaply, and efficiently than we do now. Universities still use medieval (!) techniques (lecturing) to noisily, haphazardly and partially transfer fragments of 21st century disciplines, taking many years and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per transfer per person. But what if people could spend four months with a specialized AI — something immersive, interactive, all-absorbing and video game-like, and emerge with a comprehensive understanding of physics, or materials science, or evolutionary psychology? To achieve this, technological, scientific, and entertainment innovations in several dozen areas would be integrated: Hollywood post-production techniques, the compulsively attention-capturing properties of emerging game design, nutritional cognitive enhancement, a growing map of our evolved programs (and their organs of understanding), an evolutionary psychological approach to entertainment, neuroscience-midwived brain-computer interfaces, rich virtual environments, and 3D imaging technologies. Eventually, conceptual education will become intense, compelling, searingly memorable, and ten times faster.

A Gutenberg revolution in disseminating conceptual mastery would change everything, and — not least — would allow our species to achieve widespread scientific self-understanding. We could awaken from ancient nightmares.

What will change everything? The question itself and many of the answers already given by others here on Edge.org point to a common theme: reflective, scientific investigation of everything is going to change everything. When we look closely at looking closely, when we increase our investment in techniques for increasing our investment in techniques... for increasing our investment in techniques, we create non-linearities, — like Doug Hofstadter's strange loops — that amplify uncertainties, allowing phenomena that have heretofore been orderly and relatively predictable to escape our control. We figure out how to game the system, and this initiates an arms race to control or prevent the gaming of the system, which leads to new levels of gamesmanship and so on.

The snowball has started to roll, and there is probably no stopping it. Will the result be a utopia or a dystopia? Which of the novelties are self-limiting, and which will extinguish institutions long thought to be permanent? There is precious little inertia, I think, in cultural phenomena once they are placed in these arms races of cultural evolution. Extinction can happen overnight, in some cases. The almost frictionless markets made possible by the internet are already swiftly revolutionizing commerce.

Will universities and newspapers become obsolete? Will hospitals and churches go the way of corner grocery stores and livery stables? Will reading music soon become as arcane a talent as reading hieroglyphics? Will reading and writing themselves soon be obsolete? What will we use our minds for? Some see a revolution in our concept of intelligence, either because of "neurocosmetics" (Marcel Kinsbourne) or quantum-computing (W. H. Hoffman), or "just in time storytelling" (Roger Schank). Nick Humphrey reminds us that when we get back to basics — procreating, eating, just staying alive — not that much has changed since Roman times, but I think that these are not really fixed points after all.

Our species' stroll through Design Space is picking up speed. Recreational sex, recreational eating, and recreational perception (hallucinogens, alcohol), have been popular since Roman times, but we are now on the verge of recreational self-transformations that will dwarf the modifications the Romans indulged in. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure — packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity.

Some day all semiconductors will break down and therefore all computers as, besides historic instruments no computers exist today which are nor based on semiconductor technology. The breakdown will be caused by a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by a nucler explosion outside Earth's athmosphere. It will cover large areas on Earth up to the size of a continent. Where it will happen is unpredictable. But it will happen since it is exteremely unlikely that we will be able to get rid of all nuclear weapons and the probabilty for it to happen at any given time will never be zero.

The implications of such an event will be enormous. If it happens to one of our technology based societies literally everything will break down. You will realize that none your phones does work. There is no way to find out via the internet what happened. Your car will not start anymore as it is also controlled by computer chips, unless you are lucky to own an antique car. Your local supermarket is unable to get new supplies.There will be no trucks operating anymore, no trains, no elctricity, no water supplies Society will completely break down.

There will be small exceptions in those countries where military equipment has been hardened against EMPs making the army available for emrgency relief. In some countires even some emergency civilian infrastructure has been hardened against EMPs. But these are exceptions as most goverments simply ignore that danger.

Credit crunches happen because of too much credit and too many bad debts. Credit is literally belief, from the Latin credo, "I believe." Once confidence ebbs, the loss of trust is self-reinforcing. The game changes.

Something similar is happening with materialism. Since the nineteenth century, its advocates have promised that science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry; science will show that there is no God and no purpose in the universe; it will reveal that God is a delusion inside human minds and hence in human brains; and it will prove that brains are nothing but complex machines.

Materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem their promises, turning their beliefs into facts. Meanwhile, they live on credit. The philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper described this faith as "promissory materialism" because it depends on promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Despite all the achievements of science and technology, it is facing an unprecedented credit crunch.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. They had just cracked the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take development, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of the nematode worm Caenorhabdytis. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but "to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism."

He failed. So did Brenner. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. However, among researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. For example, Steven Lehar argues that inside our heads there must be a miniaturized virtual-reality full-colour three-dimensional replica of the world. When we look at the sky, the sky is in our heads. Our skulls are beyond the sky. Others, like the psychologist Max Velmans, argue that virtual reality displays are not confined to our brains; they are life-sized, not miniaturized. Our visual perceptions are outside our skulls, just where they seem to be.

The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem" of consciousness because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, for example, the quality of redness is still unaccounted for.

In biology and psychology the credit-rating of materialism is falling fast. Can physics inject new capital? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not nineteenth-century theories of matter. But physicalism's credit-rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons.

First, some physicists argue that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers; hence minds cannot be reduced to physics, because physics presupposes minds

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, superstring and M theories, with 10 and 11 dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory. They are a very shaky foundation for materialism, physicalism or any other pre-established belief system. They are pointing somewhere new.

Third, the known kinds of matter and energy constitute only about 4% of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of 96% of reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the cosmological anthropic principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? Some cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.

In the eyes of skeptics, the multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam's Razor, the principle that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. But even so, it does not succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.

Here on Earth we are facing climate change, great economic uncertainty, and cuts in science funding. Confidence in materialism is draining away. Its leaders, like central bankers, keep printing promissory notes, but it has lost its credibility as the central dogma of science. Many scientists no longer want to be 100% invested in it.

Materialism's credit crunch changes everything. As science is liberated from this nineteenth-century ideology, new perspectives and possibilities will open up, not just for science, but for other areas of our culture that are dominated by materialism. And by giving up the pretence that the ultimate answers are already known, the sciences will be freer—and more fun.

Green oil is the development that will utterly change the world and it will arrive in the next few decades.

Oil that we take out of the ground and burn is going to be replaced by oil that we grow. Bio-fuels based on corn are our first effort to grow green oil but they have clearly not succeeded. Current bio-fuels take too much land and too much energy to grow and too much of that energy goes into building parts of a plant that we can't easily convert into fuel. The answer will come from simple, engineered organisms that can soak up energy in a vat in any sunny spot and turn that sunlight straight into a precursor for fuel, preferably a precursor that can go straight into an existing oil refinery that can turn out gasoline.

The impacts of such a development are staggering. The power balance of the world will be completely changed. Petro-dictatorships, where an endless flow of oil money keeps the population quiet, will no longer be able to look forward to oil at $50, $100, $150 and so on a barrel as oil supplies tighten. Power will be back in the hands of innovators rather than resource owners. The quest for dirty oil in remote and sensitive parts of the world, whether the Arctic or the Alberta tar sands, will not make economic sense and the environment will gain. The burning of gasoline in automobiles will no longer add much to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as the fuel will have soaked up an almost equal amount of carbon dioxide while it was being grown. The existing networks for delivering fuel to transportation (the 100,000 gas station in the US for example) won't become redundant as they would if we switched to electric autos, making plans for cutting emissions much less difficult.

Will the green oil come from algae, bacteria, archaea or something else? I don't know. Oil is a natural product arising from the transformation of plant material created by the capture of light. As it is a transformation in nature we can replicate it, not necessarily directly, but to arrive at a similar result. It is not magic.

Scientists around the world have seen the prize and hundreds of millions are going into start-up companies. There is a nice twist to this line of investment. Despite the ups and downs, the long-term trend for the price of oil is up. That means the size of the prize for replacing oil is going up while the size of the challenge is going down. Replacing $20-a-barrel oil would be difficult but replacing $100 oil is much easier.

There is an old saying: "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. Someone came up with a better idea". The better idea is coming.

"The power set free from the atom has changed everything, except our ways of thinking." So said Einstein. Whether or not he foresaw the total destruction of the world, the thought gave rise to a joke, albeit a sick one, that humans would never make contact with civilizations in other parts of the universe. Either those civilizations were not advanced enough to decode our signals or they were more advanced than us, had developed nuclear weapons and had destroyed themselves. The chances would be vanishingly small that their brief window of time between technological competence and oblivion would coincide with ours.

I never understood the policy of deterrence that justified the nuclear arms race. The coherence of such a view depended utterly on the maintenance of human rationality. Suppose that people whose concern for personal safety or thought for others was subordinated to religious or ideological belief ruled a country in possession of nuclear weapons. The whole notion of deterrence collapses.

I usually regard myself as an optimist. Tomorrow will be better than to-day. My naïve confidence has been dented by advancing age and by the growing number of reality checks that point to trouble ahead. Even if the red mists of anger or insanity do not unleash the total destruction of our way of life, the prognosis for the survival of human civilization is not good. However much we believe in technical fixes that will overcome the problems of diminishing resources, the planet is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who inhabit it and by the conceit that economic growth for everybody is the only route to well-being. The uncontrolled greed of the developed world has taken a sharp knock in the recent credit crunch, but how do you persuade affluent people to accept an overall reduction in their standard of living? Which government of any stripe is going to risk its future by enforcing the unpopular policies that are already needed? On this front the prognosis might not be too bad since crises do bring about change.

The Yom Kippur war of 1973 led to a dramatic reduction in the oil supply and, in the UK, petrol rationing was swiftly introduced and everybody was required to save fuel by driving no more than 50 mph. The restraint disappeared, of course, as soon as the oil started to flow again, but the experience showed that people will uncomplainingly change their behavior when they are required to do so and understand the justification.

Growth of the human population must be one of the major threats to sustainability of resources such as drinking water and food. Here again the prognosis does not have to be wholly bad if far-sighted wisdom prevailed. If the GDP of each country of the world is plotted on graph paper against average family size in that country, the correlation is almost perfectly negative. (The outliers provided by rich countries with large average family sizes are almost exclusively those places in which women are treated badly.) The evidence suggests that if we wished to take steps to reduce population growth, every effort should be made to boost the GDP of the poorest countries of the world. This is an example were economic growth in some countries and overall benefit to the world could proceed hand in hand, but the richest countries would have to pay the price.

Another darker thought is that human population might be curbed by its own stupidity and cupidity. I am not now thinking of conflict but of the way in which endocrine disruptors are poured unchecked into the environment. Suddenly males might be feminized by the countless number of artificial products that simulate the action of female hormone. Sufficiently so that reproduction becomes impossible. For some the irony would be delicious. The ultimate feed-back mechanism, unforeseen by Malthus, that places a limit on the growth of the human population.

Sustainability is the goal that we pass onto the next generation the resources (or some equivalent) that we received from our forbears. It may be a pipe dream, given the way we think.

What will change everything? The replacement of 90% of America's teachers at every level with parent-chosen, cloud-resident "learning tracks"; the end of conventional centralized, age-stratified schools & their replacement by local cluster-rooms where a few dozen children of all ages & IQs gather under the supervision of any trustworthy adult; where each child follows his own "learning track" at his own level & rate, but all kids in the cluster do playtime and gym-type activities together.

Thus primary & secondary education becomes radically localized & delocalized simultaneously. All children go to a nearby cluster room, & mix there with other children of all ages & interests from this neighborhood: radical localization (or re-localization, the return of the little red schoolhouse). But each child follows a learning-track prepared & presented by the best teachers and thinkers anywhere in the nation or the world. Local schools become cheap and flexible (doesn't matter whether 10 children or 50 show up, so long as there are enough machines to go around--& that will be easy). Perhaps 80+ % of school funding goes straight to the production of learning tracks, which accumulate in a growing worldwide library.

This inversion of education has bad properties as well as good: it's much easier to learn from a good teacher face-to-face than from any kind of software. But the replacement of schools by tracks-and-clusters is the inevitable, unstoppable, take-it-or-leave-it response to educational collapse in the US. "A nation at risk" appeared in 1983. Americans have known for a full generation that their schools are collapsing—& have failed even to make a dent in the problem. If anything, today's schools are worse than 1983's. Tracks-&-clusters is no perfect solution—but radical change is coming, & cloud-based, parent-chosen tracks with local cluster-rooms are all but inevitable as the (radical) next step.

None of today's software frameworks for online learning is adequate. New software must make it easy for parents & children to see & evaluate each track as a whole, give learners control over learning, integrate multimedia smoothly, include students in a net-wide discussion of each topic & put them in touch with (human) teachers as needed. Must also make it easy for parents & "guidance teachers" to evaluate each child's progress. It's all easily done with current technology—if software design is taken seriously.

Any person or group can offer a learning track at any level, on any topic. The usual consumer-evaluation mechanisms will help parents & students choose: government & private organizations will review learning tracks, comment & mark them "approved" or not. Suggested curricula will proliferate on the net. Anybody will be free to offer his services as a personal learning consultant.

Track-and-clusters poses many problems (& suggests many solutions). It represents the inevitable direction of education in the US not because it solves every problem, but because the current system is intellectually bankrupt—not merely today's schools & school districts but the whole system of government funding, local school boards & budget votes, approved textbooks., nation-wide educational fads & so on. It's all ripe for the trash, & on its way out. US schools will change radically because (& only because) they must change radically. Ten years from now the move to clusters-&-tracks will be well underway.

A serial killer is on the loose! A suicide bomber! Beware the West Nile Virus! Although headline-grabbing scares are better at generating fear, boring old cancer is more likely to do you in. Although you have less than a 1% chance per year to get it, live long enough, and it has a good chance of getting you in the end. As does accidental nuclear war.

During the half-century that we humans have been tooled up for nuclear Armageddon, there has been a steady stream of false alarms that could have triggered all-out war, with causes ranging from computer malfunction, power failure and faulty intelligence to to navigation error, bomber crash and satellite explosion. Gradual declassification of records has revealed that some of them carried greater risk than was appreciated at the time. For examples, it became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine which was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.

Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk has arguably grown in recent years. Inaccurate but powerful ICBMs undergirded the "mutual assured destruction" stability, because a first strike could not prevent massive retaliation. The shift toward more accurate missile navigation, shorter flight times and better enemy submarine tracking erodes this stability. A successful missile defense system would complete this erosion process. Both Russia and the US retain their "launch-on-warning" strategy, requiring launch decisions to be made on 5-15 minute timescales where complete information may be unavailable. On January 25 1995, Russian President Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a recent US project to replace the nuclear warheads on 2 of the 24 D5 ICBMs carried by Trident Submarines by conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea: Russian early warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possibilities for unfortunate misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas.

But why worry? Surely, if push came to shove, reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just like they have in the past?

Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate countermeasures in place, just like our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens — Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear comedy "Dr. Strangelove" illustrates this with a triple coincidence.

Accidental nuclear war between two superpowers may or may not happen in my lifetime, but if it does, it will obviously change everything. The climate change we are currently discussing pales in comparison with nuclear winter, and the current economic turmoil is of course nothing compared to the resulting global crop failures, infrastructure collapse and mass starvation, with survivors succumbing to hungry armed gangs systematically pillaging from house to house. Do I expect to see this in my lifetime? I'd give it about 30%, putting it roughly on par with me getting cancer. Yet we devote way less attention and resources to reducing this risk than we do for cancer.

The fashionable phrase "game-changing" can imply not only winning a game (usually with a dramatic turnaround), but also changing the rules of the game. If we could change the rules of the mind, we would alter our perception of the world, which would change everything (at least for humans). Assuming that the brain is the organ of the mind, what are the brain's rules, and how might we transcend them? Technological developments that combine neurophenomics with targeted stimulation will offer answers within the next century.

In contrast to genomics, less talk (and funding) has been directed towards phenomics. Yet, phenomics is the logical endpoint of genomics (and a potential bottleneck for clinical applications). Phenomics has traditionally focused on a broad range of individual characteristics including morphology, biochemistry, physiology, and behavior. "Neurophenomics," however, might more specifically focus on patterns of brain activity that generate behavior. Advances in brain imaging techniques over the past two decades now allow scientists to visualize changes in the activity of deep-seated brain regions at a spatial resolution of less than a millimeter and a temporal resolution of less than a second. These technological breakthroughs have sparked an interdisciplinary revolution that will culminate in the mapping of a "neurophenome." The neural patterns of activity that make up the neurophenome may have genetic and epigenetic underpinnings, but can also respond dynamically to environmental contingencies. The neurophenome should link more closely than behavior to the genome, could have one-to-many or many-to-one mappings to behavior, and might ideally explain why groups of genes and behaviors tend to travel together. Although mapping the neurophenome might sound like a hopelessly complex scientific challenge, emerging research has begun to reveal a number of neural signatures that reliably index not only the obvious starting targets of sensory input and motor output, but also more abstract mental constructs like anticipation of gain, anticipation of loss, self-reflection, conflict between choices, impulse inhibition, and memory storage / retrieval (to name but a few...). By triangulating across different brain imaging modalities, the neurophenome will eventually point us towards spatially, temporally, and chemically specific targets for stimulation.

Targeted neural stimulation has been possible for decades, starting with electrical methods, and followed by chemical methods. Unfortunately, delivery of any signal to deep brain regions is usually invasive (e.g., requiring drilling holes in the skull and implanting wires or worse), unspecific (e.g., requiring infusion of neutoransmitter over minutes to distributed regions), and often transient (e.g., target structures die or protective structures coat foreign probes). Fortunately, better methods are on the horizon. In addition to developing ever smaller and more temporally precise electrical and chemical delivery devices, scientists can now nearly instantaneously increase or decrease the firing of specific neurons with light probes that activate photosensitive ion channels. As with the electrical and chemical probes, these light probes can be inserted into the brains of living animals and change ongoing behavior. But at present, scientists still have to insert invasive probes into the brain. What if one could deliver the same spatially and temporally targeted bolus of electricity, chemistry, or even light to a specific brain location without opening the skull? Such technology does not yet exist — but given the creativity, brilliance, and pace of recent scientific advances, I expect that relevant tools will emerge in the next decade (e.g., imagine the market for "triangulation helmets"...). Targeted and hopefully noninvasive stimulation, combined with the map that comprises the neurophenome, will revolutionize our ability to control our minds.

Clinical implications of this type of control are straightforward, yet startling. Both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy look like blunt instruments by comparison. Imagine giving doctors or even patients the ability to precisely and dynamically control the firing of acetylcholine neurons in the case of dementia, dopamine neurons in the case of Parkinson's disease, or serotonin neurons in the case of unipolar depression (and so on...). These technological developments will not only improve clinical treatment, but will also advance scientific theory. Along with applications designed to cure will come demands for applications that aim to enhance. What if we could precisely but noninvasively modulate mood, alertness, memory, control, willpower, and more? Of course, everyone wants to win the brain game. But are we ready for the rules to change?

When scientists realize that they have failed to produce technological advances that improve or assure the most important of our brain’s abilities, empathy, it will start to allow us to accept the actual limitations of our bodies and enable us to accept our physicality.

That the body is our biggest single problem is no doubt. What we have to do to keep it fed, sheltered, clothed and reproducing has shaped everything we have invented, built and killed for.

We are blessed with a mind of extraordinary powers and we are cursed because that mind is housed in a less than extraordinary container. This has been a source of great discomfort to us all along. We have continually invented more powerful devices to enhance our sensory perceptions. We now have eyesight that can see objects billions of light years away. We can see color spectrums way beyond our natural eye’s ability to do so. We can see within as well as out. We can hear almost as far as we can see and we have learned how to throw our voices such great distances that people around the world can hear us. We can fly and we can move about underwater as if we lived there. We have tended to preference transportation and communication over our other sense experiences: touch, smell, and taste. (It probably bears looking into this discrepancy as to why this should be.)

And, of course, there is mortality. Ah, Death, you son of a bitch. You and your brothers, Disease and Aging, have tormented us since we became aware of Time. And we have worked like crazy trying to develop ways of extending Time so as to hold off the inevitable. We have even broken down Time into such miniscule units as to fool ourselves into believing it is endless.

Most scientific advancements focus on rapid repair of malfunctioning parts, most currently using robotic replacements or ever-more precise chemical interventions, or ways of expanding the sensory capabilities through technologies implanted in the brain.

One could say that these "game changers" are technologies for body enhancement. Lower forms of this techno-wish are what fuel the beauty industry.

Leave it to the Scientists, so caught up in their research, to miss the big picture. Either they take for granted that the reasons that motivate the questioning and the technologies they develop will not only contain its original impetus but will make it explicit. Or they believe that technological development will transcend its own impetus and render those expressed needs insignificant.

Will new systems for global education address the content of its courses? If the body can be made better by robotics will it enhance our ability to experience empathy?

The way we feel about the body does not get acknowledged in the way we think about the body. We fetish-ize the idea of systemic and technological developments geared towards dealing with the problems of fixing our bodies but have only managed to obscure the emotional and psychological 

I would like to describe a change in viewpoint, which I believe will alter how we think about everything from the most abstract questions on the nature of truth to the most concrete questions in our daily lives. This change comes from the deepest and most difficult problems facing contemporary science: those having to do with the nature of time.

The problem of time confronts us at every key juncture in fundamental physics: What was the big bang and could something have come before it? What is the nature of quantum physics and how does it unify with relativity theory? Why are the laws of physics we observe the true laws, rather than other possible laws? Might the laws have evolved from different laws in the past?

After a lot of discussion and argument, it is becoming clear to me that these key questions in fundamental physics come down to a very simple choice, having to do with the answers to two simple questions: What is real? And what is true?

Many philosophies and religions offer answers to these questions, and most give the same answer: reality and truth transcend time. If something is real, it has a reality which continues forever, and if something is true, it is not just true now, it was always true, and will always be. The experience we have of the world existing within a flow of time is, according to some religions and many contemporary physicists and philosophers, an illusion. Behind that illusion is a timeless reality, in modern parlance, the block universe. Another manifestation of this ancient view is the currently popular idea that time is an emergent quality not present in the fundamental formulation of physics.

The new viewpoint is the direct opposite. It asserts that what is real is only what is real in the moment, which is one of a succession of moments. It is the same for truth: what is true is only what is true in the moment. There are no transcendent, timeless truths.

There is also no past. The past only lives as part of the present, to the extent that it gives us evidence of past events. And the future is not yet real, which means that it is open and full of possibilities, only a small set of which will be realized. Nor, on this view, is there any possibility of other universes. All that exists must be part of this universe, which we find ourselves in, at this moment.

This view changes everything, beginning with how we think of mathematics. On this view there can be no timeless, Platonic, realm of mathematical objects. The truths of mathematics, once discovered, are certainly objective. But mathematical systems have to be invented-or evoked- by us. Once brought into being, there are an infinite number of facts which are true about mathematical objects, which further investigation might discover. There are an infinite number of possible axiomatic systems that we might so evoke and explore-but the fact that different people will agree on what has been shown about them does not imply that they existed, before we evoked them.

I used to think that the goal of physics was the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that was isomorphic to the history of the universe. But if there is no Platonic realm of timeless mathematical object, this is just a fantasy. Science is then only about what we can discover is true in the one real universe we find ourselves in.

More specifically, this view challenges how we think about cosmology. It opens up new ways to approach the deepest questions, such as why the laws we observe are true, and not others, and what determined the initial conditions of the universe. The philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce wrote in 1893 that the only way of accounting for which laws were true would be through a mechanics of evolution, and I believe this remains true today. But the evolution of laws requires time to be real. Furthermore, there is, I believe, evidence on technical grounds that the correct formulations of quantum gravity and cosmology will require the postulate that time is real and fundamental.

But the implications of this view will be far broader. For example, in neoclassical, economic theory, which is anchored in the study of equilibria of markets and games, time is largely abstracted away. The fundamental results on equilibria by Arrow and Debreu assume that there are fixed and specifiable lists of goods, and strategies, and that each consumer’s tastes and preferences are unchanging.

But can this be completely correct, if growth is driven by opportunities that suddenly appear from unpredictable discoveries of new products, new strategies, and new modes of organization? Getting economic theory right has implications for a wide range of policy decisions, and how time is treated is a key issue. An economics that assumes that we cannot predict key innovations must be very different from one that assumes all is knowable at any time.

The view that time is real and truth is situated within the moment further implies that there is no timeless arbiter of meaning, and no transcendent or absolute source of values or ethics. Meaning, values and ethics are all things that we humans project into the world. Without us, they don’t exist.

This means that we have tremendous responsibilities. Both mathematics and society are highly constrained, but within those constraints there are an infinitude of possibilities, only a few of which can be evoked and explored in the finite time we have. Because time is real and the future does not yet exist, the imaginative and social worlds in which we will live are to be brought into being by the choices we will make.

We will create life from inanimate compounds, and we will find life on Mars or in space. But the life that more immediately interests me lies between these extremes, in the middle range we all inhabit between our genes and our stars. It is the thin bleeding line within the thin blue line, the anthroposphere within the biosphere, the part of the material world in which we live out our lives. It is us.

And we are rapidly and inexorably changing. I do not mean that our numbers are exploding — a topic that has been attracting attention since Malthus. I mean a very modern and massive set of changes in the composition of the human population.

The global population stood at one million at 10,000 BC, 50 million at 1,000 BC, and 310 million in 1,000 AD. It stood at about one billion in 1800, 1.65 billion in 1900, and 6.0 billion in 2000. Analysis of these macro-historical trends in human population usually focuses on this population growth and on the "demographic transition" underlying it.

During the first stage of the demographic transition, life — as Hobbes rightly suggested — was nasty, brutish, and short. There was a balance between birth rates and death rates, and both were very high (30-50 per thousand people per year). The human population grew less than 0.05% annually, with a doubling time of over 1,000 years. This state of affairs was true of all human populations everywhere until the late 18th century.

Then, during the second stage, the death rate began to decline — first in northwestern Europe, but then spreading over the next 100 years to the south and east. The decline in the death rate was due initially to improvements in food supply and in public health, both of which reduced mortality, particularly in childhood. As a consequence, there was a population explosion.

During the third stage, birth rates dropped for the first time in human history. The prior decline in childhood mortality probably prompted parents to realize they did not need as many children; and increasing urbanization, increasing female literacy, and (eventually) contraceptive technology also played a part.

Finally, during the fourth stage — in which the developed world presently finds itself — there is renewed stability. Birth and death rates are again in balance, but now both are relatively low. Causes of mortality have shifted from the pre-Modern pattern dominated by infectious diseases, perinatal diseases, and nutritional diseases, to one dominated by chronic diseases, mental illnesses, and behavioral conditions.

This broad story, however, conceals as much as it reveals. There are other demographic developments worldwide beyond the increasing overall size of the population, developments that are still unfolding and that matter much more. Changes in four aspects of population structure are key: (1) sex ratio, (2) age structure, (3) kinship systems, and (4) income distribution.

Sex ratios are becoming increasingly unbalanced in many parts of the world, especially in China and India (which account for 37% of the global population). The normal sex ratio at birth is roughly 106 males for every 100 females, but it may presently be as high as 120 for young people in China, or as high as 111 in India. This shift, much discussed, may arise from preferential abortion or the neglect of baby girls relative to boys. Gender imbalance may also have other determinants, such as large-scale migration of one or the other sex in search of work. This shift has numerous implications. For example, given the historical role of females as caregivers to elderly parents, a shortage of woman to fill this role will induce large-scale social adjustments. Moreover, an excess of low-status men unable to find wives results in an easy (and large) pool of recruits for extremism and violence.

This shift in gender ratios may have other, less heralded implications, however. Some of our own work has suggested that this shift may actually shorten men's lives, reversing some of the historic progress we have made. Across a range of species, skewed sex ratios result in intensified competition for sexual partners and this induces stress for the supernumerary sex. In humans, it seems, a 5% excess of males at the time of sexual maturity shortens the survival of men by about three months in late life, which is a very substantial loss.

On the other hand, the population worldwide is getting older, especially in the developed world. Globally, the UN estimates that the proportion of people aged 60 and over will double between 2000 and 2050, from 10% to 21%, and the proportion of children will drop from 30% to 21%. This change also has numerous implications, including on the "dependency ratio," meaning that fewer young people are available to provide for the medical and economic needs of the elderly. Much less heralded, however, is the fact that war is a young person's activity, and it is entirely likely that, as populations age, they may become less aggressive.

The changing nature of kinship networks, such as the growth in blended families — whether due to changing divorce patterns in the developed world or AIDS killing off parents in Africa — has implications for the network of obligations and entitlements within families. Changing kinship systems in modern American society (with complex mixtures of remarried and cohabiting couples, half-siblings, step-siblings, and so on) are having profound implications for caregiving, retirement, and bequests. Who cares for Grandma? Who gets her money when she dies?

Finally, it is not just the balance between males and females, or young and old, that is changing, but also the balance between rich and poor. Income inequality is reaching historic heights throughout the world. The top 1% of the people in the world receives 57% of the income. Income inequality in the US is presently at its highest recorded levels, exceeding even the Roaring Twenties. And while economic development in China has proceeded with astonishing rapidity, income is not evenly distributed; the prospects for conflict in that country as a result seem very high in the coming decades.

Lacking any real predators, a key feature of the human environment is other humans. In our rush to focus on threats such as global warming and environmental degradation, we should not overlook this fact. It is well to look around at who, and not just what, surrounds us. Population structure will change everything. Our health, wealth, and peace depend on it.

Innovation in science and technology will continue to bring much change. But since it is the brain that experiences change, only changing the brain itself can possibly change everything. Changing the human brain is not new, when it is a matter of correcting psychopathology. But whether the usual agents, psychoactive drugs, psychosurgery, electroshock, even what we eat, drink and smoke, can change a brain that is functioning normally (other than for the worse), is not known. However, the novel method of deep brain stimulation (DBS), by which electrodes are inserted into the brain to stimulate precisely specified locations electrically, is already used to correct certain brain disorders (Parkinsonism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Not only are the targeted symptoms often relieved; there have been profound changes in personality, although the prior personality was not abnormal. A patient of lifelong somber disposition may not only be relieved of obsessions, but also shift to a cheerful mood, the instant the current is switched on (and revert to his prior subdued self, the instant it is switched off). The half empty glass temporarily becomes the glass that is half full. The brain seems not entirely to respect our conventional sharp distinction between what is normal and what is not.

The stimulation's immediate effect is shocking. We assume that our gratifyingly complex minds and brains are incrementally shaped by innumerable dynamic and environmental factors. And yet, identical twins adopted apart into sharply contrasting social and economic environments have shown impressive similarities in mood and sense of wellbeing. Genetically determined types of brain organization appear to set the emotional tone; experience modulates it in a positive or negative direction. Stimulating or disrupting neural transmission along a specific neural pathway or reverberating loop may reset the emotional tone, entirely sidestepping the complexities of early experience, stress, misfortune, and let personality float free. The procedure releases a previously unsuspected potential. The human brain is famously plastic. Adjusting key circuitry presumably has wide repercussions throughout the brain's neural network, which settles into a different state. We have yet thoroughly to digest the philosophical implications, but a more unequivocal validation of psychoneural identity theory (the identity of the brain and the mind, different aspects of the same thing) can hardly be imagined.

Certainly, deep brain stimulation is not currently used to render sane people more thoughtful, agreeable, gentle or considerate. Potential adverse neurosurgical side effects aside, ethical considerations prohibit using deep brain stimulation to enhance a brain considered to be normal. But history teaches two lessons: Any technology will tend to become more precise, effective and safer over time, and, anything that can be done, ultimately will be done, philosophical and ethical considerations notwithstanding.

The example of cosmetic plastic surgery is instructive. Reconstructive in its origins, it is increasingly used for cosmetic purposes. I predict the same shift for deep brain stimulation. Cosmetic surgery is used to render people more appealing. In human affairs, appearance is critical. For our hypersocial species, personal appeal opens doors that remain shut to mere competence and intellect. Undoubtedly, cosmetic surgery enhances quality of life, so how can it be denied to anyone? And yet, it is by its very nature deceptive; the operated face is not really the person's face, the operated body not really their body. However, experience teaches that these reservations as to authenticity remain theoretical. The cosmetically adjusted nose, breast, thighs or skin tones become the person's new reality, without significant social backlash. Even face transplants are now feasible. We read so much into a face—but what if it is not the person's "real" face? Does anyone care, or even remember the previous appearance? So it will be with neurocosmetics.

And yet, is it not more deeply disturbing to tinker with the brain itself, than to adjust one's body to one's liking? It is. However, the mind-body distinction has become somewhat blurred of late. Evidence accumulates as to the embodiment of cognition and emotion, and at the least, there is influential feedback between the two domains. Considerations that will be raised by cosmetic deep brain stimulation are already in play, in a minor key, with cosmetic surgery.

Deep brain stimulation seems not to enhance intellect, but intellect is no high road to success. "Social intelligence" is of prime importance, and it is a byproduct of personality. In some form, deep brain stimulation will be used to modify personality so as to optimize professional and social opportunity, within my lifetime. Ethicists will deplore this, and so they should. But it will happen nonetheless, and it will change how humans experience the world and how they relate to each other in as yet unimagined ways.

Consider an arms race in affability, a competition based not on concealing real feelings, but on feelings engineered to be real. Consider a society of homogenized good will, making regular visits to the DBS provider who advertises superior electrode placement? Switching a personality on and then off, when it becomes boring? Alternating personalities: Dr. Accumbens and Mr. Insula (friendly and disgusted respectively)? Tracking fashion trends in personality? Coordinating personalities for special events? Demanding personalities such as emerge on drugs (e.g. cocaine), or in psychopathologies (e.g. hypomania)? Regardless, the beneficiaries of deep brain stimulation will experience life quite differently. Employment opportunities for yet more ethicists and more philosophers!

We take ourselves to be durable minds in stable bodies. But this reassuring self-concept will turn out to be yet another of our so human egocentric delusions. Do we, strictly speaking, own stable identities? When it sinks in that the continuity of our experience of the world and our self is at the whim of an electrical current, then our fantasies of permanence will have yielded to the reality of our fragile and ephemeral identities.

There is a growing scientific consensus that animals have emotions and feel pain. This awareness is going to effect change: better treatment of animals in agribusiness, research, and our general interaction with them. It will change the way we eat, live, and preserve the planet. We will eliminate the archaic tendency to base their treatment on an equation of their intelligence with ours. The measure of and self-congratulation for our own intelligence should have its basis in our moral behavior as well as our smarts.

Scientists have been talking about the risks of human induced climate changes for decades now in front of places like Congress, scientific conventions, media events, corporate board rooms, and at visible cultural extravaganzas like Live Earth. Yet, a half century after serious scientific concerns surfaced, the world is still far from a meaningful deal to implement actions to curb the threats by controlling the offending emissions.

The reason is obvious: controlling the basic activities that brought us our prosperity—burning fossil fuels—is not going to be embraced by those who benefit from using the atmosphere as a place to dump for free their tailpipe and smokestack effluents, nor will developing economies like China and India easily give up the techniques we used to get rich because of some threat perceived as distant and not yet certain. To be sure there is real action at local, state, national and international levels, but a game changing global deal is still far from likely. Documented impacts like loss of the Inuit hunting culture, small island states survival in the face of inexorable sea level rise, threats of species extinction in critical places like mountain tops, or a five fold increase in wild fires in the US West since 1970 have not been game changin—yet. What might change the game?

In order to give up something—the traditional pathway to wealth, burning coal oil and gas—nations will have to viscerally perceive they are getting something—protection from unacceptably severe impacts. The latter has been difficult to achieve because most scientific assessments are honest that along with many credible and major risks are many remaining uncertainties.

We cannot pin down whether sea levels will rise a few feet or a few meters in the next century or two—the former is nasty but relatively manageable with adaptation investments, the latter would mean abandoning coastline installations or cultures where a sizeable chunk of humanity lives and works. If we could show scientifically that such a threat was likely, it would be game changing in terms of motivating the kinds of compromises required to achieve the actions needed that are currently politically difficult to achieve.

This is where the potential for up to 7 meters of sea level rise stored as ice on Greenland will come in to tip us toward meaningful actions. Already Greenland is apparently melting at an unprecedented rate, and way faster than any of our theories or models predicted. But it can be—and has been—argued it is just a short term fluctuation since large changes in ice volume come and go typically on millennial timescales—though mounting evidence from ice cores says probably there is unprecedented melting going on right now. Another decade or two of such scientifically documented acceleration of melting could indeed imply we will get the unlucky outcome: meters of sea level rise in the time frame of human infrastructure lifetimes for ports and cities—to say nothing of vulnerable natural places like coastal wetlands etc.

Unfortunately, the longer we wait for more confident "proof" of game changing melt rates in Greenland (or West Antarctica as well, where another 5 meters potential sea level rise lurks), the higher the risk of passing a tipping point in which the melting becomes an unstoppable self-driven process. That game change occurrence would force unprecedented retreat from the sea, and a major abandonment or rebuilding of coastal civilization and loss of coastal wetlands. This is a gamble with "Laboratory Earth", that we can't afford to lose.

"We should really not be studying sentences; we should not be studying language — we should be studying people" Victor Yngve

Communication is the key to cooperation. Although cross-cultural communication for the masses requires translation techniques that exceed our current capabilities, the groundwork of this technology has already been laid and many of us will live to see a revolution in automatic translation that will change everything about cooperation and communication across the world.

This goal was conceived in the late 1940s in a famous memorandum by Rockefeller Foundation scientist, Warren Weaver, in which he suggested the possibility of machine translation and tied its likelihood to four proposals, still controversial today: that there was a common logic to languages; that there were likely to be language universals; that immediate context could be understood and linked to translation of individual sentences; and that cryptographic methods developed in World War II would apply to language translation. Weaver's proposals got off the ground financially in the early 1950s as the US military invested heavily in linguistics and machine translation across the US, with particular emphasis on the research of the team of Victor Yngve at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research Laboratory of Electronics (a team that included the young Noam Chomsky).

Yngve, like Weaver, wanted to contribute to international understanding by applying the methods of the then incipient field that he helped found, computational linguistics, to communication, especially machine translation. Early innovators in this area also included Claude Shannon at Bell Labs and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel who preceded Yngve at MIT before returning to Israel. Shannon was arguably the inventor of the concept of information as an entity that could be scientifically studied and Bar-Hillel was the first person to work full-time on machine translation, beginning the program that Yngve inherited at MIT.

This project was challenged early on, however, by the work of Chomsky, from within Yngve's own lab. Chomsky's conclusions about different grammar types and their relative generative power convinced people that grammars of natural languages were not amenable to machine translation efforts as they were practiced at the time, leading to a slowdown in and reduction of enthusiasm for computationally-based translation.

As we have subsequently learned, however, the principal problem faced in machine-translation is not the formalization of grammar per se, but the inability of any formalization known, including Chomsky's, to integrate context and culture (semantics and pragmatics in particular) into a model of language appropriate for translation. Without this integration, mechanical translation from one language to another is not possible.

Still, mechanical procedures able to translate most contents from any source language into accurate, idiomatically natural constructions of any target language seem less utopian to us now because of major breakthroughs that have led to several programs in machine translation (e.g. the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University). I believe that we will see within our lifetime the convergence of developments in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, statistical grammar theories, and an emerging field — computational anthropology (informatic-based analysis and modeling of cultural values) — that will facilitate powerful new forms of machine translation to match the dreams of early pioneers of computation.

The conceptual breakthroughs necessary for universal machine translation will also require contributions from Construction Grammars, which view language as a set of conventional signs (varieties of the idea that the building blocks of grammar are not rules or formal constraints, but conventional phrase and word forms that combine cultural values and grammatical principles), rather than a list of formal properties. They will have to look at differences in the encoding of language and culture across communities, rather than trying to find a 'universal grammar' that unites all languages.

At least some of the steps are easy enough to imagine. First, we come up with a standard format for writing statistically-based Construction Grammars of any language, a format that displays the connections between constructions, culture, and local context (such as the other likely words in the sentence or other likely sentences in the paragraph in which the construction appears). This format might be as simple as a flowchart or a list. Second, we develop a method for encoding context and values. For example, what are the values associated with words; what are the values associated with certain idioms; what are the values associated with the ways in which ideas are expressed? The latter can be seen in the notion of sentence complexity, for example, as in the Pirahã of the Amazon's (among others) rejection of recursive structures in syntax because they violate principles of information rate and new vs. old information in utterances that are very important in Pirahã culture. Third, we establish lists of cultural values and most common contexts and how these link to individual constructions. Automating the procedure for discovering or enumerating these links will take us to the threshold of automatic translation in the original sense.

Information and its exchange form the soul of human cultures. So just imagine the possible change in our perceptions of 'others' when we able to type in a story and have it automatically and idiomatically translated with 100% accuracy into any language for which we have a grammar of constructions. Imagine speaking into a microphone and having your words come out in the language of your audience, heard and understood naturally. Imagine anyone being able to take a course in any language from any university in the world over the internet or in person, without having to first learn the language of the instructor.

These will always be unreachable goals to some degree. It seems unlikely, for example, that all grammars and cultures are even capable of expressing everything from all languages. However, we are developing tools that will dramatically narrow the gaps and help us decide where and how we can communicate particular ideas cross-culturally. Success at machine translation might not end all the world's sociocultural or political tensions, but it won't hurt. One struggles to think of a greater contribution to world cooperation than progress to universal communication, enabling all and sundry to communicate with nearly all and sundry. Babel means 'the gate of god'. In the Bible it is about the origin of world competition and suspicion. As humans approached the entrance to divine power by means of their universal cooperation via universal communication, so the biblical story goes, language diversity was introduced to destroy our unity and deprive us of our full potential.

But automated, near-universal translation is coming. And it will change everything.

We all develop from a single cell known as a zygote. This zygote divides and becomes two cells, then four, eight and so on. At first, most of the cells are alike, but as this division goes on something wondrous occurs: the cells begin to commit themselves to adopting different fates as eyes or ears, or livers or kidneys, or brains and blood cells. Eventually they produce a body of immense and unimaginable complexity, making things like supercomputers and space shuttles look like Lego toys. No one knows how they do it. No one is there to tell the cells how to behave, there is no homunculus directing cellular traffic, and no template to work to. It just happens.

If scientists could figure out how cells enact this miracle of development they could produce phenotypes—the outward form of our bodies—at will and from scratch, or at least from a zygote. This, or something close to it, will happen in our lifetimes. When we perfect it—and we are well on the way—we will be able to recreate ourselves, even redefine the nature of our lives.

The problem is that development isn't just a matter of finding a cell and getting it to grow and divide. As our cells differentiate into our various body parts they lose what is known as their 'potency', they forget how to go back to their earlier states where, like the zygote, all fates are possible. When we cut ourselves the skin nearby knows how to grow back, erasing all or most of the damage. But we can only do this on a very local scale. If you cut off your arm it does not grow back. What scientists are learning bit by bit to do is how to reverse cells back to their earlier potent states, how to re-program them so they could replace a limb.

Every year brings new discoveries and new successes. Cloning is one of the more visible. At the moment most cloning is a bit of a cheat, achieved by taking special cells from an adult animal's body that still retain some of their potency. But this will change as cell re-programming becomes possible, and the consequences could be alarming. Someone might be able to clone you by collecting a bit of your hair or other cells left behind when you touch something or sit somewhere. Why someone would want to do this—and wait for you to grow up—might limit this in practice but it could happen. You could become your own "father" or at least a very grown up twin.

More in the realm of the everyday and of real consequence is that once we can re-program cells, whole areas of science and medicine, including aging, injury and disease will vanish or become unimportant. All of the contentious work on 'embryonic stem cells' that regularly features in debates about whether it is moral to use embryos in research exists solely because scientists want a source of 'totipotent' cells, cells that haven't committed themselves to a fate. Embryos are full of them. Scientists aren't interested in embryonic stem cells per se, they simply want totipotent cells. Once scientists acquire the ability to return cells to their totipotent state, or even what is known as a 'multi-potent' state—a cell that is not quite yet fully committed—all this stem cell research will become unnecessary. This could happen within a decade.

School children learn that some lizards and crabs can re-grow limbs. What they are not taught is that this is because their cells retain multi- or even toti-potency. Because ours don't, this makes car crashes, ski accidents, gun shot wounds and growing old a nuisance. But once we unlock the door of development, we will be able to re-grow our limbs, heal our wounds and much more. Scientists will for once make the science-fiction writers look dull. The limbs (and organs, nerves, body parts, etc) that we re-grow will be real, making those bionic things like Anakin Skywalker gets fitted with after a light-sabre accident seem primitive. This will make transplants obsolete or just temporary, and things like heart disease will be treatable by growing new hearts. Nerve damage and paralysis will be reversible and some brain diseases will become treatable. Some of these things are already happening as scientists inch-by-inch figure out how to re-program cells.

If these developments are not life changing enough, they will, in the longer-term usher in a new era in which our minds, the thing that we think of as "us", can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don't suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced. An intriguing aspect of re-programming cells is that they can be induced to 'forget' how old they are. Aging will become a thing of the past if you can afford enough new pieces. We will then discover the extent to which our minds arise from perceptions of our bodies and the passage of time. If you give an old person the body of a teenager do they start to behave and think like one? Who knows, but it will be game-changing to find out.

I have little faith in anyone’s ability to predict what will change everything. A look at the futurology of the past turns up many chastening examples of confident predictions of technological revolutions that never happened, such as domed cities, nuclear-powered cars, and meat grown in dishes. By the year 2001, according to the eponymous movie, we were supposed to have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, and humanlike mainframe computers (though not laptop computers or word processing – the characters used typewriters.) And remember interactive television, the internet refrigerator, and the paperless office?

Technology may change everything, but it’s impossible to predict how. Take another way in which 2001: A Space Odyssey missed the boat. The American women in the film were “girl assistants”: secretaries, receptionists, and flight attendants. As late as 1968, few people foresaw the second feminist revolution that would change everything in the 1970s. It’s not that the revolution didn’t have roots in technological change. Not only did oral contraceptives make it possible for women to time their childbearing, but a slew of earlier technologies (sanitation, mass production, modern medicine, electricity) had reduced the domestic workload, extended the lifespan, and shifted the basis of the economy from brawn to brains, collectively emancipating women from round-the-clock childrearing.

The effects of technology depend not just on what the gadgets do but on billions of people’s judgments of their costs and benefits (do you really want to have call a help line to debug your refrigerator?). They also depend on countless nonlinear network effects, sleeper effects, and other nuisances. The popularity of baby names (Mildred, Deborah, Jennifer, Chloe), and the rates of homicide (down in the 1940s, up in the 1960s, down again in the 1990s) are just two of the social trends that fluctuate wildly in defiance of the best efforts of social scientists to explain them after the fact, let alone predict them beforehand.

But if you insist. This past year saw the introduction of direct-to-consumer genomics. A number of new companies have been recently launched. You can get everything from a complete sequencing of your genome (for a cool $350,000), to a screen of more than a hundred Mendelian disease genes, to a list of traits, disease risks, and ancestry data. Here are some possible outcomes:

• Personalized medicine, in which drugs are prescribed according to the patient’s molecular background rather than by trial and error, and in which prevention and screening recommendations are narrowcasted to those who would most benefit.

• An end to many genetic diseases. Just as Tay-Sachs has almost been wiped out in the decades since Ashkenazi Jews have tested themselves for the gene, a universal carrier screen, combined with preimplantation genetic diagnosis for carrier couples who want biological children, will eliminate a hundred others.

• Universal insurance for health, disability, and home care. Forget the political debates about the socialization of medicine. Cafeteria insurance will no longer be actuarially viable if the highest-risk consumers can load up on generous policies while the low-risk ones get by with the bare minimum.

• An end to the genophobia of many academics and pundits, whose blank-slate doctrines will look increasingly implausible as people learn their about genes that affect their temperament and cognition.

• The ultimate empowerment of medical consumers, who will know their own disease risks and seek commensurate treatment, rather than relying on the hunches and folklore of a paternalistic family doctor.

But then again, maybe not.

Everything will change with the advent of the laptop quantum computer (QC). The transition from PCs to QCs will not merely continue the doubling of computing power, in accord with Moore's Law. It will induce a paradigm shift, both in the power of computing (at least for certain problems) and in the conceptual frameworks we use to understand computation, intelligence, neuroscience, social interactions, and sensory perception.

Today's PCs depend, of course, on quantum mechanics for their proper operation. But their computations do not exploit two computational resources unique to quantum theory: superposition and entanglement. To call them computational resources is already a major conceptual shift. Until recently, superposition and entanglement have been regarded primarily as mathematically well-defined by psychologically incomprehensible oddities of the quantum world—fodder for interminable and apparently unfruitful philosophical debate. But they turn out to be more than idle curiosities. They are bona fide computational resources that can solve certain problems that are intractable with classical computers. The best known example is Peter Shor's quantum algorithm which can, in principle, break encryptions that are impenetrable to classical algorithms.

The issue is the "in principle" part. Quantum theory is well established and quantum computation, although a relatively young discipline, has an impressive array of algorithms that can in principle run circles around classical algorithms on several important problems. But what about in practice? Not yet, and not by a long shot. There are formidable materials-science problems that must be solved—such as instantiating quantum bits (qubits) and quantum gates, and avoiding an unwanted noise called decoherence—before the promise of quantum computation can be fulfilled by tangible quantum computers. Many experts bet the problems can't adequately be solved. I think this bet is premature. We will have laptop QCs, and they will transform our world.

When laptop QCs become commonplace, they will naturally lead us to rethink the notion of intelligence. At present, intelligence is modeled by computations, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, that allow a system to learn, often by interacting with its environment, how to plan, reason, generalize and act to achieve goals. The computations might be serial or parallel, but they have heretofore been taken to be classical.

One hallmark of a classical computation is that it can be traced, i.e., one can in principle observe the states of all the variables at each step of the computation. This is helpful for debugging. But one hallmark of quantum computations is that they cannot in general be traced. Once the qubits have been initialized and the computation started, you cannot observe intermediate stages of the computation without destroying it. You aren't allowed to peak at a quantum computation while it is in progress.

The full horsepower of a quantum computation is only unleashed when, so to speak, you don't look. This is jarring. It clashes with our classical way of thinking about computation. It also clashes with our classical notion of intelligence. In the quantum realm, intelligence happens when you don't look. Insist on looking, and you destroy this intelligence. We will be forced to reconsider what we mean by intelligence in light of quantum computation. In the process we might find new conceptual tools for understanding those creative insights that seem to come from the blue, i.e., whose origin and development can't seem to be traced.

Laptop QCs will make us rethink neuroscience. A few decades ago we peered inside brains and saw complex telephone switch boards. Now we peer inside brains and see complex classical computations, both serial and parallel. What will see once we have thoroughly absorbed the mind set of quantum computation? Some say we will still find only classical computations, because the brain and its neurons are too massive for quantum effects to survive. But evolution by natural selection leads to surprising adaptations, and there might in fact be selective pressures toward quantum computations.

One case in point arises in a classic problem of social interaction: the prisoner's dilemma. In one version of this dilemma, someone yells "FIre!" in a crowded theater. Each person in the crowd has a choice. They can cooperate with everyone else, by exiting in turn in an orderly fashion. Or they can defect, and bolt for the exit. Everyone cooperating would be best for the whole crowd; it is a so-called Pareto optimal solution. But defecting is best for each individual; it is a so-called Nash equilibrium.

What happens is that everyone defects, and the crowd as a whole suffers. But this problem of the prisoner's dilemma, viz., that the Nash equilibrium is not Pareto optimal, is an artifact of the classical computational approach to the dilemma. There are quantum strategies, involving superpositions of cooperation and defection, for which the Nash equilibrium is Pareto optimal. In other words, the prisoner's dilemma can be resolved, and the crowd as a whole needn't suffer if quantum strategies are available. If the prisoner's dilemma is played out in an evolutionary context, there are quantum strategies that drive all classical strategies to extinction. This is suggestive. Could there be selective pressures that built quantum strategies into our nervous systems, and into our social interactions? Do such strategies provide an alternative way to rethink the notion of altruism, perhaps as a superposition of cooperation and defection?

Laptop QCs will alter our view of sensory perception. Superposition seems to be telling us that our sensory representations, which carve the world into discrete objects with properties such as position and momentum, simply are an inadequate description of reality: No definite position or momentum can be ascribed to, say, an electron when it is not being observed. Entanglement seems to be telling us that the very act of carving the world into discrete objects is an inadequate description of reality: Two electrons, billions of light years apart in our sensory representations, are in fact intimately and instantly linked as a single entity.

When superposition and entanglement cease to be abstract curiosities, and become computational resources indispensable to the function of our laptops, they will transform our understanding of perception and of the relation between perception and reality.

What if I were to tell you that God were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny spec floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, were in fact an illusion, a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel like there is something grander out there…. watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But in fact there is only the air you breathe. Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world most people believe him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. In fact rather annoyingly so. As a way of perceiving, he would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways. But objectively, the notion of God as an illusion is a radical and some would say even dangerous idea, since it raises important questions about God as an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells.

In fact, the illusion of God is more plausible a notion than some other related thought experiments, such as the possibility that our brains are sitting in an electrified vat somewhere and we're merely living out simulated lives. In contrast to the vat exercise or some other analogy to the science-fiction movie The Matrix, it is rather uncontroversial to say that our species' ability to think about God—even an absent God—is made possible only by our very naturally derived brains. In particular, by virtue of the fact that our brains have evolved over the eons in the unusual manner they have. In philosophical discourse, the idea that God is an illusion would be a scientifically inspired twist on a very ancient debate, since it deals with the nature and veridicality of God's actual being.

That's all very well, you may be thinking. But perhaps God isn't an illusion at all. Rather than a scratch on our psychological lenses, our brain's ability to reason about the supernatural—about such things as purpose, the afterlife, destiny—is in fact God's personal signature on our brains. One can never rule out the possibility that God micro-engineered the evolution of the human brain so that we've come to see him more clearly, a sort of divine Lasik procedure, or a scraping off the bestial glare that clouds the minds of other animals. In fact some scholars, such as psychologists Justin Barrett and Michael Murray, hold something like this "theistic evolution" view in their writings. Yet as a psychological scientist who studies religion, I take explanatory parsimony seriously. After all, parsimony is the basic premise of Occam's Razor, the very cornerstone of all scientific enquiry. Occam's Razor holds that, of two equally plausible theories, science shaves off the extra fat by favoring the one that makes the fewest unnecessary assumptions. And in the natural sciences, the concept of God as a causal force tends to be an unpalatable lump of gristle. Although treating God as an illusion may not be entirely philosophically warranted, therefore, it is in fact a scientifically valid treatment. Because the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone his being real.

Indeed, the human brain has many such odd quips that systematically alter, obscure, or misrepresent entirely the world outside our heads. That's not a bad thing necessarily; nor does it imply poor adaptive design. You have undoubtedly seen your share of optical illusions before, such as the famous Müller-Lyer image where a set of arrows of equal length with their tails in opposite directions creates the subjective impression that one line is actually longer than the other. You know, factually, the lines are of equal length, yet despite this knowledge your mind does not allow you to perceive the image this way. There are also well-documented social cognitive illusions that you may not be so familiar with. For example, David Bjorklund, a developmental psychologist, reasons that young children's overconfidence in their own abilities keeps them engaging in challenging tasks rather than simply giving up when they fail. Ultimately, with practice and over time, children's actual skills can ironically begin to more closely approximate these earlier, favorably warped self-judgments. Similarly, evolutionary psychologists David Buss and Martie Haselton argue that men's tendency to over-interpret women's smiles as sexual overtures prompts them to pursue courtship tactics more often, sometimes leading to real reproductive opportunities with friendly women.

In other words, from both a well-being and a biological perspective, whether our beliefs about the world 'out there' are true and accurate matters little. Rather, psychologically speaking, it's whether they work for us—or for our genes—that counts. As you read this, cognitive scientists are inching their way towards a more complete understanding of the human mind as a reality-bending prism. What will change everything? The looming consensus among those who take Occam's Razor seriously that the existence of God is a question for psychologists and not physicists.

I grew up expecting that, when adult, I'd travel to Mars. I expected cancer and the flu—and all illnesses—to be cured, robots taking care of labor, the biochemistry of life fully unraveled, the possibility of recreating damaged organs in every hospital, the nations of the Earth living prosperously in peace thanks to new technology, and physics having understood the center of a black hole. I expected great changes, that did not came. Let's be open minded: it is still possible for them to come. It is possible for unexpected advances to change everything—it has happened in the past. But—let's indeed be open minded—it is also possible that big changes would not come.

Maybe I am biased by my own research field, theoretical physics. I grew up in awe for the physics of the second half of the XIX century and the first third of the XX century. What a marvel! The discovery of the electromagnetic field and waves, understanding thermodynamics with probability, special relativity, quantum mechanics, general relativity... Curved spacetimes, probability waves and black holes. What a feast! The world transforming every 10 years under our eyes; reality becoming more subtle, more beautiful. Seeing new worlds. I got into theoretical physics. What has happened big in the last 30 years? We are not sure. Perhaps not much. Big dreams, like string theory and multi-universes, but are they credible? We do not know. Perhaps the same passion that charmed me towards the future has driven large chunks of today's research into useless dead-end dreams. Maybe not. Maybe we are really understanding what happened before the Big Bang (a "Big Bounce"?) and what takes place deep down at the Planck scale ("loops"? space and time loosing their meaning?). Let's be open to the possibility we are getting there—let's work hard to get there. But let's also be ready to recognize that perhaps we are not there. Perhaps our dreams are just that: dreams. Too often I have been hearing that somebody is "on the brink of" the great leap ahead. I now tend to get asleep when I hear "on the brink of". In physics it is 15 years that I hear that we are "on the brink of observing supersymmetry". Please weak me up when we are actually there.

I do not want to sound pessimistic. I just want to put a word of caution in. Maybe what really changes everything is not something that sounds so glamourous. What did really change everything in the past? Here are two examples. Until no more than a couple of centuries ago, 95% of humanity worked the countryside as peasants. That is, humanity needed the labour of 95 out of 100 of its members just to feed the group. This left happy few for doing everything else. Today only a few percent of the humans work the fields. A few are enough to feed everybody else. This means that the large majority of us, including me and most probably you, my reader, are free to do something else, participating in constructing the world we inhabit, a better one, perhaps. What made such a huge change in our lives possible? Mostly, just one technological tool: the tractor. The humble rural machine has changed our life perhaps more than the wheel or electricity. Another example? Hygiene. Our life expectancy has nearly doubled from little more than washing hands and taking showers. Change comes often from where it is not expected. The famous note from the IBM top management at the beginning of the computer history estimated that: "there is no market for more than a few dozens of computers in the world".

So, what is my moral? Making predictions is difficult, of course, especially about the future. It is good to dream about big changes, actively seek them and be open minded to them. Otherwise we are stuck here. But let us not get blinded by hopes. Dreams and hopes of humanity sometimes succeed, sometime fail big. The century just ended has shown us momentous examples of both. The Edge question is about what will change everything, which I'll see in my lifetime: and if the answer was: "nothing"? Are we able to discern hype from substance? Dolly may be scientifically important, but I tend to see it just as a funny-born twin-sister: she hasn't changed much in my life, yet. Will she really?

I grew up in the northeast Bronx, when in the ‘80’s pretty much everyone’s heroes were basketball sensations Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins. Most of my friends, including myself fantasized about playing in the NBA. True, playing basketball was fun. But another obvious incentive was that aside from drug dealers, athletes were the only ones from our socioeconomic background that we saw earning serious money and respect. Despite my early tendencies toward science and math, I also played hooky quite a bit, spending many hours on the P. S. 16 basketball court. There, I would fantasize of one day, making my high school basketball team and doing a 360 dunk. Neither happened. At 15, in the middle of a layup, I stumbled and broke my kneecap, which forced me off the basketball playground for a half a year. I was relegated to homework and consistent class attendance.

Most of my street-court pals didn’t end up graduating from high school. But, although they were far better ball players than I, only one made it to the NBA. A few others did get scouted and ended up playing in big ten basketball teams. To this day, whenever I return to my old neighborhood, I see some of my diploma-less pals doing old school moves with kneepads on.

The year of the broken knee led to a scholarship from a private donor for a summer physics camp for teens called ISI (International Summer Institute). The camp took place in the Southampton, Long Island an environment far different from what I’d ever experienced. Most of the other kids were from foreign countries. I made strange new friends, including Hong, a South Korean boy who spent the summer trying to compute Pi to some decimal point or other. Or the group of young chess players being coached by a Russian chess master. I took college physics. Most of these students went on to become excellent scientists, one of which I am still in touch with. At some point, I met the organizer of the summer camp, a gentleman wearing a leather jacket in summer who turned out to be Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow(who coincidentally went to my neighboring High School). He gave us a physics/inspirational talk. During that talk, I realized that there are other types of Michael Jordans, in areas other than basketball and, like Shelly, I could be different plus make a good living as a scientist. More importantly, us teenagers really bonded with each other and, in a sense, formed a young global community of future scientists.

When I returned to the Bronx, I couldn’t really talk much about my experience. After all, a discussion on the Heisenberg principle is far less interesting than ball-park trash talk. I began playing less basketball and eventually went on to college and became a physicist. I could not help feeling a little guilty. In the back of my mind, I knew the real mathematical genius in my neighborhood was a guy named Eric Deabreu. But he never finished high school.

What if there were a global organization of scientists and educators dedicated to identifying (or scouting) the potential Michael Jordans of science, regardless of what part of the world they are from and regardless of socioeconomic background? This is happening on local levels, but not globally. What if these students were provided the resources to reach their full potential and naturally forge a global community of scientific peers and friends? What we would have is, among many benefits, an orchestrated global effort to address the most pressing scientific problems that current and future generations must confront: the energy crisis, global warming, HIV, diplomacy to name a few. I think an inititiative that markets the virtues of science on every corner of the planet, with the same urgency as the basketball scouts on corners of street ball courts, would change the world. Such a reality has long been my vision, which, in light the past efforts of some in the science community, including Clifford Johnson and Jim Gates and Neil Turok, I believe will see come to past.

The biggest game-changer looming in your future, if not mine, is Life Prolongation. It works for mice and worms, and surely one of these days it'll work for the rest of us.

The current price for Life Prolongation seems to be semi-starvation; the people who try it wear loose clothes to hide their ribs and intentions. There's something desperate and shameful about starving yourself in order to live longer. But right now biologists are tinkering with reservatrol and sirtuins, trying to get you the benefit of life prolongation without cutting back on calories.

Life and love gets their edge from the possibility of their ending. What will life be like when we live forever? Nothing will be the same.

The study of financial options shows that there is no free lunch. What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. If you want optionality, you have to pay a price, and part of that price is that the value of your option erodes every day. That's time decay. If you want a world where nothing fades away with time anymore, it will be because because there's nothing to fade away.

No one dies. No one gets older. No one gets sick. You can't tell how old someone is by looking at them or touching them. No May-September romances. No room for new people. Everyone's an American car in Havana, endlessly repaired and maintained long after its original manufacturer is defunct. No breeding. No one born. No more evolution. No sex. No need to hurry. No need to console anyone. If you want something done, give it to a busy man, but no one need be busy when you have forever. Life without death changes absolutely everything.

If everyone is an extended LP, the turntable has to turn very slowly.

Who's going to do the real work, then? Chosen people who will volunteer or be volunteered to be mortal.

If you want things to stay the same, then things will have to change (Giuseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard).

I expect to see this happen, because I'll be living longer. Maybe even to 150, about 30 more years than any human is known to have lived.

I expect this because I've worked on it, seen the consequences of genomics when applied to the complex problem of our aging.

Since Aristotle, many scientists and even some physicians (who should know better) thought that aging arises from a few mechanisms that make our bodies deteriorate. Instead, the genomic revolution of the last decade now promises a true 21st Century path to extending longevity: follow the pathways.

Genomics now reveals what physicians intuited: the staggering complexity of aging pathophysiology among real clinical patients. We can't solve "the aging problem" using the standard research methods of cell biology, despite the great success such methods had with some other medical problems.

Aging is not a process of deterioration actively built by natural selection. Instead it arises from a lack of such natural selection in later adulthood. Not understanding this explains the age-old failures to explain or control aging and the chronic diseases underlying it.

Aging comes from multiple genetic deficiencies, not a single biochemical problem.

But now we have genomics to reveal all the genes in an organism. More, we can monitor how each and every one of them expresses in our bodies. Genomics, working with geriatric pathology, now unveils the intricate problems of coordination among aging organ systems. Population genetics illuminates aging's cause and so, soon enough, its control. Aging arises from interconnected complexity hundreds of times greater than cell biologists thought before the late 1990s.

The many-headed monster of aging can't be stopped by any vaccine or by supplying a single missing enzyme. There are no "master regulatory" genes, or avenues of accumulating damage. Instead, there any complex pathways that inevitably trade current performance for longterm decay. Eventually that evolutionary strategy catches up with us.

So the aging riddle is inherently genomic in scale. There is no biochemical or cellular necessity to aging—it arises from side effects of evolution, through natural selection. But this also means we can attack it by using directed evolution.

Michael Rose at UC Irvine has produced "Methuselah flies" that live over four times longer than control flies in the lab. He did this by not allowing their eggs to hatch, until half are dead, for hundreds of generations. Methuselah flies are more robust, not less, and so resist stress.

Methuselah flies genomics shows us densely overlapping pathways. Directed evolution uses these to enhance longevity. Since flies have about ¾ of their genes in common with us, this tells us much about our own pathways. We now know many of these pathways and can enhance their resistance to the many disorders of aging.

By finding substances that can enhance the action of those pathways, we have a 21st Century approach to aging. Such research is rapidly ongoing in private companies, including one I co-founded only three years ago. The field is moving fast. The genomic revolution makes the use of multi-pathway treatments to offset aging inevitable.

Knowledge comes first, then its use. Science yields engineering. Already there seems no fundamental reason why we cannot live to 150 years or longer. After all, nature has done quite well on her own. We know of a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine, a 400 year old clam—plus whales, a tortoise and koi fish over 200 years old—all without technology. After all, these organisms use pathways we share, and can now understand.

It will take decades to find the many ways of acting on the longevity genes we already know. Nature spent several billion years developing these pathways; we must plumb them with smart modern tools. The technology emerging now acts on these basic pathways to immediately effect all types of organs. Traditionally, medicine focuses on disease by isolating and studying organs. Fair enough, for then. Now it is better to focus on entire organisms. Only genomics can do this. It looks at the entire picture.

Quite soon, simple pills containing designer supplements will target our most common disorders — cardiovascular, diabetes, neurological. Beyond that, the era of affordable, personal genomics makes possible designer supplements, now called neutrigenomics. Tailored to each personal genome, these can enforce the repair mechanisms and augmentations that nature herself provided to the genomically fortunate.

So…what if it works?

The prospect of steadily extending our lifespans terrifies some governments. These will yield, over time, to pressures to let us work longer—certainly far beyond the 65 years imposed by most European Union countries. Slowly it will dawn that vibrant old age is a boon, not a curse.

Living to 150 ensures that you take the long view. You're going to live in a future ecology, so better be sure it's livable. You'll need longterm investments, so think longterm. Social problems will belong to you, not some distant others, because problems evolve and you'll be around to see them.

Rather than isolating people, "old age" will lead to social growth. With robust health to go with longer lives, the older will become more socially responsible, bringing both experience and steady energy to bear.

We need fear no senioropolis of caution and withdrawal. Once society realizes that people who get educated in 20 years can use that education for another century or so, working well beyond 100, all the 20th Century social agenda vanishes. Nobody will retire at 65. People will switch careers, try out their dreams, perhaps find new mates and passions. We will see that experience can damp the ardent passions of glib youth, if it has a healthy body to work through. That future will be more mature, and richer for it.

All this social promise emerges from the genomic revolution. The 21st Century has scarcely begun, and already it looks as though most who welcomed it in will see it out–happily, after a good swim in the morning and a vigorous party that night, to welcome in the 22nd. The first person to live to 150 may be reading this right now.

Many mathematical surveys indicate that the "Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis" is the most important open question in mathematics. The rapid pace of mathematics, along with computer-assisted mathematical proofs and visualizations, leads me to believe that this question will be resolved in my lifetime. Math aficionado John Fry once said that he thought we would have a better chance of finding life on Mars than finding a counterexample for the Riemann Hypothesis.

In the early 1900s, British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy sometimes took out a quirky form of life insurance when embarking on ocean voyages. In particular, he would mail a postcard to a colleague on which he would claim to have found the solution of the Riemann Hypothesis. Hardy was never on good terms with God and felt that God would not let him die in a sinking ship while Hardy was in such a revered state, with the world always wondering if he had really solved the famous problem.

The proof of the Riemann Hypothesis involves the zeta function, which can be represented by a complicated-looking curve that is useful in number theory for investigating properties of prime numbers. Written as f(x), the function was originally defined as the infinite sum:

When x = 1, this series has no finite sum. For values of x larger than 1, the series adds up to a finite number. If x is less than 1, the sum is again infinite. The complete zeta function, studied and discussed in the literature, is a more complicated function that is equivalent to this series for values of x greater than 1, but it has finite values for any real or complex number, except for when the real part is equal to one. We know that the function equals zero when x is -2, -4, -6, ... . We also know that the function has an infinite number of zero values for the set of complex numbers, the real part of which is between zero and one—but we do not know exactly for what complex numbers these zeros occur. In 1859, mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) conjectured that these zeros occur for those complex numbers the real part of which equals 1/2. Although vast numerical evidence exists that favors this conjecture, it is still unproven

The proof of Riemann's Hypothesis will have profound consequences for the theory of prime numbers and in our understanding of the properties of complex numbers. A generalized version of the Hypothesis, when proven true, will allow mathematicians to solve numerous important mathematical problems. Amazingly, physicists may have found a mysterious connection between quantum physics and number theory through investigations of the Riemann Hypothesis. I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe.

Today, over 11,000 volunteers around the world are working on the Riemann Hypothesis, using a distributed computer software package at Zetagrid.Net to search for the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. More than 1 billion zeros for the zeta function are calculated every day.

In modern times, mathematics has permeated every field of scientific endeavor and plays an invaluable role in biology, physics, chemistry, economics, sociology, and engineering. Mathematics can be used to help explain the colors of a sunset or the architecture of our brains. Mathematics helps us build supersonic aircraft and roller coasters, simulate the flow of Earth's natural resources, explore subatomic quantum realities, and image faraway galaxies. Mathematics has changed the way we look at the cosmos.

Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world."

I find it hard to believe that anything will change everything. The only exception might be if we suddenly learned how to live with one another. But, does anyone think that will come about in a foreseeable lifetime?

Evidence from the past seems to point to our becoming increasingly dangerous pretty much every time we come up with a new idea or technology. These new things are usually wholesome and benign at first (movable type, pharmacology, rule of law) but before long we find ways to use these inventions to do what we do best—exercise power over one another.

Even if we were visited by weird little people from another planet and were forced to band together, I doubt if it would be long before we’d be finding ways to break into factions again, identifying those among us who are not quite people.

We keep rounding an endless vicious circle. Will an idea or technology emerge anytime soon that will let us exit this lethal cyclotron before we meet our fate head on and scatter into a million pieces? Will we outsmart our own brilliance before this planet is painted over with yet another layer of people? Maybe, but I doubt it.

In the 1960s movie "The Graduate" a young Dustin Hoffman is advised to go into plastics, presumably because that will be the next big thing.

Today, one might well advise the young person planning to pursue a degree in medicine or the biological sciences to go into brain plasticity. This refers to the fact that neurons are malleable throughout life, capable of being shaped by external experiences and endogenous events.

Recent imaging studies of single neurons have revealed that specialized parts of nerve cells, termed dendritic spines are constantly undergoing a process of rapid expansion and retraction. While brain cells are certainly capable of structural and functional changes throughout life, an extensive scientific literature has shown that plasticity in the nervous system is greatest early in development, during the so-called critical periods. This accounts for the marvelous ability of children to rapidly master various skills at different developmental stages. Toddlers have no difficulty in learning two, three and even more languages, and most adolescents can learn to ski black diamond slopes much before their middle-aged parents. The critical periods underlying such learning reflect the high degree of plasticity exhibited by specific brain circuits during the first two decades of life.

In recent years, developmental neurobiologists have made considerable progress in unraveling the myriad factors underlying the plasticity of neurons in the developing brain. For instance, a number of studies have now demonstrated that it is the formation of inhibitory circuits in the cortex that causes decreased plasticity in the maturing visual system. While no single event can entirely explain brain plasticity, progress is being attained at a rapid pace, and I am convinced that in my lifetime we will be able to control the level of plasticity exhibited by mature neurons.

Several laboratories have already discovered ways to manipulate the brain in ways to make mature neurons as plastic as during early development. Such studies have been done using genetically engineered mice with either a deletion or an over-expression of specific genes known to control plasticity during normal development. Moreover, drug treatments have now been found to mimic the changes observed in these mutant mice.

In essence this means that the high degree of brain plasticity normally evident only during early development can now be made to occur throughout the life span. This is undoubtedly a game changer in the brain sciences. Imagine being able to restore the plasticity of neurons in the language centers of your brain, enabling you to learn any and all languages effortlessly and at a rapid pace. The restoration of neuronal plasticity would also have important clinical implications since unlike in the mature brain, connections in the developing brain are capable of sprouting (i.e. new growth). For this reason, this technology could provide a powerful means to combat loss of neuronal connections, including those resulting from brain injury as well as various disease states.

I am optimistic that these treatments will be forthcoming in my lifetime. Indeed a research group in Finland is about to begin the first clinical study to assess the ability of drug treatments to restore plasticity to the visual system of adult humans. If successful this would provide a means for treating amblyopia in adults, a prevalent disorder of the visual system, which today can only be treated in young children whose visual cortex is still plastic. 
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Still there are a number of factors will need to be worked out before the restoration of neuronal plasticity becomes a viable procedure. For one thing, it will be necessary to devise a means of targeting specific groups of neurons, those controlling a function that one wants to attain enhanced plasticity. Many people might wish to have a brain made capable of effortlessly learning foreign languages, but few would be pleased if this were accompanied by a vocabulary limited to babbling sounds, not unlike those of my granddaughter who is beginning to learn to speak English and Ukrainian.

An answer can be given once more in one sentence: the intentional, hostile deployment‚—whether by a state, a terrorist group, or other individuals‚—of a significant nuclear device.

In the classic English fable Jack and the Beanstalk, the intrepid protagonist risks being devoured on sight in order to repeatedly raid the home of a flesh-eating giant for gold. All goes well until the snoring giant awakens and gives furious chase. But Jack beats him back down the magic beanstalk and chops it down with an axe, toppling the descending cannibal to its death. Jack thus wins back his life plus substantial economic profit from his spoils.

Industrialized society has also reaped enormous economic and social benefit from fossil fuels, so far without rousing any giants. But as geoscientists, my colleagues and I devote much of our time to worrying about whether they might be slumbering in the Earth's climate system.

We used to think climate worked like a dial — slow to heat up and slow to cool down — but we've since learned it can also act like a switch. Twenty years ago anyone who hypothesized an abrupt, show-stopping event — a centuries-long plunge in air temperature, say, or the sudden die-off of forests — would have been laughed off. But today, an immense body of empirical and theoretical research tells us that sudden awakenings are dismayingly common in climate behavior.

Ancient records preserved in tree rings, sediments, glacial ice layers, cave stalactites, and other natural archives tells us that for much of the past 10,000 years — the time when our modern agricultural society evolved — our climate was remarkably stable. Before then it was it was capable of wild fluctuations, even leaping eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in ten years. That's as if the average temperature in Minneapolis warmed to that of San Diego in a single decade.

Even during the relative calm of recent centuries, we find sudden lurches that exceed anything in modern memory. Tree rings tell us that in the past 1,000 years, the western United States has seen three droughts at least as bad as the Dust Bowl but lasting three to seven times longer. Two of them may have helped collapse past societies of the Anasazi and Fremont people.

The mechanisms behind such lurches are complex but decipherable. Many are related to shifting ocean currents that slosh around pools of warm or cool seawater in quasi-predictable ways. The El Niño/La Niña phenomenon, which redirects rainfall patterns around the globe, is one well-known example. Another major player is the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC), a massive density-driven "heat conveyor belt" that carries tropical warmth northwards via the Gulf Stream. The THC is what gifts Europe with relatively balminess despite being as far north as some of Canada's best polar bear habitat.

If the THC were to weaken or halt, the eastern U.S. and Europe would become something like Alaska. While over-sensationalized by The Day After Tomorrow film and a scary 2003 Pentagon document imagining famines, refugees, and wars, a THC shutdown nonetheless remains an unlikely but plausible threat. It is the original sleeping giant of my field.

Unfortunately, we are discovering more giants that are probably lighter sleepers than the THC. Seven others — all of them potential game-changers — are now under scrutiny: (1) the disappearance of summer sea-ice over the Arctic Ocean, (2) increased melting and glacier flow of the Greenland ice sheet, (3) "unsticking" of the frozen West Antarctic Ice Sheet from its bed, (4) rapid die-back of Amazon forests, (5) disruption of the Indian Monsoon, (6) release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from thawing frozen soils, and (7) a shift to a permanent El Niño-like state. Like the THC, should any of these occur there would be profound ramifications — like our food production, the extinction and expansion of species, and the inundation of coastal cities.

To illustrate, consider the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The water stored in them is enormous, enough to drown the planet under more than 200 feet of water. That will not happen anytime soon but even a tiny reduction in their extent — say, five percent — would significantly alter our coastline. Global sea level is already rising about one-third of a centimeter every year and will reach at least 18 to 60 centimeters higher just one long human lifetime from now, if the speeds at which glaciers are currently flowing from land to ocean remain constant. But at least two warming-induced triggers might speed them up: percolation of lubricating meltwater down to the glaciers' beds; and the disintegration of floating ice shelves that presently pin glaciers onto the continent. If these giants awaken happen our best current guess is 80 to 200 centimeters of sea level rise. That's a lot of water. Most of Miami would either be surrounded by dikes or underwater.

Unfortunately, the presence of sleeping giants makes the steady, predictable growth of anthropogenic greenhouse warming more dangerous, not less. Alarm clocks may be set to go off, but we don't what their temperature settings are. The science is too new, and besides we'll never know for sure until it happens. While some economists predicted that rising credit-default swaps and other highly leveraged financial products might eventually bring about an economic collapse, who could have foreseen the exact timing and magnitude of late 2008? Like most threshold phenomena it is extremely difficult to know just how much poking is needed to disturb sleeping giants. Forced to guess, I'd mutter something about decades, or centuries, or never. On the other hand, one might be stirring already: In September 2007, then again in 2008, for the first time in memory nearly 40% of the later-summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean abruptly disappeared.

Unlike Jack, the eyes of scientists are slow to adjust to the gloom. But we are beginning to see some outlines and unfortunately, discern not one but many sleeping forms. What is certain is that our inexorable loading of the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases increases the likelihood that one or more of them will wake up.

Having lived only 17 years so far, to ask what I expect to live to see is to cast a long, wide net.

When looking far into the future, I find it a useful exercise to imagine oneself as a non-human scientist: an alien, a god, or some other creature with a modern understanding of mathematics and physics, but no inherent understanding of human culture or language, beyond what it can deduce from watching what happens at a high level. Essentially, it looks at the world "up to isomorphism": it is not relevant who does what, what it's called, whether it has five fingers or six; but rather how much of it there is, whether it survives, and where it goes.

From this perspective, a few things are apparent: We are depleting our planet's resources faster than they can be replenished. Most of the sun's energy is reflected back into space without being used. There are more of us every minute and we have barely the slightest hint of slowing growth, despite overcrowding and lack of resources. We are trapped in a delicate balance of environmental conditions that has been faltering ever since we began pulling hydrocarbons out of the crust and burning them in the atmosphere (by coincidence, perhaps?), and there seems to be a good chance it will collapse catastrophically in the next 100 years if we don't run out of hydrocarbons first. We have thrown countless small, special-purpose objects into space, and some have transmitted very valuable information back to us. For a short period (while it seemed we would destroy our planet with deliberate nuclear explosions and immediate evacuation might be necessary) we played at shooting living men into the sky, but they have only gone as far as our planet's moon, still within Earth orbit, and sure enough wound up right back in our atmosphere. I should note here that I do not mean any disrespect to the achievements of the Apollo program. In fact, I believe they are among humankind's greatest—so far!

If civilization is to continue expanding, however, as well it shall if it does not collapse, it must escape the tiny gravity well it is trapped in. It is quite unclear to me how this will happen: whether humans will look anything like the humans of today, whether we will escape to sun-orbiting space stations or planetary colonies, but if we expand, we must expand beyond Earth. Even if environmentalists succeed in building a sustainable terrestrial culture around local farming and solar energy, it will only remain sustainable if we limit reproduction, which I expect most of modern society to find unconscionable on some level.

It has always been not only the human way, but the way of all living things, to multiply and colonize new frontiers. What is uniquely human is our potential ability to colonize all frontiers: to adapt our intelligence to new environments, or to adapt environments to suit ourselves. Although the chaos of a planetary atmosphere filled with organic diversity is a beautiful and effective cradle of life, it is no place for the new human-machine civilization. By some means—genetic engineering, medical technology, brain scanning, or something even more fantastical—I expect that humans will gradually shorten the food chain, adapting to use more directly the energy of stars. Perhaps we will genetically modify humans to photosynthesize directly, or implant devices that can provide all the energy for the necessary chemical reactions electrically, or scan our intelligences into solar-powered computing devices. Again, the details are very hard to predict, but I believe there will be some way forward.

I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's come back to the present. There is budding new interest in the development of space technology, in large part undertaken as private ventures, unlike in the past. Many view such operations as absurd luxury vacations for the super-rich, or at best as unlikely schemes to harvest fuel on the Moon and ship it back to Earth via a rail gun. I believe this research is tremendously important, because whatever short-term excuses may be found to fund it, in the long run, it is absolutely critical to the future development of our civilization. I also don't mean to imply that we should give up on environmentalism and sustainability, and just start over with another planet: these principles will only become more important as we spread far and wide, beginning in each new place with even more limited resources and limited contact with home. Not to mention that if Earth can be saved, it would be a tremendous cultural treasure to preserve as long as possible.

I'm not as optimistic about interstellar travel as some (I certainly don't expect it to become practical in this century), but I'm also much more optimistic about the ability of human civilization to adapt and survive without the precise conditions that were necessary for its evolution. There are so many possible solutions for the survival of humans (or posthumans) in solar orbit or on "inhospitable" planets that I expect we will find some way to make it work long before generational or faster-than-light voyages to faraway star systems; in fact, I expect it in my lifetime. But someday, "escaping the gravity well" will mean not that of Earth, but that of our star, and then humankind's ship will at last have...gone out.

The world is transforming from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to an information economy. This means that people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood. Our new scientific understanding of neural plasticity and gene regulation, along with the global spread of schooling, will make that increasingly possible. We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer.

Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning. There is a developmental division of labor. Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that. Adults use what they learn as children to mate, predate, and generally succeed as grown-ups in that environment. Children are the R & D department of the human species. We grown-ups are production and marketing. We start out as brilliantly flexible but helpless and dependent babies, great at learning everything but terrible at doing just about anything. We end up as much less flexible but much more efficient and effective adults, not so good at learning but terrific at planning and acting.

These changes reflect brain changes. Young brains are more connected, more flexible and more plastic, but less efficient. As we get older, and experience more, our brains prune out the less-used connections and strengthen the connections that work. Recent developments in neuroscience show that this early plasticity can be maintained and even reopened in adulthood. And, we've already invented the most unheralded but most powerful brain-altering technology in history — school.

For most of human history babies and toddlers used their spectacular, freewheeling, unconstrained learning abilities to understand fundamental facts about the objects, people and language around them — the human core curriculum. At about 6 children also began to be apprentices. Through a gradual process of imitation, guidance and practice they began to master the particular adult skills of their particular culture — from hunting to cooking to navigation to childrearing itself. Around adolescence motivational changes associated with puberty drove children to leave the protected cocoon and act independently. And by that time their long apprenticeship had given children a new suite of executive abilities — abilities for efficient action, planning, control and inhibition, governed by the development of prefrontal areas of the brain. By adolescence children wanted to end their helpless status and act independently and they had the tools to do so effectively.

School, a very recent human invention, completely alters this program. Schooling replaces apprenticeship. School lets us all continue to be brilliant but helpless babies. It lets us learn a wide variety of information flexibly, and for its own sake, without any immediate payoff. School assumes that learning is more important than doing, and that learning how to learn is most important of all. But school is also an extension of the period of infant dependence — since we don't actually do anything useful in school, other people need to take care of us — all the way up to a Ph.D. School doesn't include the gradual control and mastery of specific adult skills that we once experienced in apprenticeship. Universal and extended schooling means that the period of flexible learning and dependence can continue until we are in our thirties, while independent active mastery is increasingly delayed.

Schooling is spreading inexorably throughout the globe. A hundred years ago hardly anyone went to school, even now few people are schooled past adolescence. A hundred years from now we can expect that most people will still be learning into their thirties and beyond. Moreover, the new neurological and genetic developments will give us new ways to keep the window of plasticity open. And the spread of the information economy will make genetic and neurological interventions, as well as educational and behavioral interventions, more and more attractive.

These accelerated changes have radical consequences. Schooling alone has already had a revolutionary effect on human learning. Absolute IQs have increased at an astonishing and accelerating rate, "the Flynn effect". Extending the period of immaturity indeed makes us much smarter and far more knowledgeable. Neurological and genetic techniques can accelerate this process even further. We all tend to assume that extending this period of flexibility and openness is a good thing — who would argue against making people smarter?

But there may be an intrinsic trade-off between flexibility and effectiveness, between the openness that we require for learning and the focus that we need to act. Child-like brains are great for learning, but not so good for effective decision-making or productive action. There is some evidence that adolescents even now have increasing difficulty making decisions and acting independently, and pathologies of adolescent action like impulsivity and anxiety are at all-time historical highs. Fundamental grown-up human skills we once mastered through apprenticeship, like cooking and caregiving itself, just can't be acquired through schooling. (Think of all those neurotic new parents who have never taken care of a child and try to make up for it with parenting books). When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?

This is a tough one. Not because there is a shortage of possibilities for major advances in science, and not because any predictions Edgies make are likely to be way off the mark (history tells us that they assuredly will); rather you set the hurdle impossibly high with "change everything." and "expect to live to see". The contraceptive pill "changed everything" for people living in parts of the world where it is available and the Internet "changed everything" for those of us who are connected. But for large parts of the world those advances may as well not have occurred. Moreover, many scientific changes take a generation or more to have a significant effect.

But since you ask, I'll give you an answer, and it's one I am pretty sure will happen in my lifetime (say, thirty more years). The reason for my confidence? The key scientific and technological steps have already been taken. In giving my answer, I'm adopting a somewhat lawyer-like strategy of taking advantage of that word "development" in your question. Scientific advances do not take place purely in the laboratory, particularly game-changing ones. They have to find their way into society as a whole, and that transition is an integral part of any "scientific advance."

History tells us that it can often take some time for a scientific or technological advance to truly "change everything". Understanding germs and diseases, electricity, the light bulb, and the internal combustion engine are classic examples. (Even these examples still have not affected everyone on the planet, of course, at least not directly, but that is surely just a matter of time.) The development I am going to focus on is the final one in the scientific chain that brings the results of the science into everyday use.

My answer? It's staring us in the face. The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world's knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone's hands. The world has never, ever, been in that situation before. It really will change everything. From the way individual people live their lives, to the way wealth and power are spread across the globe. It is the ultimate democratizing technology. And if my answer seems less "cutting edge" or scientifically sexy than many of the others you receive, I think that just shows how dramatic and pervasive the change has already been.

What other object do you habitually carry around with you and use all the time, and take for granted? Yet when did you acquire your first mobile phone? Can you think of a reason why anyone else in the world will not react the same way when the technology reaches them? Now imagine the impact on someone in apart of the world that has not had telephones, computers, the Internet, or even easy access to libraries. I'll let your own answers to these questions support my case that this is game changing on a hitherto unknown global scale.

I'm 62, so I'll have to limit my projections to what I expect to happen in the next two to three decades. I believe these will be the most interesting times in human history (Remember the old Chinese curse about "interesting times?") Humanity will see, before I die, the "Singularity," the day when we finally create a human level artificial intelligence. This involves considering the physics advances that will be required to create the computer that is capable of running a strong AI program.

Although by both my calculations and those of Ray Kurzweil (originator of the "Singularity" idea), the 10 teraflop speed of today's supercomputers have more than enough computing power to run a minimum AI program, we are missing some crucial idea in this program. Conway's Game of Life has been proven to be a universal program, capable of expressing a strong AI program, and it should therefore be capable, if allowed to run long enough, of bootstrapping itself into the complexity of human level intelligence. But Game of Life programs do no do so. They increase their complexity just so far, and then stop. Why, we don't know. As I said, we are missing something, and what we are missing is the key to human creativity.

But an AI program can be generated by brute force. We can map an entire human personality, together with a simulated environment into a program, and run this. Such a program would be roughly equivalent to the program being run in the movie The Matrix, and it would require enormous computing power, power far beyond today's supercomputers. The power required can only be provided by a quantum computer.

A quantum computer works by parallel processing across the multiverse. That is, part of the computation is done in this universe by you and your part of the quantum computer, and the other parts of the computation are done by your analogues with their parts of the computer in the other universes of the multiverse. The full potential of the quantum computer has not been realized because the existence of the multiverse has not yet been accepted, even by workers in the field of quantum computation, in spite of the fact that the multiverse's existence is required by quantum mechanics, and by classical mechanics in its most powerful form, Hamilton-Jacobi theory.

Other new technologies become possible via action across the multiverse. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory of all forces and particles except gravity, a theory confirmed by many experiments done over the past forty years, tells us that it is possible to transcend the laws of conservation of baryon number (number of protons plus neutrons) and conservation of lepton number (number of electrons plus neutrinos) and thereby convert matter into energy in a process far more efficient that nuclear fission or fusion. According to the Standard Model, the proton and electron making up a hydrogen atom can be combined to yield pure energy in the form of photons, or neutrino-anti-neutrino pairs. If the former, then we would have a mechanism that would allow us to convert garbage into energy, a device Doc in the movie Back to the Future obtained from his trip to the future. If the latter, then the directed neutrino-anti-neutrino beam would provide the ultimate rocket: the exhaust would be completely invisible to those nearby, just as the propulsion mechanism that Doc also obtained from the future. The movie writers got it right, Doc's future devices are indeed in our future.

Quantum computer running an AI program, direct conversion of matter into energy, the ultimate rocket that would allow the AI's and the human downloads to begin interstellar travel at near light speed, depend on the same physics, and should appear at the same time in the future.

Provided we have the courage to develop the technology allowed by the known laws of physics. I have grave doubts that we will.

In order to have advances in physics and engineering, one must first have physicists and engineers. The number of students majoring in these subjects has dropped enormously in the quarter century that I have been a professor. Worse, the quality of the few students we do have has dropped precipitously. The next decade will see the retirement of Stephen Hawking, and others less well-known but of similar ability, but I know of no one of remotely equal creativity to replace them. Small wonder, given that the starting salary of a Wall Street lawyer fresh out of school is currently three times my own physicist's salary. As a result, most American engineers and physicists are now foreign born.

But can foreign countries continue to supply engineers and physicists? That is, will engineers and physicists be available in any country? The birth rate of the vast majority of the developed nations has been far below replacement level for a decade and more. This birth dearth also holds for China, due to their one-child policy, and remarkably is developing even in the Muslim and southern nations. We may not have enough people in the next twenty years to sustain the technology we already have, to say nothing of developing the technology allowed by the known laws of physics that I describe above.

The great Galileo scholar Giorgio de Santillana, who taught me history of science when I was an undergraduate at MIT in the late 1960's, wrote that Greek scientific development ended in the century or so before the Christian era because of a birth dearth and a simultaneous bureaucratization of intellectual inquiry. I fear we are seeing a repeat of this historical catastrophe today.

However, I remain cautiously optimistic that we will develop the ultimate technology described above, and transfer it with faltering hands to our ultimate successors, the AI's and the human downloads, who will be thus enabled to expand outward into interstellar space, engulf the universe, and live forever.

"With Nuclear Weapons, everything has changed, save our way of thinking."  So said Albert Einstein, sixty three years ago, following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at the end of World War II.  Having been forced to choose a single game changer, I have turned away from the fascinating scientific developments I might like to see, and will instead focus on the one game changer that I will hopefully never directly witness, but nevertheless expect will occur during my lifetime:  the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population.  Whether used by one government against the population of another, or by a terrorist group, the detonation of even a small nuclear explosive, similar in size, for example, to the one that destroyed hiroshima, would produce an impact on the economies, politics, and lifestyles of the first world in a way that would make the impact of 9/11 seem trivial.   I believe the danger of nuclear weapons use remains one of the biggest dangers of this century.  It is remarkable that we have gone over 60 years without their use, but the clock is ticking.  I fear that Einstein's admonition remains just as true today as it did then, and I that we are unlikely to go another half century with impunity, at least without confronting the need for a global program of disarmament that goes far beyond the present current Nuclear Non-Proliferation, and strategic arms treaties.

Following forty years of Mutually Assured Destruction, with the two Superpowers like two scorpions in a bottle, each held at bay by the certainty of the destruction that would occur at the first whiff of nuclear aggression on the part of the other, we have become complacent.  Two generations have come to maturity in a world where nuclear weapons have not been used.  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been largely ignored, not just by nascent nuclear states like North Korea, or India and Pakistan, or pre-nuclear wannabies like Iran.  Together the United States and Russia possess 26,000 of the world's 27,000 known nuclear warheads.  This in spite of the NPT's strict requirement for these countries to significantly reduce their arsenals.   Each country has perhaps 1000 warheads on hair trigger full alert.  This in spite of the fact that there is no strategic utility at the current time associated with possessing so many nuclear weapons on alert.  

Ultimately, what so concerned Einstein, and is of equal concern today, is the fact that first use of nuclear weapons cannot be justified on moral or strategic grounds. Nevertheless, it may surprise some people to learn that the United States has no strict anti-first-use policy. In fact, in its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. declared that nuclear weapons "provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats" including "surprising military developments."  

And while we spend $10 billion/yr on flawed ballistic missile defense systems against currently non-existent threats, the slow effort to disarm means that thousands of nuclear weapons remain in regions that are unstable, and which could, in principle, be accessed by well organized and well financed terrorist groups.  We have not spent a noticeable fraction of the money spent supposedly defending against ballistic missiles instead outfitting ports and airports to detect against possible nuclear devices smuggled into this country in containers. 

Will it take a nuclear detonation used against a civilian population to stir a change in thinking?  The havoc wreaked on what we now call the civilized world, no matter where a nuclear confrontation takes place, would be orders of magnitude greater than that which we have experienced since the Second World War.   Moreover, as recent calculations have demonstrated, even a limited nuclear exchange between, say India and Pakistan, could have a significant global impact for almost a decade on world climates and growing seasons.  

I sincerely hope that whatever initiates a global realization that the existence of large nuclear stockpiles throughout the world is a threat to everyone on the planet, changing the current blind business-as-usual mentality permeating global strategic planning, does not result from a nuclear tragedy.  But physics has taught me that the world is the way it is whether we like it or not.  And my gut tells me that to continue to ignore the likelihood that a game changer that exceeds our worst nightmares will occur in this century is merely one way to encourage that possibility.

It is January, named for the Roman God Janus (Latin for door), the doorway to the new year, and yet Janus-faced in looking to the past to forecast the future. This January, 2009, in particular, finds us at a crisis tipping point both economically and environmentally. If ever we needed to look to the past to save our future it is now. In particular, we need to do two things: (1) stop the implosion of the economy and enable markets to function once again both freely and fairly, and (2) make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make these transformations will doom us to the endless tribal political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for millennia. We need to make the transition to Civilization 1.0. Let me explain.

In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic — where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production — fossil fuels won’t get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power — perhaps even nuclear fusion (instead of the fission reactors we have now) could eventually get us to Civilization 1.0.

We are close. Taking our Janus-faced look to the past in order to see the future, let’s quickly review the history of humanity on its climb to become a Civilization 1.0:

Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intra-group conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and between-group violence is common.

Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups, with a mostly horizontal political system and egalitarian economy.

Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.

Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members produce food and other products consumed by non-producing upper-class members.

Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined geographical territory and its corresponding inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a win-lose game against other states.

Type 0.6: Empires extend their control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.

Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power over several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.

Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, win-win economic game through free trade with other states.

Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.

Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.

Looking from this past toward the future, we can see that the forces at work that could prevent us from reaching Civilization 1.0 are primarily political and economic, not technological. The resistance by non democratic states to turning power over to the people is considerable, especially in theocracies whose leaders would prefer we all revert to Type 0.4 chiefdoms. The opposition toward a global economy is substantial, even in the industrialized West, where economic tribalism still dominates the thinking of most people.

The game-changing scientific idea is the combination of energy and economics — the development of renewable energy sources made cheap and available to everyone everywhere on the planet by allowing anyone to trade in these game-changing technologies with anyone else. That will change everything.

One of the sacred principles of physics is that information is never lost. It can be scrambled, encrypted, dissipated and shredded, but never lost. This tenet underlies the second law of thermodynamics and a concept called "unitarity," an essential component of unified theories of particles and forces. Discovering a counterexample or new ways to preserve information could be a real game-changer: one that alters our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, transforms our concept of space and time, triggers a reconstruction of the history of the universe and leads to new prognostications about its future.

There is a real chance of breakthrough in the foreseeable future as theorists converge on one of the greatest threats to information preservation: black holes. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, a black hole forms when matter is so concentrated that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational field. Any information that passes through the event horizon surrounding the black hole—the "point of no return"—is lost forever to the outside world. Suppose, for example, that Bob pilots a spaceship into the black hole carrying along three books of his choice. It appears that the titles and contents of the three books vanish. Either that or Einstein's general theory of relativity is wrong.

There is nothing shocking about having to correct Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's known to be missing an essential element, quantum physics. Einstein, and generations of theorists since, have sought an improved theory of gravity that incorporates quantum physics in a way that is mathematically and physically consistent. String theory and loop quantum gravity are the most recent attempts.

There is no doubt that quantum physics alters the event horizon and the evolution of a black hole in a fundamental way, as first point out in the work of Jacob Bekenstein, Gary Gibbons and Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. According to quantum physics, matter and energy are composed of discrete chunks known as quanta (such as electrons, quarks and photons) whose position and velocities are undergoing constant random fluctuations. Even empty space—a pure vacuum—is seething with microscopic fluctuations that create and annihilate pairs of quanta and anti-quanta. The seething vacuum just outside the event horizon occasionally produces a pair of quanta, such as an electron-positron duo, in which one escapes and one falls into the black hole. From afar, it appears that the black hole radiates a particle. This phenomenon repeats continuously, producing a spectrum of particles known as "Hawking radiation," whose properties are similar to the "thermal radiation" emitted by a hot body. Very slowly, the black hole radiates away energy and shrinks in mass and size until—well, here is where the story really begins to get interesting.

Thermal radiation only depends on the temperature of the emitting body, providing no other details about the body itself. So, if Hawking radiation is truly thermal, then the information inside the black hole is truly lost . For the last decade, though, leading physicists including Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Stephen Hawking fiercely debated (and even bet on) the outcome—Susskind refers to the debate as the "black hole war." Aided by new theoretical tools developed by Juan Maldacena and other string theorists, physicists discovered that Hawking radiation is not quite thermal after all! The radiation deviates by a tiny amount from a perfectly thermal signal, and the tiny deviation incorporates information about whatever was inside. The titles of Bob's three books, for example, are not lost forever, although the information dribbles out incredibly slowly and is unimaginably scrambled. Thus, victory was declared in the black hole war.

But it may be an uneasy peace, for there remains the question of what happens to information after it falls into the horizon. This is a reasonable question because, curiously enough, passage through the horizon can be unremarkable (if the black hole is very big). There are no sign posts indicating to Bob that he has passed the point of no return, and his books remain intact. Now suppose Bob scribbles some notes in the margins of his book. What happens to this information?

Here there is a diversity of views. Some suggest that this information, too, is radiated away through the Hawking process and the black hole simply disappears. Some suggest that quantum physics makes the event horizon penetrable so that some information is radiated by the Hawking process but some escapes directly. Yet others suggest that the information is copied; one copy is radiated away and the other strikes the singularity, entering a new section of space-time that is causally disconnected from observers outside the black hole, so the two copies never meet.

Theorists have recently developed a number of new theoretical tools to attack the problem and are hard at work. Although the subject lies in the domain of quantum gravity, the implications for other fields, including my own, cosmology, will be profound. The answer will shape any future formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, quantum gravity and unified field theory. Since scrambling information, a.k.a., the entropy, determines the arrow of time, the results may inform us how time may have first emerged at the cosmic singularity known as the big bang. Or, if it proves possible for copies to bounce from the black hole singularity to a separate piece of space time, the same may apply to an even more famous singularity, the big bang. This would lend support to recent ideas suggesting that the large scale properties of the universe were shaped by events before the big bang and these conditions (a form of information) were transmitted across the cosmic singularity into a new phase of expansion. In fact, if information is forever preserved across singularities, the universe may undergo regularly repeating cycles of big bangs, expansion, and big crunches, forever into the past and into the future. To me, a breakthrough with these kinds of implications would be the ultimate game-changer.

Much of the misery in the world today — as it always has been — is due to the human propensity to contemplate, or actually commit, violence against another human being. It's not just assaults and murders that display that propensity. Someone who designs a weapon, punishes a child, declares war or leaves a hit-and-run victim by the side of the road has defined 'harming another human being' as a justifiable action for himself. How different the world would be if, as a biologically determined characteristic of future human beings, there was such a cognitive inhibition to such actions that people would be incapable of carrying them out, just as most of us are incapable of moving our ears.

It must be the case that that in the brains of everyone, from abusive parents and rapists to arms dealers and heads of state, there can arise a concatenation of nerve impulses which allow someone to see as 'normal' — or at least acceptable — the mutilation, maiming or death of another for one's own pleasure, greed or benefit. Suppose the pattern of that series of impulses was analysable exactly, with future developments of fMRI, PET scans or technology as yet uninvented. Perhaps every decision to kill or harm another person can be traced to a series of nerve impulses that arise in brain centre A, travel in a microsecond to areas B, C, and D, inhibit areas E and F, and lead to a previously unacceptable decision becoming acceptable. Perhaps we would discover a common factor between the brain patterns of someone who is about to murder a child, and a head of state signing a bill to initiate a nuclear weapons programme, or an engineer designing a new type of cluster bomb. All of them accept at some intellectual level that it is perfectly all right for their actions to cause harm or death to another human. The brains of all of them, perhaps, experience pattern D, the 'death pattern'.

If such a specific pattern of brain activity were detectable, could methods then be devised that prevented or disrupted it whenever it was about to arise? At its most plausible — and least socially acceptable — everyone could wear microcircuit-based devices that detected the pattern and suppressed or disrupted it, such that anyone in whom the impulse arose would instantaneously lose any will to carry it out. Less plausible, but still imaginable, would be some sophisticated chemical suppressant of 'pattern D', genetically engineered to act at specific synapses or on specific neurotransmitters, and delivered in some way that reached every single member of the world's population. The 'pattern D suppressant' could be used as a water additive, like chlorine, acceptable now to prevent deaths from dirty water; or as inhalants sprayed from the air; or in genetically modified foodstuffs; even, perhaps, alteration of the germ cell line in one generation that would forever remove pattern D from future generations.

Rapes would be defused before they happened; soldiers — if there were still armies — would be inhibited from firing as their trigger fingers tightened, except of course there would be no one to fire at since enemy soldiers, insurgents, or terrorists would themselves be unable to carry their violent acts to completion.

Would the total elimination of murderous impulses from the human race have a down side? Well, of course, one single person who escaped the elimination process could then rule the world. He — probably a man — could oppress and kill with impunity since no one else would have the will to kill him. Measures would have to be devised to deal with such a situation. Such a person would be so harmful to the human race that, perhaps, plans would have to be laid to control him if he should arise. Tricky, this one, since he couldn't be killed, as there would no one able to kill him or even to design a machine that would kill him, as that also would involve an ability to contemplate the death of another human being.

But setting that possibility aside, what would be the disadvantages of a world in which, chemically or electronically, the ability to kill or harm another human being would be removed from all people? Surely, only good could come from it. Crimes motivated by greed would still be possible, but robberies would be achieved with trickery rather than at the point of a pistol; gang members might attack each other with insults and taunts rather than razors or coshes; governments might play chess to decide on tricky border issues; and deaths from road accidents would go down because even the slightest thought about one's own behaviour causing the death of another would be so reminiscent of 'pattern D' that we would all drive much more carefully to avoid it. Deaths from natural disasters would continue, but charitable giving and international aid in such situations would soar as people realised that not helping to prevent them in future would be almost as bad as the old and now eliminated habit of killing people.

A method to eliminate 'pattern D' will lead to the most significant change ever in the way humans — and therefore societies — behave. And somewhere, in the fields of neurobiology or genetic modification today the germ of that change may already be present.

It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We'd use artificial intelligence the same way we've exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we'd plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.

However, the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not be bounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that use the web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, the more money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the web is on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link or creates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

As more commercial life, science work, and daily play of humanity moves onto the web, the potential and benefits of a web AI compound. The first genuine AI will most likely not be birthed in standalone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion CPUs known as the web. It will be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded, and loosely connected. Any device that touches this web AI will share —and contribute to—its intelligence. Therefore all devices and processes will (need to) participate in this web intelligence.

Standalone minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped, a penalty one might pay in order to have mobility in distant places. A truly off-the-grid AI could not learn as fast, as broadly, or as smartly as one plugged into 6 billion human minds, a quintillion online transistors, hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, and the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization.

When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?

While we will waste the web's ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we'll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we "know" something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

What is talent? If you ask the average grade school teacher to identify her most talented student, she is likely to reject the question: "All my students are equally talented." But of course, this answer is rubbish. Anyone who has worked with numerous young people over the years knows that some catch on quickly, almost instantly, to new skills or understandings, while others must go through the same drill, with little depressingly little improvement over time.

As wrongheaded as the teacher's response is the viewpoint put forward by some psychological researchers, and most recently popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. This is notion that there is nothing mysterious about talent, no need to crack open the lockbox: anyone who works hard enough over a long period of time can end up at the top of her field. Anyone who has the opportunity to observe or read about a prodigy—be it Mozart or Yo-Yo Ma in music, Tiger Woods in golf, John von Neumann in mathematics—knows that achievement is not just hard work: the differences between performance at time 1 and successive performances at times 2, 3, and 4 are vast, not simply the result of additional sweat. It is said that if algebra had not already existed,, precocious Saul Kripke would have invented it in elementary school: such a characterization would be ludicrous if applied to most individuals.

For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having 'a rage to learn, a passion to master?)

This interdisciplinary scientific breakthrough will allow us to understand what is special about Picasso, Gauss, J.S. Mill. Importantly, it will illuminate whether a talented person could have achieved equally in different domains (could Mozart have been a great physicist? Could Newton have been a great musician?) Note, however, that will not illuminate two other issues:

1.    What makes someone original, creative? Talent, expertise,
       are necessary but not sufficient.
2.    What determines whether talents are applied to constructive 
       or destructive ends?

These answers are likely to come from historical or cultural case studies, rather than from biological or psychological science. Part of the maturity of the sciences is an appreciation of which questions are best left to other disciplinary approaches.

Culture changes everything because culture contains everything, in the sense of things that can be named, and so what can be conceived. Wittgenstein implied that what cannot be said cannot be thought. He meant by this that language relies on a series of prior agreements. Such grammar has been shown by anthropologists to underpin the idea of any on-going community, not just its language, but its broader categories, its institutions, its metaphysics. And the same paradox is presented: how can anything new ever happen? If by 'happen' we only think of personal and historical events, we miss the most crucial novelty—the way that new things, new physical objects, devices and techniques, insinuate themselves into our lives. They have new names which we must learn, and new, revolutionary effects.

It does not always work like that. Resistance is common. Paradoxically, the creative force of culture also tries to keep everything the same. Ernest Gellner said that humans, taken as a whole, present the most extensive behavioural variation of any species while every particular cultural community is characterized by powerful norms. These are ways of being that, often through appeals to some apparently natural order, are not just mildly claimed as quintessentially human, but lethally enforced at a local level, in a variety of more or less public ways. Out groups (whether a different ethnicity, class, sexuality, creed, whether being one of twins, an albino, someone disabled or an unusually talented individual) are suspect and challenging in their abnormality. Categories of special difference are typical foci for sacrifice, banishment, and ridicule through which the in-group becomes not just the in-group but, indeed, a distinctly perceptible group, confident, refreshed and culturally reproductive. This makes some sense: aberrance subverts the grammar of culture.

The level at which change can be tolerated varies greatly across social formations, but there is always a point beyond which things become intolerably incoherent. We may rightly label the most unprecedented behaviour mad because, whatever relativization might be invoked to explain it, it is, by definition, strategically doomed: we seek to ignore it. Yet the routine expulsion of difference, apparently critical in the here and now, becomes maladaptive in any longer-term perspective. Clearly, it is change that has created our species' resilience and success, creating the vast inter- (not intra-) cultural diversity that Gellner noted. So how does change happen?

Major change often comes stealthily. Its revolutionary effect may often reside in the very fact that we do not recognize what it is doing to our behaviour, and so cannot resist it. Often we lack to words to articulate resistance as the invention is a new noun whose verbal effect lags in its wake. Such major change operates far more effectively through things than directly through people, not brought about by the mad, but rather by 'mad scientists', whose inventions can be forgiven their inventors.

Unsurprisingly then, the societies that tolerate the least behavioural deviance are the most science-averse. Science, in the broadest sense of effective material invention, challenges quotidian existence. The Amish (a quaint static ripple whose way of life will never uncover the simplest new technological fix for the unfolding hazards of a dynamic universe) have long recognized that material culture embodies weird inspirations, challenging us, as eventual consumers, not with 'copy what I do', but a far, far more subversive 'try me.'

Material culture is the thing that makes us human, driving human evolution from the outset with its continually modifying power. Our species' particular dilemma is that in order to safeguard what we have, we have continually to change. The culture of things—invention and technology—is ever changing under the tide of words and routines whose role is to image fixity and agreement when, in reality, none exists. This form of change is no trivial thing because it is essential to our longer term survival. At least, the longer term survival of anything we may be proud to call universally human

The technological changes were small at first. In 2007 a telescope was developed that could search for planets in the Milky Way within 100 light years of Earth. The next version of the telescope in 2008 did not have to block out the light of the new star to see the planets. It could directly see the reflected light of the planets closest to every star. That made it possible to do spectroscopic analysis of reflected light and search for blue planets like Earth. Within a decade, 100 Earth-like planets had been identified within 100 light years. In the next two centuries that number increased to 50,000 blue planets.

Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips.

Laboratory Earth colonies were formed for simulating conditions for the galactic trips. Based on these experiments, social scientists soon recognized that the major unsolved problem of galactic colonization was the social psychological problem, How could humans live together for up to 52 years, raising children who would become the explorers of the blue planets? Much had been learned, of course, from the social psychological studies early in the 21st and 22nd Centuries for obtaining planet-wide cooperation in solving global warming and sustainable energy production, and in curing world-wide hunger and disease. But that work was primitive and rudimentary for the challenges of galactic colonization.

The subsequent classic social psychological studies were all funded privately by one man. Thousands of scientists participated. Studies of all kinds were initially devised, and the results were carefully replicated. The entire series of social psychological experiments took a century to perform. It rapidly became clear that a military or any hierarchical social structure could not last without the threats of continual external danger. The work of Peggy Sanday had demonstrated that fact without question. The problem was to foster creative collaboration and minimize self-interest. Eventually, it was deemed necessary for each ship to spend 5 years prior to the trip selecting a problem that all the members would creatively and cooperatively face. The work had to easily consume the crew of a ship for 60 years. In addition, each ship represented a microcosm of all Earth's activities, including all the occupations and professions, adventure, play, and sports.

In the year 2,500 more than 20,000 ships set out, 2 headed for each planet. It was inevitable that many ships would successfully make the journey. No one knew what they would find. There was no plan for communication between the stars. The colonization of the Milky Way had begun.

Nothing has a greater potential for changing everything than the successful implementation of good old-fashioned nanotechnology.

I specify the old-fashioned version because nanotechnology is decidedly no longer what it used to be. Back in the mid-1980s when Eric Drexler first popularized the concept in his book Engines of Creation, the term referred to a radical and grandiose molecular manufacturing scheme. The idea was that scientists and engineers would construct vast fleets of "assemblers," molecular-scale, programmable devices that would build objects of practically any arbitrary size and complexity, from the molecules up. Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they'd do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they'd do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials.

The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion: they began as minute, nanoscale structures that duplicated themselves, and whose successors then differentiated off into specialized organs and other components. Those growing ranks of biological marvels did all this repeatedly until, eventually, they had automatically assembled themselves into complex and functional macroscale entities. And the initial seed structures, the gametes, were not even designed, built, or programmed by scientists: they were just out there in the world, products of natural selection. But if nature can do that all by itself, then why can't machines be intelligently engineered to accomplish relevantly similar feats?

Latter-day "nanotechnology," by contrast, is nothing so imposing. In fact, the term has been co-opted, corrupted, and reduced to the point where what it refers to is essentially just small-particle chemistry. And so now we have "nano-particles" in products raging from motor oils to sunscreens, lipstick, car polish and ski wax, and even a $420 "Nano Gold Energizing Cream" that its manufacturer claims transports beneficial compounds into the skin. Nanotechnology in this bastardized sense is largely a marketing gimmick, not likely to change anything very much, much less "everything."

But what if nanotechnology in the radical and grandiose sense actually became possible? What if, indeed, it became an operational reality? That would be a fundamentally transformative development, changing forever how manufacturing is done and how the world works. Imagine all of our material needs being produced at trivial cost, without human labor, and with no waste. No more sweat shops, no more smoke-belching factories, no more grinding workdays or long commutes. The magical molecular assemblers will do it all, permanently eliminating poverty in the process.

Then there would be the medical miracles performed by other types of molecular-scale devices that would repair or rejuvenate your body's cells, killing the cancerous or other bad ones, and nudging the rest of them toward unprecedented levels of youth, health, and durability. All without $420 bottles of face cream.

There's a downside to all this, of course, and it has nothing to do with Michael Chrichton-ish swarms of uncontrolled, predatory nanobots hunting down people and animals. Rather, it has to do with the question of what the mass of men and women are going to do when, newly unchained from their jobs, and blessed or cursed with longer life spans, they have oceans of free time to kill. Free time is not a problem for the geniuses and creators. But for the rest of us, what will occupy our idle hands? There is only so much golf you can play.

But perhaps this is a problem that will never have to be faced. The bulk of mainstream scientists pay little attention to radical nanotechnology, regarding its more extravagant claims as science-fictional and beyond belief. Before he died, chemist Richard Smalley, a Nobel prizewinner, made a cottage industry out of arguing that insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level would keep radical nanotechnology perpetually in the pipe dream stage. Nobody knows whether he was right about that.

Some people may hope that he was. Maybe changing everything is not so attractive an idea as it seems at first glance.

We're talking about changing everything—not just our abilities, relationships, politics, economy, religion, biology, language, mathematics, history and future, but all of these things at once. The only single event I can see shifting pretty much everything at once is our first encounter with intelligent, extra-terrestrial life.

The development of any of our current capabilities—genetics, computing, language, even compassion—all feel like incremental advances in existing abilities. As we've seen before, the culmination of one branch of inquiry always just opens the door to a new a new branch, and never yields the wholesale change of state we anticipated. Nothing we've done in the past couple of hundred thousand years has truly changed everything, so I don't see us doing anything in the future that would change everything, either.

No, I have the feeling that the only way to change everything is for something be done to us, instead. Just imagining the encounter of humanity with an "other" implies a shift beyond the solipsism that has characterized our civilization since our civilization was born. It augurs a reversal as big as the encounter of an individual with its offspring, or a creature with its creator. Even if it's the result of something we've done, it's now independent of us and our efforts.

To meet a neighbor, whether outer, inner, cyber- or hyper- spatial, finally turns us into an "us." To encounter an other, whether a god, a ghost, a biological sibling, an independently evolved life form, or an emergent intelligence of our own creation, changes what it means to be human.

Our computers may never inform us that they are self-aware, extra-terrestrials may never broadcast a signal to our SETI dishes, and interdimensional creatures may never appear to those who aren't taking psychedelics at the time—but if any of them did, it would change everything.

Speciation is coming. Fast. We keep forgetting that we are but one of several hominids that have walked the Earth (erectus, habilis,neanderthalis, heidelbergensis, ergaster, australopithecus). We keep thinking we are the one and only, the special. But we easily could not have been a dominant species. Or even a species anymore. We blissfully ignore the fact that we came within about 2,000 specimens of going extinct (which is why human DNA is virtually identical).

There is not much evidence, historically, that we are the be all and end all, or that we will remain the dominant species. The fossil history of the planet tells tales of at least six mass extinctions. In each cycle, most life was toast as DNA/RNA hit a reboot key. New species emerged to adapt to new conditions. Asteroid hits? Do away with oceans of slime. World freezes to the Equator? Microbes dominate. Atmosphere fills with poisonous oxygen? no worries, life eventually blurts out obnoxious mammals.

Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it.

There are at least three parallel tracks on which this change is running towards us. The easiest to see and comprehend is taking place among the "handicapped." As we build better prostheses, we begin to see equality. Legless Oscar Pistorious attempting to put aside the Special Olympics and run against able bodied Olympians is but one example. In Beijing he came very close, but did not meet the qualifying times. However, as materials science, engineering, and design advance, by next Olympics he and his disciples will be competitive. And one Olympics after that the "handicapped" could be unbeatable.

It's not just limbs, what started out as large cones for the hard of hearing eventually became pesky, malfunctioning hearing aids. Then came discrete, effective, miniaturized buds. Now internally implanted cochlear implants allow the deaf to hear. But unlike natural evolution, which requires centuries, digital technologies double in power and halve in price every few months. Soon those with implants will hear as well as we do, and, a few months after that, their hearing may be more acute than ours. Likely the devices will span a broad and adjustable tonal range, including that of species like dogs, bats, or dolphins. Wearers will be able to adapt to various environments at will. Perhaps those with natural hearing will file discrimination lawsuits because they were not hired by symphony orchestras…

Speciation does not have to be mechanical, there is a second parallel, fast moving, track in stem cell and tissue engineering. While the global economy melted down this year, a series of extraordinary discoveries opened interesting options that will be remembered far longer that the current NASDAQ index. Labs in Japan and Wisconsin rebooted skin cells and turned them into stem cells. We are now closer to a point where any cell in our body can be rebooted back to its original factory settings (pluripotent stem cell) and can rebuild any part of our body. At the same time, a Harvard team stripped a mouse heart of all its cells, leaving only cartilage. The cartilage was covered in mouse stem cells, which self organized into a beating heart. A Wake Forest group was regrowing human bladders and implanting them into accident and cancer victims. By year end, a European team had taken a trachea from a dead donor, taken the cells off, and then covered the sinew with bone marrow cells taken from a patient dying of tuberculosis. These cells self organized and regrew a fully functional trachea which was implanted into the patient. There was no need for immunosuppressants; her body recognized the cells covering the new organ as her own…

Again, this is an instance where treating the sick and the needy can quickly expand into a "normal" population with elective procedures. The global proliferation of plastic surgery shows how many are willing to undergo great expense, pain, and inconvenience to enhance their bodies. Between 1996 and 2002 elective cosmetic surgery increased 297%, minimally invasive procedures increased 4146%. As artificial limbs, eyes, ears, cartilage begin to provide significant advantages, procedures developed to enhance the quality of life for the handicapped may become common.

After the daughter of one of my friends tore her tendons horseback riding, doctors told her they would have to harvest parts of her own tendons and hamstrings to rebuild her leg. Because she was so young, the crippling procedure would have to be repeated three times as her body grew. But her parents knew tissue engineers were growing tendons in a lab, so she was one of the first recipients of a procedure that allows natural growth and no harvesting. Today she is a successful ski racer, but her coach feels her "damaged" knee is far stronger and has asked whether the same procedure could be done on the undamaged knee…

As we regrow or engineer more body parts we will likely significantly increase average life span and run into a third track of speciation. Those with access to Google already have an extraordinary evolutionary advantage over the digitally illiterate. Next decade we will be able to store everything we see, read, and hear in our lifetime. The question is can we re-upload and upgrade this data as the basic storage organ deteriorates? And can we enhance this organ's cognitive capacity internally and externally? MIT has already brought together many of those interested in cognition—neuroscientists, surgeons, radiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists—to begin to understand this black box. But rebooting other body parts will likely be easier than rebooting the brain, so this will likely be the slowest track but, over the long term, the one with the greatest speciation impact.

Speciation will not be a deliberate, programmed event. Instead it will involve an ever faster accumulation of small, useful improvements that eventually turn homo sapiens into a new hominid. We will likely see glimpses of this long-lived, partly mechanical, partly regrown creature that continues to rapidly drive its own evolution. As the branches of the tree of life, and of hominids, continue to grow and spread, many of our grandchildren will likely engineer themselves into what we would consider a new species, one with extraordinary capabilities, a homo evolutis.