Is there a field of science that doesn't predict some imminent geek rapture for the human race?* Don't get me wrong, I dig this stuff, the world would be a poorer place without visions of downloadable consciousness and seed-grown homes and whatnot. (Read! Accelerando! Now!)
After a while, it starts to seem like all these hopes and dreams have an almost religious function -- an outlet and source of optimism, a way of participating in something bigger and more decent and more long-lived than we are, a shot at immortality. And that's fine. Most of us need something like that, in one form or another. It beats being bored or hanging out at the mall.
Michio Kaku delivered the string theorist riff on The Biggest Jump in the History of the Humanity as part of his Idea Festival talk.
It involves a souped-up Kardashev scale, which goes like this: Type I civilizations are capable of harnessing the energy available in a single planet. (Wikipedia says this happens in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, though I don't remember it.)
Type II civilizations, like the Matrioshka Brains in (again)
Accelerando, can juice up on whole stars. Type III civilizations --
Iain Banks' marvelous Culture -- deal with galactic energy outputs. And then there are Type IV civilizations. They're kind of hard to imagine because they'd be able to use all the energy in the universe, but you can think of them as the Q from Star Trek. Talk about needing a lot of adapters.
Anyways, humanity is still plugging along at Type 0. We run our civilization on a dwindling supply of dead plants. Our laptops don't have enough juice to survive a long layover at an airport in
Louisville. But within a hundred years, said Kaku, we'll have ramped up to full-fledged Type I status. The signs are all around us: English is a Type I language, the European Union is a Type I economy, the internet is a Type I phone system, and Type 1 culture is rock music, youth culture, blue jeans....
I'm not sure how Kaku arrived at these signs. The internet fits the bill, no questions there. But don't tell the Chinese about that English bit. The EU -- well, I love the EU in principle, I'd like to think the whole world could be so enlightened, but I'm not about to bet on it. Blue jeans and rock music? Please. That already sounds dated. And if I sound grouchy because these "signs" don't exactly have a lot of depth to them, it's because they're of a piece with Kaku's insistence that the human race, half of whom live daily on less than what I just paid for my coffee, will soon be booking flights to Betelgeuse on Travelocity.
But ... well ... details aside, screw it. Every now and then, you just have to suspend disbelief in some corner of your mind and go with the dream. Kaku's into this, and so am I. Like he says, if we're going to escape our own dying universe, we need to go Class IV and build a universe-scale atom smasher that focuses so much energy at a single point that a bubble universe is formed and we get pulled through. Who cares if that's a few hundred trillion years from now? We all get old some someday.
* I.e., a tiny, rich slice of the human race, or poor people that sneak into cargo holds or are really good artists.
*Image: *Angelo Ventura
