Physics of the Future (Michio Kaku)— Notes
7 min readDec 5, 2019
- Physicists rank human civilisation by the energy it consumes.
- For countless millennia, our energy was limited to 1/5 horsepower, the power of our bare hands, and hence we lived nomadic lives in small, wandering tribes, scavenging for food in a harsh, hostile environment.
- For eons, life was short and brutish, with an average life expectancy of eighteen to twenty years. Your total wealth consisted of whatever you could carry on your back. Most of your life, you felt the gnawing pain of hunger.
- But 10,000 years ago, a marvelous event happened that set civilization into motion: the Ice Age ended. Thousands of years of glaciation ended. This paved the way for the rise of agriculture. Horses and oxen were soon domesticated, which increased our energy to 1 horsepower. Now one person had the energy to harvest several acres of farmland, yielding enough surplus energy to support a rapidly expanding population. With the domestication of animals, humans no longer relied primarily on hunting animals for food, and the first stable villages and cities began to rise from the forests and plains.
- The excess wealth created by the agricultural revolution spawned new, ingenious ways to maintain and expand this wealth. Mathematics and writing were created to count this wealth, calendars were needed to keep track of when to plant and harvest, and scribes and accountants were needed to keep track of this surplus and tax it. This excess wealth eventually led to the rise of large armies, kingdoms, empires, slavery, and ancient civilizations.
- The next revolution took place about 300 years ago, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the wealth accumulated by an individual was not just the product of his hands and horse but the product of machines that could create fabulous wealth via mass production.
- Steam engines could drive powerful machines and locomotives, so that wealth could be created from factories, mills, and mines, not just fields. Peasants, fleeing from periodic famines and tired of backbreaking work in the fields, flocked to the cities, creating the industrial working class. Blacksmiths and wagonmakers were eventually replaced by autoworkers. With the coming of the internal combustion engine, a person could now command hundreds of horsepower. Life expectancy began to grow, hitting forty-nine in the United States by the year 1900.
- Finally, we are in the third wave, where wealth is generated from information. The wealth of nations is now measured by electrons circulating around the world on fiber-optic cables and satellites, eventually dancing across computer screens on Wall Street and other financial capitals. Science, commerce, and entertainment travel at the speed of light, giving us limitless information anytime, anywhere.
- A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming the sliver of sunlight that falls on their planet, or about 10 17 watts. A Type II civilization is stellar, consuming all the energy that their sun emits, or 10 27 watts. A Type III civilization is galactic, consuming the energy of billions of stars, or about 10 37 watts.
- our present-day civilization is Type 0. We don’t even rate on this scale, since we get our energy from dead plants, that is, from oil and coal. we are actually a Type .7 civilization according to Carl Sagan.
- A Type -1 civilization would be that of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, where an entire planet’s energy resources have been developed. They can control all planetary sources of energy, so they might be able to control or modify the weather at will, harness the power of a hurricane, or have cities on the oceans. Although they roam the heavens in rockets, their energy output is still largely confined to a planet. A Type II civilization might include Star Trek ’s United Federation of Planets (without the warp drive), able to colonize about 100 nearby stars. Their technology is barely capable of manipulating the entire energy output of a star. A Type III civilization may be the Empire in the Star Wars saga, or perhaps the Borg in the Star Trek series, both of which have colonized large portions of a galaxy, embracing billions of star systems. They can roam the galactic space lanes at will.
- we should point out the possibility of a Type IV civilization, which derives its energy from extragalactic sources. The only known energy source beyond our galaxy is dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the matter and energy of the known universe, while the world of stars and galaxies makes up only 4 percent of the universe.
- Assume that world civilization grows at the rate of 1 percent each year in terms of its collective GDP. This is a reasonable assumption when we average over the past several centuries. According to this assumption, it takes roughly 2,500 years to go from one civilization to the next. A 2 percent growth rate would give a transition period of 1,200 years.
- We can mathematically estimate that we will attain Type I status in about 100 years, given an average rate of our economic growth.
- With the spectacular rise of computer power, attention turned to the information revolution, where the number of bits processed by a civilization became as relevant as its energy production.
- Carl Sagan introduced another scale, based on information processing. He devised a system in which the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z, correspond to information. A Type A civilization is one that processes only a million pieces of information, which corresponds to a civilization that has only a spoken language but not a written one. An educated guess puts us at a Type H civilization. So therefore, the energy and information processing of our civilization yields a Type .7 H civilization.
- The more energy a civilization consumes and the more information it spews out, the more pollution and waste it might produce.
- We need a new scale, one that takes efficiency, waste heat, and pollution into account. A new scale that does is based on another concept, called entropy.
- The first law of thermodynamics simply says that you can’t get something for nothing, i.e., there is no free lunch. In other words, the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is constant.
- The second law is the most interesting and, in fact, may eventually determine the fate of an advanced civilization. Simply put, the second law of thermodynamics says that the total amount of entropy (disorder or chaos) always increases. This means that all things must pass; objects must rot, decay, rust, age, or fall apart.
- if civilizations of the future blindly produce energy as they rise to a Type II or III civilization, they will create so much waste heat that their home planet will become uninhabitable. Entropy, in the form of waste heat, chaos, and pollution, will essentially destroy their civilization. Similarly, if they produce information by cutting down entire forests and generating mountains of waste paper, the civilization will be buried in its own information waste.
- The majority of our energy consumption, especially transportation, goes into overcoming friction. That is why we put gasoline into our gas tanks, even though it would take almost no energy to move from California to New York if there were no friction.
- Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores.
- It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard. — Benjamin Franklin
- By 2100, we shall have the power of the gods of mythology that we once worshipped and feared. In particular, the computer revolution should give us the ability to manipulate matter with our minds, the biotech revolution should give us the ability to create life almost on demand and extend our life span, and the nanotech revolution may give us the ability to change the form of objects and even create them out of nothing.
- Immanuel Kant once said, “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
- The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov
- “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” — George Bernard Shaw
- The prediction that the Internet would wipe out TV and radio never came to pass. When the movies and radio first came in, people bewailed the death of live theater. When TV came in, people predicted the demise of the movies and radio. We are living now with a mix of all these media. The lesson is that one medium never annihilates a previous one but coexists with it. It is the mix and relationship among these media that constantly change. Anyone who can accurately predict the mix of these media in the future could become very wealthy. The reason for this is that our ancient ancestors always wanted to see something for themselves and not rely on hearsay
- we love to watch others and even sit for hours in front of a TV, endlessly watching the antics of our fellow humans, but we instantly get nervous when we feel others watching us. In fact, scientists have calculated that we get nervous if we are stared at by a stranger for about four seconds. After about ten seconds, we even get irate and hostile at being stared at.
- In the future, we will make the transition from being passive observers of the dance of nature, to being the choreographers of nature, to being masters of nature, and finally to being conservators of nature.
