Futurology

Futurology

Prediction is difficult- particularly when it involves the future. - Mark Twain

Dr Michio Kaku: 

Mark Twain was famous for saying, "Everyone complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it."  Well obviously to control the weather you'd have to have super powers.  A simple thunderstorm has more energy than a hydrogen bomb, so to control the weather is very difficult.  The CIA tried it during the Vietnam War.  They tried to seed the clouds with crystals, iodide crystals that formed nuclei to form rain clouds to stimulate a monsoon season.  The CIA did not like the Vietcong and the Vietcong would operate in the jungles, so why not stop them in their tracks by seeding the clouds and creating an artificial monsoon?  Well that was a failure and it's very humbling knowing that many countries have tried to control the weather.  None of these harebrained schemes have actually worked.  However, now that we have global warming some people are saying that we really should think about altering the weather itself.  There is a doomsday plan proposed by a Nobel laureate and that is that if the greenhouse effect spirals out of control we should put rockets to shoot pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into outer space.  That would be a doomsday mechanism to control the weather, but weather control is really for a type one civilization minimum 100 years in to the future.

If you asked someone today, would it be easier predicting tomorrow's weather or the future of technology for the next 50 - 100 years? you would be surprised of the answers.

In early November I had the pleasure to listing to Dr Kaku's lecture, The Future of Humanity in my home city, Wellington. The first impression and reflective thought I had after his talk was, 'wow, the future is just around the corner, and its going to effect me personally and my habitat.

Often I give little thought to my habitat, that being the city I live in predominantly, Wellington.

I've always assuming our pocket metropolis will be the last place on earth to create a quantum computing industry, or a space program or even be the first New Zealand city to be powered by a safe fusion reactor.

Nonetheless Dr Kaku ideas and predictions had a profound effect to my prior concepts of the future.

Not only were the technological changes coming quick, but they'd present a positive and enlightening age to come. 

I was previously convinced the future held dire consequences with the  progression of technology and even worse conclusions to society and the environment.

But with my faith restored I was left wanting to know more about Kaku's utopianist technological future and this let to a little research into Futurology. 

From what I have gathered in the contemporary circles of futurology there are two diametric opposing camps of thought. One progressive and positive, predicting a new expansive technological boon is about to beside humanity for good or ill.

The other view was a skeptical and safe calculation that we have reached the pinnacle of technology, we are at the glass ceiling. Our concepts are unbound and beyond this ceiling, but the practice and real functional invention of these concepts are unattainable. Causing us to take existing technologies and simply reinvent and refine them.

Various scientist and futurists agree new technological concepts are potentially there for the taking, however out of our reach due to a constant variable each time.

I figured it was obviously governments, finances and bureaucracy but as Dr Kaku states more often than not our systemic thought processes is what's holding us back. No one wants to think in science or science-fiction as their frame of mind.   

Clearly Dr Kaku, is not found wanting when it comes to positive technological progress and he made me recall the age old quote, if we are the architects of our own problems then surly we are also the creators to our solutions. This ethos was best portrayed by another Futurists, Authur C Clarke.  

Clarke's Sci-fi creations were positive solutions to humanities problems. Each creation became a profound prediction because he understood science. Coincidentally Clarkes predictions are being pursued by Dr Kaku and his peers. 

This proves Clarke was undoubtably was schooled in application and history physics. Knowing humanities problems is easy but the knowing its solutions and in turn predicting the future takes a scientific mind. 

'If you want to understand the future you have to understand Physics'  - Machio Kaku

Essentially, if I want to make good on Sci-fi, I must understand science.

This area serves as the main jumping board of research into help cast a future technology that represents the main theme in the Childhoods End adaptation.