We are, roughly, living in the world the cyberpunks envisioned.
Two things happened. First, we ran out of theoretical physics. Second, we ran out of energy.
If you watch Star Trek or Star Wars, or read any of the innumerable space operas of the mid-20th century, they all depend on a bunch of fancy physics. Faster-than-light travel, artificial gravity, force fields of various kinds. In 1960, that sort of prediction might have made sense. Humanity had just experienced one of the most amazing sequences of physics advancements ever. In the space of a few short decades, humankind discovered relativity and quantum mechanics, invented the nuclear bomb and nuclear power, and created the x-ray, the laser, superconductors, radar and the space program. The early 20th century was really a physics bonanza, driven in large part by advances in fundamental theory. And in the 1950s and 1960s, those advances still seemed to be going strong, with the development of quantum field theories.
Then it all came to a halt. After the Standard Model was completed in the 1970s, there were no big breakthroughs in fundamental physics. There was a brief period of excitement in the 80s and 90s, when it seemed like string theory was going to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, and propel us into a new era to match the time of Einstein and Bohr and Dirac. But by the 2000s, people were writing pop books about how string theory has failed. Meanwhile, the largest, most expensive particle collider ever built has merely confirmed the theories of the 1970s, leaving little direction for where to go next. Physicists have certainly invented some more cool stuff (quantum teleporation! quantum computers!), but there have been no theoretical breakthroughs that would allow us to cruise from star to star or harness the force of gravity.
The second thing that happened was that we stopped getting better sources of energy. Here is a brief, roughly chronological list of energy sources harnessed by humankind, with their specific energies (usable potential energy per unit mass) listed in units of MJ/kg. Remember that more specific energy (or, alternatively, more energy density) means more energy that you can carry around in your pocket, your car, or your spaceship.
Protein: 16.8
Sugars: 17.0
Fat: 37
Wood: 16.2
Gunpowder: 3.0
Coal: 24.0 - 35.0
TNT: 4.6
Diesel: 48
Kerosene: 42.8
Gasoline: 46.4
Methane: 55.5
Uranium: 80,620,000
Deuterium: 87,900,000
Lithium-ion battery: 0.36 - 0.875
This doesn't tell the whole story, of course, since availability and recoverability are key - to get the energy of protein, you have to kill a deer and eat it, or grow some soybeans, while deposits of coal, gas, and uranium can be dug up out of the ground. Transportability is also important (natural gas is hard to carry around in a car).
But this sequence does show one basic fact: In the industrial age, we got better at carrying energy around with us. And then, at the dawn of the nuclear age, it looked like we were about to get MUCH better at carrying energy around with us. One kilogram of uranium has almost two million times as much energy in it as a kilogram of gasoline. If you could carry that around in a pocket battery, you really might be able to blow up buildings with a handheld laser gun. If you could put that in a spaceship, you might be able to zip to other planets in a couple of days. If you could put that in a car, you can bet that car would fly. You could probably even use it to make a deflector shield.
But you can't carry uranium around in your pocket or your car, because it's too dangerous. First of all, if there were enough uranium to go critical, you'd have a nuclear weapon in your garage. Second, uranium is a horrible deadly poison that can wreak havoc on the environment. No one is going to let you have that. (Incidentally, this is also probably why you don't have a flying car yet - it has too much energy. The people who decide whether to allow flying cars realize that some people would choose to crash those high-energy objects into buildings. Regular cars are dangerous enough!)
Now, you can put uranium on your submarine. And you can put it in your spaceship, though actually channeling the power into propulsion is still a problem that needs some work. But overall, the toxicity of uranium, and the ease with which fission turns into a meltdown, has prevented widespread application of nuclear power. That also holds to some degree for nuclear electricity.
So the reason we didn't get the 1960s sci-fi future was twofold. A large part of it was apparently impossible (FTL travel, artificial gravity). And a lot of the stuff that was possible, but relied on very high energy density fuels, was too unsafe for general use. We might still get our androids, and someday in the very far future we might have nuclear-powered spaceships whisking us to Mars or Europa or zero-G habitats somewhere. But you can't have your flying car or your pocket laser cannon, because frankly, you're probably just too much of a jerk to use them responsibly.
So that brings us to another question: What about the most recent era of science fiction? Starting in the mid to late 1990s, until maybe around 2010, sci-fi once again embraced some very far-out future stuff. Typical elements (some of which, to be fair, had been occasionally included in the earlier cyberpunk canon) included:
1. Strong (self-improving) AI, artificial general intelligence, and artificial consciousness
2. Personality upload
3. Self-replicating nanotech and general assemblers
4. A technological Singularity
Unlike faster-than-light travel and artificial gravity, we have no theory telling us that we can't have strong AI or a Singularity or personality upload. (Well, some people have conjectures as to reasons we couldn't, but these aren't solidly proven theories like General Relativity.) But we also don't really have any idea how to start making these things. What we call AI isn't yet a general intelligence, and we have no idea if any general intelligence can be self-improving (or would want to be!). Personality upload requires an understanding of the brain we just don't have. We're inching closer to true nanotech, but it still seems far off.
So there's a possibility that the starry-eyed Singularitan sci-fi of the 00s will simply never come to pass. Like the future of starships and phasers, it might become a sort of pop retrofuture - fodder for fun Hollywood movies, but no longer the kind of thing anyone thinks will really happen. Meanwhile, technological progress might move on in another direction - biotech? - and another savvy generation of Jules Vernes and William Gibsons might emerge to predict where that goes.
Which raises a final question: Is sci-fi least accurate when technological progress is fastest?
Think about it: The biggest sci-fi miss of all time came at the peak of progress, right around World War 2. If the Singularitan sci-fi boom turns out to have also been a whiff, it'll line up pretty nicely with the productivity acceleration of the 1990s and 00s. Maybe when a certain kind of technology - energy-intensive transportation and weapons technology, or information-intensive computing technology - is increasing spectacularly quickly, sci-fi authors get caught up in the rush of that trend, and project it out to infinity and beyond. But maybe it's the authors at the very beginning of a tech boom, before progress in a particular area really kicks into high gear, who are able to see more clearly where the boom will take us. (Of course, demonstrating that empirically would involve controlling for the obvious survivorship bias).
We'll never know. Nor is this important in any way that I can tell, except for sci-fi fans. But it's certainly fun to think about.
from Noahpinion http://ift.tt/2xjjOHt