Stephen Hawking, the celebrated scientist who broke through the barriers of disability to be an authoritative voice on all aspects of science, has done it again. He has “spoken from beyond the grave” through his final essay published in the Sunday Times of London. The very fact that it was carried in a mainstream newspaper and not a science journal such as Nature, speaks volumes about the accessibility of Hawking’s science.
This paper is actually a treatise on the future of Mankind, but most, if not all of the technologies mentioned are already available or being experimented with. Thus there is a degree of certainty that most of these predictions would come true within our lifetime.
There are two main narratives in the essay – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Super Humans. The two might even blend together at some point. Hawking delivers a grave warning on the importance of regulating AI, noting that “in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours.”
In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI is not going rogue per se, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals are not aligned with ours we could be in trouble.
Cripple the Earth
Hawking predicts that in the next 1,000 years, nuclear war, an asteroid impact or an environmental calamity will “cripple the Earth.” He cites Climate Change as a particularly dangerous phenomenon for the Earth and its populace.“A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250C.”
However, by then, “our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.” He writes that humans who do escape Earth will probably be new “super humans” who have used gene editing technology to outpace others. They will do so by genetic engineering, improving their memories and disease resistance to increase life expectancy.
“These changes will be confined at first to the repair of genetic defects — such as, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, which are controlled by single genes and so are fairly easy to identify and correct,” he writes, adding that complex processes will be added later.
Many of these technologies are already available and within the next 50 years or so, it should be possible to make all organs artificially, from the skin to the heart.
Artificial eyes will make blindness a thing of the past. It will be possible for humans to live for 150-200 years, almost akin to immortality.
In fact scientists believe, the first person who will live to 150 years has already been born somewhere on Earth. As Hawking points out, “there is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured.”
Super humans
The only problem is that once such “super humans” appear, there could be significant political and social problems for and with the unimproved humans, who will not be able to compete.
Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. This will probably lead to a race of self-designing humans improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. They will probably spread out and colonize other planets and stars. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man and owner of the Blue Origin space company, seems to agree.
He says, there could be up to one trillion humans (as opposed to the current population of 7 billion) in the Solar System and beyond one day in the far, far future.
As for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, Hawking explains that humans may have “overlooked” forms of intelligent life out there. However, scientists have intensified efforts to track down any alien radio signals or other signs of intelligent life in the universe. Just last week, scientists in Australia announced that telescopes have picked up a huge number of mysterious signals coming from deep space. The radio telescopes have nearly doubled the number of the known “fast radio bursts” – bright flashes of radio waves that make their way to Earth from deep space. Fast radio bursts are one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe.
Incredible energy
They are blasts of incredible energy – equivalent to the amount released by the Sun in 80 years – that last for just a moment, and come from a mysterious source. Some have suggested they are being emitted by extraterrestrial beings.
Harvard University scientists suggested last year that they could be leaks from vast transmitters that are usually shooting at light sail ships to push them across the universe.
In any case, given there are billions of stars in all the galaxies, most of them with planets, it is simply impossible that life exists only on Earth.
But, in the meantime, what can we do to get away from practices that can ruin the Earth ? Hawking cites nuclear fission power as one answer. This is the holy grail of science. We have had nuclear fusion power since the 1940s and we all know the inherent dangers, as seen in Fukushima and Chernobyl.
On the other hand, nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the Sun (which can go on for another five billion years) and is relatively safe. The good news is that scientists are working on it already, even if the garbage-bin sized nuclear fusion reactors seen in ‘Back to the Future’ could be quite some time away.
Carbon-free energy
When the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is switched on in 2025 it will fuse together hydrogen atoms, releasing immense amounts of carbon-free energy in the process. Significantly, there will not be any long-lived radioactive waste.
The fusion process produces enormous amounts of energy. A pineapple-sized amount of hydrogen is equivalent to 10,000 tonnes of coal. It is also extremely clean. The hydrogen can be extracted from seawater. Previous attempts at nuclear fusion have been too small to extract usable energy.
The only downside so far is that nuclear fusion needs extreme temperatures to work, but scientists are addressing these barriers. Nuclear fusion should be a ‘real thing’ by around 2050 if all goes well.
The world should heed Hawking’s words as he has proven to be a visionary time and again, despite the many obstacles in his life.
Some of the predictions he has made look inevitable given the scale of human progress, but we might still be able to scale back a notch on some of the more fearful ones to achieve a semblance of balance.