Post by Charles on Oct 26, 2008 6:06:19 GMT -8
Okay, it's probably too soon to be thinking about this, but I can't help it. I like to look ahead, far ahead.
I'm thinking of making a sci-fi MMORPG.
Magic of the Gods still needs a lot of work, but I never intended it to be the ultimate game. At some point I would like to do other games. I'll probably spend a year or more working on Magic of the Gods before even starting a new game, but like I said, I'm thinking ahead.
I have told the Nations and Empires players that the next priority would probably be to finish the Yostan game which is set in the world of Nations and Empires and could be a first step to bringing that whole world into an MMORPG. I might do that.
But another idea I've been kicking around is creating a sci-fi game of some kind. I've barely begun thinking about it, but there is obviously demand for it.
The more I think about it the more I see how it's not as technically difficult as I thought it would be.
I'm not thinking of the standard "space opera" type game like Star Wars. I'm also not thinking of something set in the near future.
I'm thinking of something way, way out there either very far in the future, or even something that takes place on an alien world where there are no humans.
I'm considering a fairly realistic game with serious attention paid to the science aspect of science fiction. For example, I wouldn't put in something like light sabers unless I had some idea how they might work.
I would think about the physics of interstellar travel and from that figure out how it will be done in the game, not just throw in some cool looking ships and come up with some pseudo-scientific explanation of how they work after the ships have already been created. I'm not even going to start off assuming the best means of travel will be some kind of "ship". There are other possibilities.
When we look at how the internet has changed the world so much in such a short time, we get a glimpse of how different the future may be.
There are many other transformational technologies out there. Here are a few I may include:
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is sometimes mentioned in passing in sci-fi, but if we get to the point that it really works well, it could change a lot of things. For example, why go out and shoot at someone with a gun or laser when you could wage war by sending out armies of microscopic robots with deadly weapons that would be extremely difficult to even detect, much less stop.
Cyborgism
We are already in the age of cyborgs. Every artificial heart, leg, arm, etc. that is being attached to a person by doctors is moving us farther down that road. There is even a technology already in use where a video camera attached to a blind man's head fed data into his brain via a number of wires implanted in his brain that provided direct stimulation of the visual cortex. After surgery to have this equipment attached to his head, he was able to see using the camera and even borrowed the doctor's car and was driving it around the parking lot. This is a guy whose actual eyes didn't work at all. Of course, if they wanted to, they could give him a camera that can see colors beyond the range of human vision in the ultra violet and infra red. With infra red, he could see in the dark.
This merging of man and machine is going to go a lot farther than that. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see people get tiny computers implanted in their bodies so that your computer becomes more of an extension of your mind than it already is. With enough of this kind of technology, you become so much of a cyborg that you might not even be recognizable as human. Even if you are, you would have very different capabilities.
Genetic Engineering
Then there's genetic engineering. This could easily change people until they aren't human anymore. It could also mix human and animal DNA to create animals with human intelligence. It could even create creatures far more intelligent than humans.
The Nazis claimed that Germans and some other groups were genetically superior to others. This was a political lie not supported by scientific evidence. Germans don't have noticeably better DNA than other groups.
What would be the political consequences if people were genetically engineered so that they DID have DNA that was obviously better? What if they were stronger, smarter, healthier and lived much longer? What would it do to the human race if the cherished notions of equality just weren't true anymore?
Would we at least retain the important principle of legal equality? Or would that be replaced with something else? Would there be a different set of laws for different groups as there was in medieval Europe, Japan and elsewhere between nobility and commoners or as there was for different castes in India long ago?
Would people with better DNA decide the Nazis had the right idea and try to conquer everyone else? Would there be disputes or even wars over who has the better DNA? Would normal, unmodified people go berzerk with fear of this and kill off the genetically engineered people? One way or another, this is likely to lead to huge problems.
Extended Lifespan
I was reading some Star Wars novels recently that were set about 40 years after the first Star Wars movie. Han Solo is 70 years old, but still running around almost like a young man. The novel says 70 isn't all that old and he could expect to live something like forty or fifty more years. In our time his life expectancy at that point is about 15 years.
Life expectancy has been slowly rising and it's easy to imagine a future in which people routinely live to be over 100. But that's ignoring the possibility of a major breakthrough that may be coming soon. We are so accustomed to the idea that death is inevitable that we miss the bigger picture. Sure, humans seem to have this problem of getting old and dying. So do cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, even insects, even plants. On the other hand, there are other species that never get old and die. In fact, I think there are more species that never die of old age than do. You see, bacteria or other single-celled organisms reproduce by dividing in half. Neither half is older or younger than the other. Both of them go on to divide again and again and again. 500 million years later, none of them have died of old age. Think about that. It changes your perspective on what is possible.
Scientists are at work on curing aging. Curing it. Can we even begin to imagine what it would be like if there were a cure for old age? Imagine if there were a medical procedure you could undergo and after that your body would never develop the usual signs of age. Unless you got sick, injured or killed, you would have every reason to expect to live for 100 years, 1,000 years, a million years and more.
Maybe the cure, if it is found, would involve genetic engineering. Maybe people already alive could not be cured, but children not yet conceived could be given the gift of immortality. Would some people end up immortal and others not? Or maybe some advanced form of viral gene therapy could modify the DNA of people already alive so that everyone could have the cure.
What sort of wisdom might the human race gain if we had people among us with thousands of years of life experience? What if MOST people had that much experience?
Artificial Intelligence
I still have my doubts as to whether it is even possible to make a non-organic computer truly intelligent. Even if that's not possible, scientists are already building artificial intelligence using nerve cells from rats. They built an artificial neuron array of about 25,000 rat neurons and taught it to fly a jet fighter in a simulator. I didn't hear that it could take off or land, which is much harder than flying straight and level, but it's a start. I've been predicting this for a very long time. As I said twenty years ago, this will eventually be done with human neurons. I have no doubt at all that something intelligent can be made this way. If you make a "computer" out of the same stuff human brains are made of, it is certainly possible to achieve human levels of intelligence. I used to call this concept the "bio-computer". I'm not sure it's a good idea and it can easily lead to some nightmare scenarios, but it's virtually impossible to stop people from using any technology that is possible so this is likely to be in our future. Imagine a "bio-computer" made from human neurons that is just as intelligent and self-aware as a human brain. Now imagine the scientists building a better one the next year and an even better one the year after that and pretty soon, human intelligence is far surpassed. Now imagine a team of super-genius bio-computers working on the problem of how to build even more intelligent bio-computers.
Technological Singularity
The famous sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge predicted that some form of technology would increase intelligence. Whether it was artificial intelligence in computers, genetic engineering, cyborgism which merged human brains with the processing and memory capacity of computers or something else, that this would happen. He further predicted that technology-enhanced intelligence, working on the problem of how to further increase intelligence would produce a positive feedback loop resulting in an ever-accelerating increase in intelligence. He said this would also result in a massive increase in technology in a short time so that virtually any technology that we can imagine today would have already been invented. He further predicted that all this would happen by the year 2030.
He called this effect the "technological singularity". The timing was derived from his belief that artificial intelligence in computers is possible and would increase at a rate similar to the increase in computer capabilities we've seen ever since the invention of electronic computers. I think he is overlooking the role of economics and capital in technology development. It's not purely a matter of intelligence. Still, some form of this effect might still occur. If I'm wrong about artificial intelligence, Vinge might even be right about the timing. This is the kind of thing that, until Vernor Vinge pointed it out, probably didn't even occur to anyone.
Could someone 500 years ago have thought of this? When DNA had not yet been discovered, when electronic computers hadn't been invented, when electrical circuits hadn't even been invented, when static electricity wasn't even understood, when even science didn't really exist?
500 years ago, it wasn't easy to foresee the Protestant Reformation that was right around the corner and was about to lead to bloody revolutions and major wars that would continue for over a hundred years. The internet and space travel were far beyond their thinking.
This is what we face when we try to look 500 years into the future. We're like monks in a monastery in 1508 trying to predict the internet.
On the other hand, if our purpose is to have fun and make an interesting game, maybe it's not all that important that we have no hope of being right about the future. If it's entertaining and keeps us thinking of possibilities, then maybe it's worth doing. Certainly if we're going to do a sci-fi game set in the far future, it would be absurdly limiting to imagine a future that too greatly resembles the present day.
Revolution in Theoretical Physics
There is increasing evidence that our current understanding of physics is incomplete. Not just a little bit incomplete. Of course, this doesn't mean that the equations that have been proven over and over again to accurately describe the universe will stop working. More likely we will simply see other situations we didn't know were possible before where our equations don't accurately predict the results.
It's similar to the revolution in theoretical physics which occurred in the early 20th century. By that time, the equations describing gravity, inertia and movement developed by Sir Isaac Newton had been tested by experiment for centuries and proven correct. Then an experiment in the late 19th century involving light produced a result that seemed impossible. Efforts to explain it resulted in a radically different understanding of physics that replaced Newton's theories with Einstein's theory of general relativity and gave us new equations such as the Lorentz transformations that are far different than anything Newton calculated.
Even though Newton's equations still work in most cases and are still in use, they are understood to be incorrect. We now understand that there are situations, especially involving relative motion near the speed of light, where Newton's equations will produce incorrect answers. But for the type of things Newton was describing, his theories are still close enough.
That doesn't mean that the 20th century's revolution in physics was about minor details. Newton's equations would never have predicted that matter could be converted to energy as Einstein's most famous equation describes. So now we have a world where entire cities are provided with electricity by nuclear power plants and the people in those cities live in fear of destruction by nuclear weapons. The power plants and the weapons are examples of direct conversion of matter to energy and make the world a very different place than the one Sir Isaac Newton lived in. He had to write his equations by candle light or wait until morning.
We have, yet again, some experimental results that seem impossible even with Einstein's help in understanding things. The so-called double slit experiment, which involves interference patterns of electrons passing through two very small holes, makes it seem as if the behavior of the electrons changes depending on whether we know which hole they passed through. That's just one seemingly impossible result.
Many scientists are now saying that our whole understanding of the universe may need to be replaced with some new theory. That doesn't mean that apples won't still fall off apple trees and drop to the ground at almost exactly the same rate that Sir Isaac Newton calculated. But it does mean that we may have a completely different understanding of why they do and we may get a whole new crop of technologies as drastic as nuclear power and atomic bombs which maybe we haven't even thought of yet and currently seem impossible.
If we were trying to imagine the future of 500 years from now or 5,000, it would be foolish to imagine that only one such revolution in theoretical physics will occur by then and just one can change everything.
What might be possible? Time travel? Telekinesis? Maybe, but these are things people have thought of a lot for a long time. If Einstein's theory of general relativity is any guide, breakthroughs in theoretical physics are more likely to give us truly bizarre things nobody thought of, than the obvious things sci-fi writers have been scribbling about since the 1890s when H. G. Wells wrote about a time machine.
What sort of things? How about traveling sideways in time to alternate realities? That topic has been addressed in sci-fi as well, but the implications are usually not explored. It's one thing to visit one alternate reality where the confederacy won the civil war or the Germans won World War II, (favorite sci-fi scenarios) but how many different alternate realities could there be? If there are any at all, I doubt very much there are less than a trillion of them. More likely there would be an infinite number. What would it mean for economics if we suddenly could travel to and trade with a trillion other Earths? What if it were an infinite number of other Earths? If we feel a moral obligation to send food when there's a famine in Africa or a flood in Bangladesh, to send soldiers to fight a war when there are reports of genocide in Kosovo or tyranny in Iraq, what would we feel if there were a billion famines in a billion different Africas on a billion other Earths and a billion genocides occuring all the time?
Even if it were a billion famines, a trillion Earths might manage to send enough food. It would still be possible to solve the problems, just vastly more difficult. But what if there were an infinite number of Earths in an infinite number of alternate realities? What if everything that could possibly happen is happening in an alternate reality? What if every time you go to an alternate reality, you discover an infinite number of alternate realities where everything you could have done in that first alternate reality, you did actually do, whether it was wise or stupid, good or evil? Wouldn't that mean that nothing you do changes anything? I have tried to imagine people's reaction to such a situation. (This was for a game I created.) It would be very easy to imagine people concluding that it doesn't matter whether they do good or do evil because even if you choose to do good, another version of you in another universe is choosing to do evil. According to this view, an infinite number of alternate versions of you are doing good and another infinite number of alternate versions of you are doing evil. I can imagine an extremely destructive social movement based on this idea. Oddly, this is based on our inability to understand the mathematics of infinity. So far as we know, infinity plus one still equals infinity. The plus one didn't matter at all. If the plus one was an evil deed, that becomes very significant.
If we discovered an infinite number of alternate realities I'll bet there would be a lot more thought devoted to the mathematics of infinity. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that we have already discovered the existence of alternate realities as evidenced by the behavior of subatomic particles and a few other things.
The theory that says alternate realities is the explanation for this is called the "Everett Theory" or the "Many Worlds Theory." Yet the main reason the Everett Theory is rejected by so many scientists is precisely BECAUSE it involves infinity. The Lorentz transformation equations connected to Einstein's relativity theories also produce infinities if an object ever reaches the speed of light. This is one of the main reasons scientists say it can't be done - because they can't calculate the results! They try to visualize it and give explanations like the fact that the energy needed would be infinite. That's a very real obstacle for a particle accelerator, but not so much for a spacecraft because the relative mass of the fuel of a spacecraft accelerating towards the speed of light would also increase to infinity according to the same Lorentz transformation equations that are being used to say it can't be done. That means the energy available to accelerate the spaceship would also increase to infinity in exactly the proportion needed by the increased mass of the ship. They also say that time would slow down so you could never finish the last acceleration. This is nonsense because it could be done in pulses to overcome that problem if it were real and according to Einstein, time would seem to pass normally on the ship. So even if it would seem from Earth that time slowed down to the point that the ship had stopped accelerating, onboard the ship they should perceive that they were rapidly accelerating to the speed of light and perhaps beyond it. You could argue that time would pass at such a vastly faster rate in the rest of the universe that the ship would be destroyed by the end of the universe before it reached light speed. Sure, if the theory that the universe is going to end is even correct. Even if that's true and as a practical matter it can't be done, it would still be theoretically possible. It would be the particular situation of our universe standing in the way, not the laws of physics. In a different universe, that wasn't about to collapse in a few billion years (if that theory is true), it would be possible to go faster than the speed of light. If the alternate realities are really out there, a different universe with a different total amount of matter and a different expected lifetime, might exist and might even be reachable.
The fact is we really don't know what will happen until we put an ion drive (yes, they do really exist) on a spacecraft and accelerate it. Theory is important, but science is based on actually doing the experiment to confirm or refute the theory. I think that experiment would give us some interesting data.
Anyway, the seemingly minor matter of a breakthrough in mathematics that would help us understand how to do calculations involving infinity might reveal that faster than light travel is possible and since time would flow backwards at faster than light speeds according to the Lorentz transformations, this might also give us time travel. Since time travel would produce paradoxes that are impossible unless there are infinite alternate realities, time travel might allow us to discover inifnite alternate realities. The same mathematical breakthrough might then save us from hordes of evil fanatics following some demogogue who preaches that good and evil are irrelevant because infinity plus one is still infinity.
But these are things I can foresee as possibilities. The real future is probably going to be much more bizarre than that.
Alien Intelligence
The future is going to be strange enough even if we don't find alien life on other planets, but recent discoveries such as the discoveries of planets in other star systems and the evidence for ancient micro-organisms on Mars have caused scientists to think that alien life on other planets is far more likely than we previously estimated.
At some point, we are likely to encounter alien life and possibly intelligent alien life. If we find intelligent alien life, it's probably going to turn our ideas of the world upside down. We have seen so many fictional aliens in so many different sci-fi settings that it's tempting to think we understand what they are likely to be like. But we don't. From a scientific perspective, the aliens of Star Wars and Star Trek and countless other works of science fiction are absurd. They are so similar to humans in physical appearance, in customs and in behavior, that it's laughable. If you want to know what aliens might be like, look at other species here on Earth, see how different from us they are, and then try to imagine life that evolved differently. I don't mean imagine humanoids with scales and tails like lizard men or humanoids with bug eyes and four arms that still speak English with barely an accent. I mean, imagine something that is not a mammal or a reptile or a bird or an insect or any kind of Earth creature, does not have a basic humanoid shape, does not communicate with spoken language, does not have laws, government or armies, all of which are human institutions. Now imagine that it is intelligent. Maybe it lives with vast numbers of its own kind like humans in cities or ants in an ant nest, or huge flocks of nesting birds, or large schools of fish. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it lives in small groups like many Earth animals, such as wolves or deer. Or maybe it lives a solitary existence, meeting others of its own kind only to battle over territory or mate. If it is territorial. If it mates at all rather than reproducing on its own without a mate.
If you've read anything about the psychology of animals or of mentally ill people, you will have some idea of the radically different psychology that is possible even here on Earth. We should not expect alien psychology to fit within the bounds of what would be normal for a human. How alien is the thinking of most sci-fi aliens? Not very.
Somewhere, due to parallel evolution, we might find aliens very much like ourselves. If they exist, they are unlikely to be the first ones we meet. There will probably be many more who are very, very different. What would it mean for humans to interact with an intelligent alien species with a radically different psychology? Even if they were exactly like us, just one attractive ideology or religious idea from the aliens could revolutionize our whole society. The more different they might turn out to be, the more we might learn from them, or have to learn about them to survive. No matter what intelligent aliens are like, some humans will probably want to try to be more like them.
What would our society really be like if we encountered not one intelligent alien species, but dozens, like in Star Trek, or thousands, like in Star Wars?
Social Change
One thing that the makers of Star Trek got right and that many sci-fi writers don't is that if history is any guide, there is probably going to be a lot of change in how humans interact as a society. The specific changes the show depicted are unlikely to all be correct, but the fact that there will be major changes seems almost certain because such change keeps happening.
What would the changes be? That's hard to say, but it's important to note the role of technology in driving these changes. The protestant reformation in the early sixteenth century seems to have been driven partly by the invention of the printing press. The so-called "sexual revolution" that began in the 1960s was partly driven by the invention of birth control pills. The French Revolution and the American Revolution were partly driven by the development of mass media in the form of pamphlets carrying political ideas. The labor movement and Marxism of the 19th and 20th centuries were driven by industrialized mass production and its effects on society, especially on people working in factories. The movement for equal rights for women may have been driven by industrialization as well since the increasing use of machines to do work put less emphasis on muscle power. Prior to the industrial revolution, 90% or more of the world's population lived and worked on farms which were operated without tractors or similar machinery to help.
Human Nature
Despite the drastic changes in the world, there are some things about human behavior that just don't seem to ever change. We call that human nature. It's not easy to discern which things are really human nature that doesn't change and which are social roles that may have been in place for thousands of years, but can suddenly change without warning. The changing role of women over the past century or so comes to mind on that point.
Genetic engineering and cyborgism and other technologies may even change human nature, but I wouldn't bet on it. Even if they could change human nature, humans may not be willing to use them for that. Or other humans may put a stop to it if someone tries.
Putting It All Together
You could write a sci-fi novel about each of the above issues. They won't happen in isolation, though. Any or all of these things that really happen in the future, plus any more that we couldn't think of today, will all happen together. It won't be a world with genetic engineering or a world with time travel to alternate realities or a world with radical social change. Imagine instead a world where nanotechnology has led to drastically different economic circumstances which in turn has caused massive social changes. Imagine the nanotechnology made genetic engineering much easier and led to genetically engineered super-intelligent people. Imagine that the super-intelligent people used their intelligence to amass vast fortunes and take over many governments, but were overthrown by hordes of more ordinary people because it is in human nature to resent being ruled by elites. Imagine the super-intelligent people are in hiding, bitter over what they suffered in the revolutions and plotting to return to power while cyborg secret police hunt them down with nanotechnology. Then imagine that aliens arrive, not in spaceships, but in time machines that can travel to infinite alternate realities. The aliens not only can travel through time, but never grow old and humans suddenly realize this is possible and undertake massive efforts to cure old age. Imagine these efforts succeed. Meanwhile people are using alien technology to explore a billion trillion alternate realities and the first explorer groups to use this technology have made unimaginable fortunes off trade between different alternate Earths to the point where they have become gigantic corporations with properties and operations across thousands of worlds that own more wealth than our entire Earth and have technologies from the future that nobody else even knows are possible. Then they encounter similar groups from alternate Earths that have been doing this a lot longer and more successfully and they start doing merger deals or waging war against each other. Now imagine it is the year 2500 and all this has already happened. Let 1,000 more years go by and try to imagine what the year 3,500 will be like.
That's not the specific scenario I'm considering. I just made that up as I went. That's just a glimpse of how things get a whole lot weirder when you start combining these futuristic technologies instead of just looking at them one at a time.
That's my thinking so far on a possible sci-fi game.
Comments anyone?
I'm thinking of making a sci-fi MMORPG.
Magic of the Gods still needs a lot of work, but I never intended it to be the ultimate game. At some point I would like to do other games. I'll probably spend a year or more working on Magic of the Gods before even starting a new game, but like I said, I'm thinking ahead.
I have told the Nations and Empires players that the next priority would probably be to finish the Yostan game which is set in the world of Nations and Empires and could be a first step to bringing that whole world into an MMORPG. I might do that.
But another idea I've been kicking around is creating a sci-fi game of some kind. I've barely begun thinking about it, but there is obviously demand for it.
The more I think about it the more I see how it's not as technically difficult as I thought it would be.
I'm not thinking of the standard "space opera" type game like Star Wars. I'm also not thinking of something set in the near future.
I'm thinking of something way, way out there either very far in the future, or even something that takes place on an alien world where there are no humans.
I'm considering a fairly realistic game with serious attention paid to the science aspect of science fiction. For example, I wouldn't put in something like light sabers unless I had some idea how they might work.
I would think about the physics of interstellar travel and from that figure out how it will be done in the game, not just throw in some cool looking ships and come up with some pseudo-scientific explanation of how they work after the ships have already been created. I'm not even going to start off assuming the best means of travel will be some kind of "ship". There are other possibilities.
When we look at how the internet has changed the world so much in such a short time, we get a glimpse of how different the future may be.
There are many other transformational technologies out there. Here are a few I may include:
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is sometimes mentioned in passing in sci-fi, but if we get to the point that it really works well, it could change a lot of things. For example, why go out and shoot at someone with a gun or laser when you could wage war by sending out armies of microscopic robots with deadly weapons that would be extremely difficult to even detect, much less stop.
Cyborgism
We are already in the age of cyborgs. Every artificial heart, leg, arm, etc. that is being attached to a person by doctors is moving us farther down that road. There is even a technology already in use where a video camera attached to a blind man's head fed data into his brain via a number of wires implanted in his brain that provided direct stimulation of the visual cortex. After surgery to have this equipment attached to his head, he was able to see using the camera and even borrowed the doctor's car and was driving it around the parking lot. This is a guy whose actual eyes didn't work at all. Of course, if they wanted to, they could give him a camera that can see colors beyond the range of human vision in the ultra violet and infra red. With infra red, he could see in the dark.
This merging of man and machine is going to go a lot farther than that. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see people get tiny computers implanted in their bodies so that your computer becomes more of an extension of your mind than it already is. With enough of this kind of technology, you become so much of a cyborg that you might not even be recognizable as human. Even if you are, you would have very different capabilities.
Genetic Engineering
Then there's genetic engineering. This could easily change people until they aren't human anymore. It could also mix human and animal DNA to create animals with human intelligence. It could even create creatures far more intelligent than humans.
The Nazis claimed that Germans and some other groups were genetically superior to others. This was a political lie not supported by scientific evidence. Germans don't have noticeably better DNA than other groups.
What would be the political consequences if people were genetically engineered so that they DID have DNA that was obviously better? What if they were stronger, smarter, healthier and lived much longer? What would it do to the human race if the cherished notions of equality just weren't true anymore?
Would we at least retain the important principle of legal equality? Or would that be replaced with something else? Would there be a different set of laws for different groups as there was in medieval Europe, Japan and elsewhere between nobility and commoners or as there was for different castes in India long ago?
Would people with better DNA decide the Nazis had the right idea and try to conquer everyone else? Would there be disputes or even wars over who has the better DNA? Would normal, unmodified people go berzerk with fear of this and kill off the genetically engineered people? One way or another, this is likely to lead to huge problems.
Extended Lifespan
I was reading some Star Wars novels recently that were set about 40 years after the first Star Wars movie. Han Solo is 70 years old, but still running around almost like a young man. The novel says 70 isn't all that old and he could expect to live something like forty or fifty more years. In our time his life expectancy at that point is about 15 years.
Life expectancy has been slowly rising and it's easy to imagine a future in which people routinely live to be over 100. But that's ignoring the possibility of a major breakthrough that may be coming soon. We are so accustomed to the idea that death is inevitable that we miss the bigger picture. Sure, humans seem to have this problem of getting old and dying. So do cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, even insects, even plants. On the other hand, there are other species that never get old and die. In fact, I think there are more species that never die of old age than do. You see, bacteria or other single-celled organisms reproduce by dividing in half. Neither half is older or younger than the other. Both of them go on to divide again and again and again. 500 million years later, none of them have died of old age. Think about that. It changes your perspective on what is possible.
Scientists are at work on curing aging. Curing it. Can we even begin to imagine what it would be like if there were a cure for old age? Imagine if there were a medical procedure you could undergo and after that your body would never develop the usual signs of age. Unless you got sick, injured or killed, you would have every reason to expect to live for 100 years, 1,000 years, a million years and more.
Maybe the cure, if it is found, would involve genetic engineering. Maybe people already alive could not be cured, but children not yet conceived could be given the gift of immortality. Would some people end up immortal and others not? Or maybe some advanced form of viral gene therapy could modify the DNA of people already alive so that everyone could have the cure.
What sort of wisdom might the human race gain if we had people among us with thousands of years of life experience? What if MOST people had that much experience?
Artificial Intelligence
I still have my doubts as to whether it is even possible to make a non-organic computer truly intelligent. Even if that's not possible, scientists are already building artificial intelligence using nerve cells from rats. They built an artificial neuron array of about 25,000 rat neurons and taught it to fly a jet fighter in a simulator. I didn't hear that it could take off or land, which is much harder than flying straight and level, but it's a start. I've been predicting this for a very long time. As I said twenty years ago, this will eventually be done with human neurons. I have no doubt at all that something intelligent can be made this way. If you make a "computer" out of the same stuff human brains are made of, it is certainly possible to achieve human levels of intelligence. I used to call this concept the "bio-computer". I'm not sure it's a good idea and it can easily lead to some nightmare scenarios, but it's virtually impossible to stop people from using any technology that is possible so this is likely to be in our future. Imagine a "bio-computer" made from human neurons that is just as intelligent and self-aware as a human brain. Now imagine the scientists building a better one the next year and an even better one the year after that and pretty soon, human intelligence is far surpassed. Now imagine a team of super-genius bio-computers working on the problem of how to build even more intelligent bio-computers.
Technological Singularity
The famous sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge predicted that some form of technology would increase intelligence. Whether it was artificial intelligence in computers, genetic engineering, cyborgism which merged human brains with the processing and memory capacity of computers or something else, that this would happen. He further predicted that technology-enhanced intelligence, working on the problem of how to further increase intelligence would produce a positive feedback loop resulting in an ever-accelerating increase in intelligence. He said this would also result in a massive increase in technology in a short time so that virtually any technology that we can imagine today would have already been invented. He further predicted that all this would happen by the year 2030.
He called this effect the "technological singularity". The timing was derived from his belief that artificial intelligence in computers is possible and would increase at a rate similar to the increase in computer capabilities we've seen ever since the invention of electronic computers. I think he is overlooking the role of economics and capital in technology development. It's not purely a matter of intelligence. Still, some form of this effect might still occur. If I'm wrong about artificial intelligence, Vinge might even be right about the timing. This is the kind of thing that, until Vernor Vinge pointed it out, probably didn't even occur to anyone.
Could someone 500 years ago have thought of this? When DNA had not yet been discovered, when electronic computers hadn't been invented, when electrical circuits hadn't even been invented, when static electricity wasn't even understood, when even science didn't really exist?
500 years ago, it wasn't easy to foresee the Protestant Reformation that was right around the corner and was about to lead to bloody revolutions and major wars that would continue for over a hundred years. The internet and space travel were far beyond their thinking.
This is what we face when we try to look 500 years into the future. We're like monks in a monastery in 1508 trying to predict the internet.
On the other hand, if our purpose is to have fun and make an interesting game, maybe it's not all that important that we have no hope of being right about the future. If it's entertaining and keeps us thinking of possibilities, then maybe it's worth doing. Certainly if we're going to do a sci-fi game set in the far future, it would be absurdly limiting to imagine a future that too greatly resembles the present day.
Revolution in Theoretical Physics
There is increasing evidence that our current understanding of physics is incomplete. Not just a little bit incomplete. Of course, this doesn't mean that the equations that have been proven over and over again to accurately describe the universe will stop working. More likely we will simply see other situations we didn't know were possible before where our equations don't accurately predict the results.
It's similar to the revolution in theoretical physics which occurred in the early 20th century. By that time, the equations describing gravity, inertia and movement developed by Sir Isaac Newton had been tested by experiment for centuries and proven correct. Then an experiment in the late 19th century involving light produced a result that seemed impossible. Efforts to explain it resulted in a radically different understanding of physics that replaced Newton's theories with Einstein's theory of general relativity and gave us new equations such as the Lorentz transformations that are far different than anything Newton calculated.
Even though Newton's equations still work in most cases and are still in use, they are understood to be incorrect. We now understand that there are situations, especially involving relative motion near the speed of light, where Newton's equations will produce incorrect answers. But for the type of things Newton was describing, his theories are still close enough.
That doesn't mean that the 20th century's revolution in physics was about minor details. Newton's equations would never have predicted that matter could be converted to energy as Einstein's most famous equation describes. So now we have a world where entire cities are provided with electricity by nuclear power plants and the people in those cities live in fear of destruction by nuclear weapons. The power plants and the weapons are examples of direct conversion of matter to energy and make the world a very different place than the one Sir Isaac Newton lived in. He had to write his equations by candle light or wait until morning.
We have, yet again, some experimental results that seem impossible even with Einstein's help in understanding things. The so-called double slit experiment, which involves interference patterns of electrons passing through two very small holes, makes it seem as if the behavior of the electrons changes depending on whether we know which hole they passed through. That's just one seemingly impossible result.
Many scientists are now saying that our whole understanding of the universe may need to be replaced with some new theory. That doesn't mean that apples won't still fall off apple trees and drop to the ground at almost exactly the same rate that Sir Isaac Newton calculated. But it does mean that we may have a completely different understanding of why they do and we may get a whole new crop of technologies as drastic as nuclear power and atomic bombs which maybe we haven't even thought of yet and currently seem impossible.
If we were trying to imagine the future of 500 years from now or 5,000, it would be foolish to imagine that only one such revolution in theoretical physics will occur by then and just one can change everything.
What might be possible? Time travel? Telekinesis? Maybe, but these are things people have thought of a lot for a long time. If Einstein's theory of general relativity is any guide, breakthroughs in theoretical physics are more likely to give us truly bizarre things nobody thought of, than the obvious things sci-fi writers have been scribbling about since the 1890s when H. G. Wells wrote about a time machine.
What sort of things? How about traveling sideways in time to alternate realities? That topic has been addressed in sci-fi as well, but the implications are usually not explored. It's one thing to visit one alternate reality where the confederacy won the civil war or the Germans won World War II, (favorite sci-fi scenarios) but how many different alternate realities could there be? If there are any at all, I doubt very much there are less than a trillion of them. More likely there would be an infinite number. What would it mean for economics if we suddenly could travel to and trade with a trillion other Earths? What if it were an infinite number of other Earths? If we feel a moral obligation to send food when there's a famine in Africa or a flood in Bangladesh, to send soldiers to fight a war when there are reports of genocide in Kosovo or tyranny in Iraq, what would we feel if there were a billion famines in a billion different Africas on a billion other Earths and a billion genocides occuring all the time?
Even if it were a billion famines, a trillion Earths might manage to send enough food. It would still be possible to solve the problems, just vastly more difficult. But what if there were an infinite number of Earths in an infinite number of alternate realities? What if everything that could possibly happen is happening in an alternate reality? What if every time you go to an alternate reality, you discover an infinite number of alternate realities where everything you could have done in that first alternate reality, you did actually do, whether it was wise or stupid, good or evil? Wouldn't that mean that nothing you do changes anything? I have tried to imagine people's reaction to such a situation. (This was for a game I created.) It would be very easy to imagine people concluding that it doesn't matter whether they do good or do evil because even if you choose to do good, another version of you in another universe is choosing to do evil. According to this view, an infinite number of alternate versions of you are doing good and another infinite number of alternate versions of you are doing evil. I can imagine an extremely destructive social movement based on this idea. Oddly, this is based on our inability to understand the mathematics of infinity. So far as we know, infinity plus one still equals infinity. The plus one didn't matter at all. If the plus one was an evil deed, that becomes very significant.
If we discovered an infinite number of alternate realities I'll bet there would be a lot more thought devoted to the mathematics of infinity. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that we have already discovered the existence of alternate realities as evidenced by the behavior of subatomic particles and a few other things.
The theory that says alternate realities is the explanation for this is called the "Everett Theory" or the "Many Worlds Theory." Yet the main reason the Everett Theory is rejected by so many scientists is precisely BECAUSE it involves infinity. The Lorentz transformation equations connected to Einstein's relativity theories also produce infinities if an object ever reaches the speed of light. This is one of the main reasons scientists say it can't be done - because they can't calculate the results! They try to visualize it and give explanations like the fact that the energy needed would be infinite. That's a very real obstacle for a particle accelerator, but not so much for a spacecraft because the relative mass of the fuel of a spacecraft accelerating towards the speed of light would also increase to infinity according to the same Lorentz transformation equations that are being used to say it can't be done. That means the energy available to accelerate the spaceship would also increase to infinity in exactly the proportion needed by the increased mass of the ship. They also say that time would slow down so you could never finish the last acceleration. This is nonsense because it could be done in pulses to overcome that problem if it were real and according to Einstein, time would seem to pass normally on the ship. So even if it would seem from Earth that time slowed down to the point that the ship had stopped accelerating, onboard the ship they should perceive that they were rapidly accelerating to the speed of light and perhaps beyond it. You could argue that time would pass at such a vastly faster rate in the rest of the universe that the ship would be destroyed by the end of the universe before it reached light speed. Sure, if the theory that the universe is going to end is even correct. Even if that's true and as a practical matter it can't be done, it would still be theoretically possible. It would be the particular situation of our universe standing in the way, not the laws of physics. In a different universe, that wasn't about to collapse in a few billion years (if that theory is true), it would be possible to go faster than the speed of light. If the alternate realities are really out there, a different universe with a different total amount of matter and a different expected lifetime, might exist and might even be reachable.
The fact is we really don't know what will happen until we put an ion drive (yes, they do really exist) on a spacecraft and accelerate it. Theory is important, but science is based on actually doing the experiment to confirm or refute the theory. I think that experiment would give us some interesting data.
Anyway, the seemingly minor matter of a breakthrough in mathematics that would help us understand how to do calculations involving infinity might reveal that faster than light travel is possible and since time would flow backwards at faster than light speeds according to the Lorentz transformations, this might also give us time travel. Since time travel would produce paradoxes that are impossible unless there are infinite alternate realities, time travel might allow us to discover inifnite alternate realities. The same mathematical breakthrough might then save us from hordes of evil fanatics following some demogogue who preaches that good and evil are irrelevant because infinity plus one is still infinity.
But these are things I can foresee as possibilities. The real future is probably going to be much more bizarre than that.
Alien Intelligence
The future is going to be strange enough even if we don't find alien life on other planets, but recent discoveries such as the discoveries of planets in other star systems and the evidence for ancient micro-organisms on Mars have caused scientists to think that alien life on other planets is far more likely than we previously estimated.
At some point, we are likely to encounter alien life and possibly intelligent alien life. If we find intelligent alien life, it's probably going to turn our ideas of the world upside down. We have seen so many fictional aliens in so many different sci-fi settings that it's tempting to think we understand what they are likely to be like. But we don't. From a scientific perspective, the aliens of Star Wars and Star Trek and countless other works of science fiction are absurd. They are so similar to humans in physical appearance, in customs and in behavior, that it's laughable. If you want to know what aliens might be like, look at other species here on Earth, see how different from us they are, and then try to imagine life that evolved differently. I don't mean imagine humanoids with scales and tails like lizard men or humanoids with bug eyes and four arms that still speak English with barely an accent. I mean, imagine something that is not a mammal or a reptile or a bird or an insect or any kind of Earth creature, does not have a basic humanoid shape, does not communicate with spoken language, does not have laws, government or armies, all of which are human institutions. Now imagine that it is intelligent. Maybe it lives with vast numbers of its own kind like humans in cities or ants in an ant nest, or huge flocks of nesting birds, or large schools of fish. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it lives in small groups like many Earth animals, such as wolves or deer. Or maybe it lives a solitary existence, meeting others of its own kind only to battle over territory or mate. If it is territorial. If it mates at all rather than reproducing on its own without a mate.
If you've read anything about the psychology of animals or of mentally ill people, you will have some idea of the radically different psychology that is possible even here on Earth. We should not expect alien psychology to fit within the bounds of what would be normal for a human. How alien is the thinking of most sci-fi aliens? Not very.
Somewhere, due to parallel evolution, we might find aliens very much like ourselves. If they exist, they are unlikely to be the first ones we meet. There will probably be many more who are very, very different. What would it mean for humans to interact with an intelligent alien species with a radically different psychology? Even if they were exactly like us, just one attractive ideology or religious idea from the aliens could revolutionize our whole society. The more different they might turn out to be, the more we might learn from them, or have to learn about them to survive. No matter what intelligent aliens are like, some humans will probably want to try to be more like them.
What would our society really be like if we encountered not one intelligent alien species, but dozens, like in Star Trek, or thousands, like in Star Wars?
Social Change
One thing that the makers of Star Trek got right and that many sci-fi writers don't is that if history is any guide, there is probably going to be a lot of change in how humans interact as a society. The specific changes the show depicted are unlikely to all be correct, but the fact that there will be major changes seems almost certain because such change keeps happening.
What would the changes be? That's hard to say, but it's important to note the role of technology in driving these changes. The protestant reformation in the early sixteenth century seems to have been driven partly by the invention of the printing press. The so-called "sexual revolution" that began in the 1960s was partly driven by the invention of birth control pills. The French Revolution and the American Revolution were partly driven by the development of mass media in the form of pamphlets carrying political ideas. The labor movement and Marxism of the 19th and 20th centuries were driven by industrialized mass production and its effects on society, especially on people working in factories. The movement for equal rights for women may have been driven by industrialization as well since the increasing use of machines to do work put less emphasis on muscle power. Prior to the industrial revolution, 90% or more of the world's population lived and worked on farms which were operated without tractors or similar machinery to help.
Human Nature
Despite the drastic changes in the world, there are some things about human behavior that just don't seem to ever change. We call that human nature. It's not easy to discern which things are really human nature that doesn't change and which are social roles that may have been in place for thousands of years, but can suddenly change without warning. The changing role of women over the past century or so comes to mind on that point.
Genetic engineering and cyborgism and other technologies may even change human nature, but I wouldn't bet on it. Even if they could change human nature, humans may not be willing to use them for that. Or other humans may put a stop to it if someone tries.
Putting It All Together
You could write a sci-fi novel about each of the above issues. They won't happen in isolation, though. Any or all of these things that really happen in the future, plus any more that we couldn't think of today, will all happen together. It won't be a world with genetic engineering or a world with time travel to alternate realities or a world with radical social change. Imagine instead a world where nanotechnology has led to drastically different economic circumstances which in turn has caused massive social changes. Imagine the nanotechnology made genetic engineering much easier and led to genetically engineered super-intelligent people. Imagine that the super-intelligent people used their intelligence to amass vast fortunes and take over many governments, but were overthrown by hordes of more ordinary people because it is in human nature to resent being ruled by elites. Imagine the super-intelligent people are in hiding, bitter over what they suffered in the revolutions and plotting to return to power while cyborg secret police hunt them down with nanotechnology. Then imagine that aliens arrive, not in spaceships, but in time machines that can travel to infinite alternate realities. The aliens not only can travel through time, but never grow old and humans suddenly realize this is possible and undertake massive efforts to cure old age. Imagine these efforts succeed. Meanwhile people are using alien technology to explore a billion trillion alternate realities and the first explorer groups to use this technology have made unimaginable fortunes off trade between different alternate Earths to the point where they have become gigantic corporations with properties and operations across thousands of worlds that own more wealth than our entire Earth and have technologies from the future that nobody else even knows are possible. Then they encounter similar groups from alternate Earths that have been doing this a lot longer and more successfully and they start doing merger deals or waging war against each other. Now imagine it is the year 2500 and all this has already happened. Let 1,000 more years go by and try to imagine what the year 3,500 will be like.
That's not the specific scenario I'm considering. I just made that up as I went. That's just a glimpse of how things get a whole lot weirder when you start combining these futuristic technologies instead of just looking at them one at a time.
That's my thinking so far on a possible sci-fi game.
Comments anyone?
