by John Maxwell

Created on: October 19, 2009

"Prediction is difficult, especially about the future." Said by the great physicist Niels Bohr, these words should inspire humility in anyone who hopes to foretell the events of tomorrow. Too many prominent columnists and academics make overconfident predictions after analyzing only one or two aspects of a situation. Thinkers who do thorough analyses tend to be much less confident.

But even though folks tend to be overconfident when analyzing markets, geopolitics, and other present-day systems, they tend to be underconfident when talking about far-future events. It is often assumed that faster-than-light spaceships, time travel, aliens, galactic colonization, and machine intelligence are topics for idle speculation only. But in fact there's a surprising amount we can say about the chance that each of these will occur.

Let's start with the bad news. Faster-than-light travel is simply out. It's impossible under Einstein's theory of special relativity, which has accurately predicted the results of physics experiments to the twentieth decimal place.

Time travel can also be ruled out, for one simple reason: No one seems to be confident enough to bet millions of dollars on the outcomes of sporting events.

We can't rule out extraterrestrial life entirely, but we can say that if it occurs, it does so extremely infrequently. How do we know this? Well, let's say that somewhere in our galaxy there was a civilization with fast spaceships and a desire to expand. Since our galaxy is only about 100,000 light-years across, it would only take about 100,000 years for this hypothetical civilization to fill it if their spaceships traveled just under the speed of light. Dinosaurs were around 230 million years ago, which gives you an idea of just how long Earth has been laying fallow. Combine this with the fact that our galaxy has around 200 billion stars in it and we're talking either a very empty galaxy or some very lethargic aliens.

Having said that, galactic colonization is actually considerably easier than most people think. When most people think of space colonies, they think of Apollo 11 plus inflatable geodesic domes. In fact, planetary colonization will be far easier than that, because our homes will be built in advance by versatile self-duplicating robots. To prepare a planet for human consumption, all we'll need to do will be drop one of these handy self-duplicating robots planetside and wait a few decades. And don't tell me self-duplication is hard. Practically every organism on Earth can do it.

Unlike the other items on the list, machine intelligence already has a working proof-of-concept: humans. When it comes right down to it, we humans are biological machines. And ven if our scientists and researchers are unable to figure out the fundamental principles behind intelligent thought, there is a fallback strategy: whole-brain emulation. Just four or five more decades until personal computers will have enough processing power to simulate your brain in the same way modern computers simulate everything from roller coasters to financial markets. That'll be when the fun starts.

The future will be an exciting placeif humanity lives to see it.

Learn more about this author, John Maxwell.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.