Pictures of the Future

Take a moment to close your eyes and let your wildest visions for 2100 run rampant. After this fantastic vision fades, come back to reality and understand one very important idea: 2100 probably will not look a damn bit like that future you just envisioned.

Not to say that the future you envision is wrong, it may very well be that many of the technologies you just envisioned will indeed come to fruition. It’s just that what you see may in fact meet our society in less than 20 years, not 80.

This is because your mind sees the future progressing at a rate directly proportional to the current rate of advancement in society. You see the red line in that chart. This is a beneficial trait for us to have for our own personal futures, because most of the projection required for our daily lives is limited to what meal we want to eat later, what we are going to do that night, or at the furthest extent, how are we going to pay for a vacation in a few months.

However, many of us have noticed how the further out we try to predict our lives, the more wrong we really are. The further you go into the future, the more unpredictable it gets.  Scientists believe this is because our world is actually evolving at an exponential rate rather than a linear rate, represented by thee yellow curve above. The trend can be seen from the beginning of time all the way up to right now.

This logarithmic chart plots key events in evolution vs. time elapsed between the next key event. It clearly shows that the further into the future we go, the less time it takes for the next  paradigm shift to take place and revolutionize the world.

Thus biological evolution exhibits the trend of exponential growth, and it is now becoming clear that humans are ushering in our own wave of exponential growth in technology. This claim is supported be the inexhaustible quality of Moor’s Law: computing power has doubled with every doubling in computers supplied for nearly thirty years now. Most computer scientists expected this exponential increase in efficiency to level off naturally, but technology just keeps growing exponentially.

Thus the future is extremely unpredictable because our brains our trained to think linearly rather than exponentially. This raises clear obstacles for communicating with extra-terrestrial life: If they began evolving just a million years before us (which is a minuscule time-frame from the universe’s perspective)  they will be so much further advanced than us that it is practically impossible to predict anything about their civilization. Since they have had a million more years to grow exponentially, we literally have no clue the vastness of the power they could wield, just like we cannot possibly predict the power we could yield in a million years at this exponential rate of technological advancement.

This gap in progress posses a serious barrier to our hopes to find and communicate with another advanced civilization.