Hey everyone, so it’s no secret that I’m really into futurism.
That’s why I’ve partnered up with Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which premieres on FOX September
22nd, in order to discuss hope for humanity.
There’s a plethora of challenges that we face in the 21st century, some of the biggest
we’ve ever faced as a species.
The Cosmos FutureFair Presentation Day, airing September 21st on the FOXTV YouTube Channel,
will present some demonstrations that may provide some hope for humanity, but I thought
I’d share my two cents on the matter as well.
So what is it that we need to hope for?
Well, survival would be the top priority.
Given the potential of things like asteroids and nuclear war, our survival is not explicitly assured.
Some say that a civilization rises and falls on an energy source.
And there is actually a metric for describing the level of advancement of a civilization
based on its capacity to harness energy.
It’s called the Kardashev scale.
According to this scale, a Type 1 civilization, or planetary civilization, can utilize all
the energy available on its planet.
All the light beaming down from its star, all the mechanical energy from the movement
of the atmosphere and liquid bodies, and so forth.
A Type 2 civilization, or stellar civilization, has mastered all the energy available in its
planetary system.
That means utilizing the entire energy output of its star, perhaps by constructing something
like a Dyson sphere, which is a hypothetical megastructure that surrounds a star, such
that it can take advantage of its output in all directions, rather than just the minuscule
fraction that arrives on a planet within the system.
A Type 3 civilization, or galactic civilization, is one that has mastered all the energy available
in its entire galaxy.
Whether this would involve some way of manipulating the supermassive black hole at its center,
or some other construct that remains unknown to us, one can only speculate.
So what kind of civilization is humanity?
Unfortunately, we currently qualify as a Type 0 civilization.
We have not yet figured out how to utilize all the energy available on our own planet.
But there’s a chance we could be transitioning into a Type 1 civilization in the relatively
near future.
We just have to bring about a paradigm shift in energy production.
Right now we are still in the practice of digging organic substances out of the ground
and stripping them of chemical energy through combustion, which means to burn something
in the presence of oxygen.
Combustion is how we fuel our cars and planes, and even our spacecraft, if you can believe it.
But in no more than a century or two, this will seem like a primitive and archaic practice.
First, the substances we combust are going to run out, and actually, there isn’t that
much of them left already.
And second, combustion reactions produce carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
The widespread industrialization of our civilization has had an impact on the composition of the
atmosphere, and this inevitably has a result on Earth’s climate, which makes a lot of
problems for us.
So what is the answer?
Clearly the path forward lies in renewable energy.
These are energy sources that naturally replenish themselves, unlike the fossil fuels we dig
out of the ground, which once gone, are gone forever.
We’ve already been innovating renewable energy for decades now.
Everyone is familiar with solar panels, which convert radiant energy from the sun into electrical
energy, as well as wind turbines, which convert kinetic energy from the wind into electrical energy.
The sun won’t stop shining for billions of years, nor will the wind stop blowing,
so these sources of energy don’t run out.
But we are still nowhere near completely harnessing even that sliver of radiant energy that hits
the earth, something that would be a prerequisite to becoming a Type 1 civilization.
But the sun isn’t the only game in town.
While the sun produces energy by fusing hydrogen nuclei deep within its core, we can actually
perform the same process here on earth, and given that hydrogen is the most abundant element
in the universe by a huge margin, we can in a loose sense consider this renewable energy as well.
Nuclear fusion technology is still in its budding stages, but its categorization as
nuclear energy gives it a bad rap.
When people think of nuclear energy, they immediately think of reactor towers, hazmat
suits, glowing green rods, and deadly radiation.
But these are associated with nuclear fission.
This is where large, unstable nuclei like uranium are split apart, and a tiny fraction
of their mass is converted to energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2.
But fusion is essentially the precise opposite process.
It involves fusing tiny hydrogen nuclei together, just like what happens inside the sun, and
an even greater fraction of mass is converted to energy, for even greater energy output
than fission.
There are no radioactive products and no risk of nuclear fallout, so all of the dangers
people associate with nuclear energy apply only to fission.
Given that our best reactors are already on the cusp of net-positive energy production,
or putting out more energy than is put in, it could be a matter of just a few decades
before the world is powered by nuclear fusion plants.
It’s not just particle physics that gives me hope for humanity.
Many scientific fields will produce technologies that change our civilization for the better.
Biotechnology holds the promise of producing genetically modified microorganisms capable
of producing ultra-efficient biofuels, or even removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
at a thousand-times greater rate to offset carbon emissions and reduce global temperatures.
In every area of scientific inquiry, brilliant minds are figuring out how to solve these
big problems.
The only barriers to their implementation are sociological and political in nature.
If you want to learn more about these bold new ideas, tune in to the Cosmos FutureFair
Presentation Day, September 21st on the FOXTV YouTube channel, and don’t miss Cosmos:
Possible Worlds, premiering on FOX on September 22nd.
I’ll see you there.