Could This Be Humanity's Last Century?: Many Predict Man Will Soon Merge With Machine

The Borg: From the Star Trek television series. The Borg represented a hybrid of humans and machines.

By Seth Shostak

OK, quick: Name a few important things that happened in the 11th century.

If you're not tenured in medieval studies, that may be tough, although several modestly notable events took place in those hundred years -- for example, the Battle of Hastings and the launch of the Crusades. When we look back a millennium, even the highest parapets of history become hard to discern. Nonetheless, those long-ago happenings dramatically altered the future.

But what about the 21st century? What will your kids and grandkids do that will still be important a thousand years from now?

Let me suggest that they may trump every previous generation. They may go beyond simply changing society, and possibly usher in the last act for Homo sapiens.

That may strike you as a less-than-sunny prospect, but only because you're missing the big picture. I'm not talking about the various self-destructive threats of the moment -- the ones that fill the papers and spark pontification on the nightly news. Yes, both terrorism and climate change are serious matters, but the former is manageable and frankly, so is the latter. Alleviating environmental catastrophe requires modifications of behavior. Hard, sure, but we're not talking about violating physics.

No, the three big things that I believe will take place in the 21st century are more profound, and not necessarily bad.

To begin with, we're finally going to understand biology at a molecular level. DNA's double helix was discovered a mere six decades ago, and now -- for hardly more than a kilobuck -- you can sequence the genome of your yorkie or yourself.

The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it's obviously desirable. But our efforts won't be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we'll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.

Number two on my list of major 21st century developments is expanding into nearby space. We need more resources -- both acreage and raw materials -- unless we're happy to condemn our descendants to a limited lifestyle and unlimited war. You may worry about running out of oil, but that's not the resource that should really make you antsy. We're going to eat through the easily recoverable reserves of stuff like copper, zinc, and the platinum group metals in a matter of decades.

We can find more of these elements in asteroids, and already several companies are planning to do so. But nearby space could also provide unlimited real estate for siting the condos of the future. Everyone expects our progeny to establish colonies on the moon or Mars, but the better deal is to build huge, orbiting habitats in which you can live without a spacesuit. Think of scaling up the International Space Station a few thousand times. We can put unlimited numbers of people in such engineered environments, and sometime in this century we'll start doing that. The days of being confined to the bassinette of our birth are coming to an end.

The third thing you can expect before the year 2100 is the development of generalized artificial intelligence (GAI). In other words, machines that don't just play games like chess or Jeopardy, but can do the thinking required for any white-collar job, including all the ones at the top. And such machines won't necessarily be large. A synapse in your brain is a few thousand nanometers in size. A transistor on a chip is hundreds of times smaller. The hardware necessary for human-level smarts -- even today -- could fit in an iPad.

These are developments that -- over the long term -- will dwarf such quotidian concerns as politics, war, or economics.

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America's 'Oil Independence' Myth: 'Most Shale Oil and Gas Reserves Could Prove Too Deep, Too Expensive to Drill' — Economic Collapse Will Follow

Peak Oil is not a myth. The production of oil will eventually peak (likely sooner than later) and then it will drop dramatically from then on. Fracking and tar sand oil extraction will only delay the inevitable: World oil output will drop like a rock. Meanwhile, there will be a vast acceleration in demand, caused by China, India and the entry into the high-tech age of the underdeveloped nations. Think nuclear energy and uranium will save the day? Have you ever heard of Peak Uranium?
—Ronald David Jackson

PeakGraph provided by Joy King.

By Peter Moskowitz
In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that the U.S. had a supply of natural gas “that can last America nearly 100 years.”

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 Richard Heinberg on Peak Oil and the Globe's Limitations

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But that unbridled optimism, shared by the natural gas industry as well as politicians who want to see the U.S. become more energy independent, is worrying a growing grout op of activists and analysts who say U.S. oil and gas production may start declining in a matter of years as drillers run out of sweet spots in U.S. shale reserves and are forced to explore less productive — and less lucrative — regions.

“Most of the wells right now are going into sweet spots,” said David Hughes, who authored a report released this week on the future of oil and gas production from the Post Carbon Institute, a green energy think tank. “You’re going to have to go into other parts of the reservoir eventually.”

He says more pessimistic observations have for years been swept under the rug, as the recent flood of untapped oil and gas made accessible by newly popularized technologies like hydraulic fracturing has buoyed the spirits of fossil fuel optimists. These optimists believe the U.S. oil and gas boom could create hundreds of thousands more jobs, cut dependence on foreign oil and even use U.S. energy sources to leverage power in diplomatic battles — as long as the country manages to keep producing gas and oil at the current rate for decades to come.

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But the relentless upbeat nature of the U.S. government’s predictions may mask a more complicated truth about oil and gas development. No one knows exactly how much oil and gas will be accessible in the future, and some people say it’s a lot less than what the government and industry think.

The Post Carbon Institute report suggests that while the U.S. does have a lot of shale oil and gas, the majority of it may be too deep and too expensive to drill.

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GO DEEPER:
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

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The report is based on an analysis of the productivity of thousands of wells in the most productive U.S. shale regions.

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