The Illusion of a Bright Future
Well, the computer with its brain just, yeah, so your brain is composed of neurons. Neurons connect together and form a network that can talk to each other through synapses. They're the connection points between neurons, and they communicate using chemical signals known as neurotransmitters. All of your senses, everything you experience in life, it's all just neurons firing electrical signals, or otherwise known as action potentials. When neuron spikes occur, these neurotransmitters are released. Information is then relayed across its synapses and eventually reaches another neuron.
Now, multiply this process by 100 billion and that's your brain in a nutshell. Electrodes are the way that Neurolink and other medical practices study your brain activity. By placing these electrodes close to neurons, the action potentials that create electric fields inside your brain can be detected and transferred to a machine that records and measures the data. Neurolink plans to use this to its advantage.
Your brain has two main systems: your limbic system and your cortex. These two are in a relationship with each other. Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions, your survival instinct; your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills, your critical thinking. It's where your consciousness exists. Neurolink is aiming to create a third layer to this. The implants will be a third wheel in this relationship but would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude.
They plan to increase the number of neurons that you can access regularly, that you can use to remember things, or regain access to certain parts of your brain that may no longer be active. This is extremely useful for medical patients, some of which who had absolutely zero options before Neurolink became a reality. The goal is to make this one of the most simple procedures there is, similar to people getting Lasik to improve their vision.
But why do we even need this in the first place? Well, in most cases, it's a bandwidth issue. Now, many people hear this but don't exactly understand what that means. It's a speed problem. It's an energy problem. It's how fast you can get information into or out of your brain. If you have something that you want to write down on a computer, you have to type it with your hands or speak it into a microphone. That's probably going to mess it up. To learn something, it could take days, weeks, months, or even years to fully grasp.
If we were able to solve this bandwidth issue, we could accomplish exponentially more in less time with much less physical effort. Neurolink cuts out the middleman and allows input and output directly from your brain to whatever you're doing on a machine or vice versa. It's like going from writing using a quill to having a pencil to having a keyboard to having Siri to now potentially having nothing but the power of your own brain.
This is where brain-machine interfaces come in, and they change everything. A brain-machine interface, or BMI, is composed of two things: a brain and a machine. The machine could be anything—a phone, a computer, a bionic arm; anything that provides you with sensory inputs from the outside world or an external source. These inputs are then returned back into your brain where you can process them. But you need something artificial in your head to return this data to.
Now don’t worry, it’s not like putting a CPU inside your head. It’s actually quite tiny. Each Neurolink N1 chip is roughly four by four millimeters with a thousand electrodes each. It’s feasible to fit up to 10 of these inside your head in different areas, all to measure and affect different parts of your brain. But companies and neurosurgeons alike can't just go around throwing anything they want into someone's head. It’s usually a lengthy process to getting these things approved by the FDA for medical purposes and later on public use.
BMIs contain the potential to help people with a wide range of clinical disorders. Using just 256 electrodes, or about two-and-a-half percent of the number of electrodes Neurolink eventually plans to use, human patients have been able to control computer cursors, robotic limbs, and speech synthesizers. The full potential with nearly 40 times that amount of electrodes is hard to imagine.
Currently, the best FDA approved BMI is used for Parkinson’s patients, and it only has 10 electrodes. For Neurolink, this is just the beginning and it’s already a thousand times better than what is currently approved. In version one, each electrode is inserted into your head via tiny threads that are roughly five micrometers thick. They’re around 10 times smaller than a human hair and contain 32 electrodes each.
It’s roughly the same size as a neuron, which is a good idea—there’s a size limit for things that you want to stick in your head. Something too large is inevitably going to cause problems, so the smaller the better. Neurolink actually made a robot that is used to insert these with extreme precision, which is pretty much mandatory. Humans couldn’t do it if they wanted.
This is a penny; it’s pretty small, right? It’s roughly the same size as the tip of my thumb. Now zooming in extremely close, this right here is the needle that will be inserted into your skull. Placing it beside a penny, you actually couldn’t see it, as the robot inserts each thread one by one. At the end, there could eventually be up to ten thousand of these electrodes inside your head, each responsible for recording separate neurons, which can later on be analyzed.
But not only can they read data from your brain; they can also input data as well. It’s a two-way street. It’s sort of like being able to upload and download things from your brain. Implants aren’t exactly new either, though. They go as far back as the 1950s. Hearing implants are a good example. Neurolink just plans to take the baton and continue down the path, but in a different way.
Other BMIs approach the situation differently. For deep brain stimulation, the kind of implants that were used to assist Parkinson’s patients, that I mentioned before, they essentially use larger stiff needles that were pretty much just shoved into the brain to affect neural activity, just as the electrodes from Neurolink will. It works well, but there’s a pretty high probability that complications will occur over time: seizures, strokes, and even more. It may fix one issue, but it’s probable that multiple other issues will show up.
See, your brain doesn’t sit still inside your head; it moves around with you. Even if you think you’re sitting still, your brain moves with each breath, each heartbeat. This is what can cause issues and is why a robot is needed for Neurolink’s procedure to be successful. Neurolink is taking a different approach. It really isn’t even a huge surgery. Your head isn’t going to be completely peeled open for these chips to be inserted. Each chip will be inserted into your head through a small incision of eight millimeters at most, so less than a centimeter. You won’t need stitches; you won’t need any of that. It’s hardly a surgery at all.
By the way, those chips that are inserted are completely wireless, as you would probably hope. The craziest thing of all is that you won’t need to go to a hospital or random place to hook yourself up to use this interface. There’s no USB port sticking out of your head. You won’t need a caretaker or anyone to help you; with the use of a single wireless battery-powered computer behind your ear, it will actually be able to connect you to your smartphone, effectively making your phone an official part of you.
The options and potentials for this technology are limitless, and it's only going to improve over time. Now, I don’t want to overreach here and throw out ideas that are impossible, so I won’t. But I will give some solid uses and some pretty cool ideas for Neurolink that can actually become a reality one day.
This is my computer; Ironside sent it to me a couple months back and it’s great for everything I need to do. It has a 2080 TI graphics card, an i9 processor, and 64 gigabytes of RAM. I can edit much faster and more efficiently than I was able to before. I can play pretty much any game on ultra settings. But in order to do these things, I need to use my hands. Well, duh! I need to use a mouse and a keyboard to get things done in the way I want or to move my character in games.
But Neurolink may be able to change this. If a patient is able to control an arm with his or her mind, then it’s not infeasible to believe that one day you may be able to control characters and video games with your brain as well, considering it’s all Bluetooth, all wireless. It’s not too much of a stretch to ask this. Coupled with advancements in virtual reality will cause video games and potentially even films to become almost fully immersive.
Let’s take an example of where Neurolink technology could be used in a pretty cool yet practical way. Let’s say you’re about to take a month-long trip to Tokyo. You’re an American, and like most Americans, most of us only speak one language. You’ll have no clue how to get around any city that doesn’t have street signs or directions completely in English. But luckily, Neurolink can help us out here.
Imagine there’s a Tokyo local who’s lived there his entire life, looking at the action potentials of that particular person, studying their neuron spikes in a region of their brain called the hippocampus and in which order they occur. You can trace out a path throughout the entire city from when these neurons spike, and once this data is input into your brain, you’ll be able to traverse the city like you’ve lived there your entire life.
Telepathy is no longer unrealistic. The electrode implants that detect neural signals wirelessly transmit their data back to the small computer behind your ear. So the idea of transferring data back and forth between these devices is relatively simple to imagine. And because the electrodes can both read and write data, you could theoretically communicate back and forth between people who also have Neurolink implants.
Now, at the moment, technology isn’t exactly close to making this happen—maybe a word or two—but in theory, with enough improvements, it is possible for high-bandwidth communication between two people using nothing but their minds. It may be an aggressive approach, as Elon tends to take, but you can see Neurolink implants in human patients by the end of this year and once that happens, it’s only up from there. Improvements will slowly be added, and I can honestly see this becoming a big and common practice within the next couple of decades.
You always hear that there’s new technology coming out that will change our lives, but I’m serious when I say this. If this is taken seriously and can work in the ways we’re studying and planning on at the moment, I see this as an invention that is on the scale of the internet. It will change the world in the way airplanes impact travel, the way antibiotics impact medicine. Computers and the internet threw us into a brand new digital age. Phones and computers have become extensions of human beings; they can answer almost any question you could ask at a moment’s notice.
They’ve both been pivotal in connecting the entire planet. BMIs, like the one Neurolink is creating, are going to have a similar and honestly even larger effect than that as time goes on. As we enter a new decade, technology that we’ve passed off as unrealistic becomes more and more plausible. Things that we’ve written off as impossible end up being the same things that push society forward—airplanes, rockets, medicine; all things that used to be seen as wizardry or some voodoo magic are now things that we use every single day.
As Neurolink progresses and gets better and better, its cultural impact will grow larger and larger. Kids being born today will grow up in a world vastly different than the one we’re living in today. The same way that we’re living through a time vastly different than the previous generations. We will make mistakes along the way; the past shows that pretty well. However, humans overcome, we adapt, and we move forward.
If you think we’re living in the peak of the digital age, you have no idea what’s just around the corner.
Have you ever had a dream that came true the next day? Have you ever had a vision of the future and then watched it play out in the real world? Have you ever had a feeling that something big was going to happen and then it does? You are not alone.
One night, the famous American writer Mark Twain awoke from a horrible dream. Mark saw his younger brother Henry laying in a metal casket, dead. On his brother’s chest was a bouquet of white roses with a single red rose at the center. When Mark woke up, he was stricken with a sense of grief as if his brother were really dead. But he wasn’t. Henry was still alive. Still, his nightmare was so specific that it left Mark with a sensation of being more of a vision than a dream.
The white roses with the single red rose at the center in the coffin being metal and not wood was particularly strange. At the time, wooden coffins were the standard. Mark was eventually able to calm himself down, and he dismissed this vision as only a dream. In the real world, Mark and Henry got a job working together aboard a riverboat, but Mark was soon transferred to another vessel after he got in a fight with the boat’s captain. So the two brothers were separated; Mark went one way, and Henry went another.
A few weeks after his dream, Mark got word that his brother Henry was dead, killed in an explosion aboard the riverboat. Mark was summoned to where his brother's body was being prepared. When Mark entered the room, he was horrified to see the scene from his dream exactly as he dreamed it. Henry was lying in a metal casket.
As shocking as this was to see, a small detail was missing: there were no flowers, no bouquet of white roses with the red rose at the center. The nightmare must have been just a coincidence, right? Here’s the twist. Before Mark leaves his brother, a woman carrying a bouquet of white roses with a red rose at the center enters the room.
Mark dreams of his brother's untimely death and gets every detail of his sibling's demise correct, right down to the color of the flowers and the unique type of casket. But he isn’t the only luminary from the past to dream about the future. Abraham Lincoln reportedly dreamed of his impending assassination. There are records of passengers meant to board the infamous Titanic who dreamed of the catastrophe before it occurred; as a result, they didn’t take the trip.
These are only a few of the thousands of reported cases from all over the world of people dreaming up accurate visions of the future. This phenomenon is known as precognitive dreams. But how is this possible? Is it all just coincidence? I can’t claim to believe in precognitive dreams one way or the other, but a story sent to me got me interested in the topic. It’s a story I will share with you at the end of this video; a story you may find hard to believe.
But first, I’d like to provide a little background and context that got me thinking that the story isn’t so hard to believe after all. But what is precognitive dreaming? A study by the American Psychological Association defines a precognitive dream as a dream that seemingly includes knowledge about the future that cannot be inferred by some prior knowledge. In other words, they have a vision of the future that does not draw on input from the five senses, memory, or logic.
Have you experienced something like this before? It’s likely that you have, and given the nature of dreams and the uncanny feeling they leave you with, chances are you remember them. Although precognitive dreams are categorized as paranormal, research suggests that they are quite common. Up to 38% of large samples of people reported having at least one precognitive dream. Women report having them more than men, and the frequency of them occurring seems to decline with age.
In 1989, a meta-analysis published by paranormal investigators Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari cited over 2 million trials conducted between 1935 and 1987 on 50,000 random participants. The goal was to discover if precognitive dreams are more than just coincidence, and the results are shocking: the study concluded that there was only a 0.0975% chance that coincidence had anything to do with the descriptions of future events offered by the participants.
But is the ability to have these precognitive dreams so unbelievable? What if they are more akin to something like instinct? And we don’t debate the existence of instinct, right? Instinct almost always comes with a physical sensation. A study by Northwestern University investigated the hypothesis that human physiology can predict important future or emotional events. In this study, participants were shown pictures at random.
On average, participants experienced physiological changes like sweating before they were shown a picture of a gun. But this is hardly a modern phenomenon. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature that dates back to 2100 BC. In the story, dreams are regarded as visions of the future.
Aristotle published a paper called Unprophizing Dreams; in it, he concludes that precognitive dreams are possible, but then most of them are probably coincidental. Are precognitive dreams only mere coincidence? People can’t really predict the future, can they? It depends on what you believe about time.
When you’re awake, does it feel like time is linear, moving forward, or is this an illusion? First, let’s go with the assumption that it is linear. And if it is, then our ability to predict the future is impossible, right? The idea of knowing the future before it arrives is logically incoherent. Newtonian physics is built upon the concept of materialism. This is the assumption that matter is the basis of everything.
So consciousness is merely a byproduct of physical processes, and this strictly physical world operates on the principle that time flows in one direction. This is known as the principle of causality. Thing A causes thing B, and thing B only happens because thing A caused it to happen. Your coffee mug shattered on the floor because you dropped it.
If dreams violate the fundamental principle that an effect cannot occur before its cause? But this Newtonian materialist view has not been adopted by everyone. There’s another theory: the theory that consciousness is a fundamental part of reality itself and something so much more than a byproduct of brain activity.
One of the most unbelievable theories in quantum physics is the theory that an observer can affect reality simply by the act of observing it. What’s even more unbelievable is that this has been proven to be true on the quantum level. It all comes down to qualia and quanta. Qualia is conscious awareness, and quanta is this discovery that objects observed at the quantum level are extremely sensitive to being observed.
Nobody likes the feeling of being watched. This feeling often produces physiological changes in our bodies and results in us changing course or acting differently than we otherwise would have. And you’ve probably heard of teleportation, which on the quantum level really is possible. It’s much like Schrödinger’s cat, where the cat is simultaneously alive and dead.
The cat exists in two different states at two different times simultaneously. You could think of precognitive dreams as the passing of information, and we know from our Wi-Fi signals that the passing of information can defy all kinds of laws. What is being teleported in the quantum world is information, not matter. Newtonian physics and materialism simply cannot explain this phenomenon, but quantum physics can.
Kind of. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, time is just another dimension in space, and you can traverse this space in either direction, forward or backward. Quantum physics and general relativity support the theory of a block universe, which is to say a four-dimensional universe.
But existence, as we experience it, is only three-dimensional. You are a three-dimensional being living in a three-dimensional world. Physical objects in the three-dimensional world have height, width, and depth, and they take up space. With me here, because we’re jumping from a three-dimensional world into a four-dimensional one, there is a four-dimensional spacetime structure where time is just like space.
Space and time both have coordinates or addresses in spacetime. Time does not have a tense, as in past, present, and future, so all points in time are equally real. The past and future are no less real than the present. They were all occurring simultaneously. Like physical objects in the 3D World, time takes up space. This challenges the notion that the past already happened and so is gone forever and the future doesn’t exist yet, so it’s inaccessible.
This leads to the many worlds or multiverse theory. This theory states that at each moment, a new possible future splits off into a whole new timeline. This would explain how particles can exist in the same place at the same time. But this theory hasn’t yet been proven; it can’t be empirically tested because we just don’t have access to those other timelines—or do we?
A common vision or warning in precognitive dreams is that of car crashes. The dreamer witnesses their own death while being behind the wheel, and as a consequence, they refuse to drive to work the next day or take a different route than normal, in effect ending one timeline and splitting off into another.
A common warning is that of illness. In a study of warning dreams preceding the diagnosis of breast cancer, each participant had similar dreams that shared the same characteristics. Each dream had a sense of conviction about the importance of the dream. Each one was more vivid, real, or intense than ordinary dreams. Each one had an emotional sense of threat, menace, or dread. Warning dreams of breast cancer were often reported to be life-changing experiences that spurred the participants to get checked right away, which led to early diagnosis.
Had the person not had the dream, the cancer could have gone undiagnosed, and for some, the timeline would end, perhaps prematurely. So what is it about sleep that allows us to do the impossible and break the linear flow of time? Is time both real and not real? What about the physical barriers of the world, both real and not real? This is a paradox, and that’s the word I want you to keep in mind as we continue: paradox.
You’ve probably heard of REM sleep, but have you heard of paradoxical sleep? Paradoxical sleep is a part of the sleep cycle where the brain is incredibly active, but our body is unable to move. Brain scans indicate that the brainwave activity during this part of sleep is almost identical to brainwave activity while we’re awake. For all intents and purposes, our brain thinks we are awake, and yet the body is in effect paralyzed during this stage of sleep.
The brain’s limbic system is in overdrive. The limbic system contains the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the singular gyrus. These parts of the brain are responsible for our five senses and emotions, long-term memory, and muscle movement, respectively. Though we’re sleeping, our brain is still busy interpreting visual cues and sensations without external stimulus or input. So we are awake but not awake. We are simultaneously experiencing the world, and yet we are not; hence the paradox.
This brain activity during sleep supports studies on the top-down connection between the unconscious mind and the physical body. The first empirical demonstration of this mind-matter interaction was achieved in the 1990s when scientists concluded that guided imagery and self-hypnosis enhanced immune function.
You could say that the simple act of behaving differently after having a dream is an example of your consciousness having a real tangible consequence on the physical world. But how many dreams are ignored because they don’t predict anything? There are nearly 8 billion people in the world. On average, the majority of them have multiple dreams each night, and when it comes to precognitive dreams, people aren’t dreaming of alien invasions or zombies walking the Earth. The content can be warning of something tragic; they are still mundane, possible, and plausible occurrences.
If that many people are having that many dreams, doesn’t it stand to reason that every now and then, a dream is just a really good guess or coincidence? I’d like to leave you with the story I spoke of earlier and let you decide. The following story happened in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. After yet another negative pregnancy test, Bill and Kate had all but given up trying to have a baby. They had the dog, and that would be enough.
But one night, Bill had a dream. In it, he held their dog in his arms, but when he looked down at it, the dog had a baby’s head with a furry body. Bill doesn’t tell Kate about the dream until the moment he has to. In the real world, Bill and Kate take the dog for its morning walk. Kate stops when she notices the dog has something in its mouth. Kate bends down to see what the dog has found. She holds the something up to Bill, and Bill’s jaw drops; in her hand, Kate holds a tiny doll with the baby’s head and a furry body.
Bill tells Kate about his dream. A couple races home, where Kate takes the pregnancy test, then another, and then another. All three came back positive. Bill and Kate are going to have a baby. Maybe just maybe we really can see the future.
The world is shrinking. There’s a deep and relatively unexplored world beyond what the human eye can see. The microscopic world is truly alien and truly fascinating. I'm delving further than the microscopic scale. I'm going to explore the potentials of working at a nanoscopic level, working at a level a billion times smaller than the average scale we work at today. This is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology means any technology on a nanoscale that has applications in the real world. Nanotechnology is the science of building small—and I mean really, really small.
It’s pretty difficult to imagine how small a nanometer is, but let’s just take a moment to try and wrap our heads around it. The tip of a pen is around a million nanometers wide, so nowhere near close. A single sheet of paper is around 75,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is around 50,000 nanometers thick, and I ran out of things to compare. Let’s just take a different approach. If a nanometer were the size of a football, the coronavirus would be the size of an adult male. A donut would be the size of New Zealand, and a chicken would be the size of the Earth.
In fact, on a comparative scale, if each person on Earth were the size of a nanometer, every single person on the planet would fit into a single car—a Hot Wheels car. You get the idea, nano is super, super tiny. We’re talking subatomic. So that’s how big or rather small a nanometer is. But why does it matter? Why look at really small things? Well, they ultimately teach us about the universe that we live in, and we can do really interesting things with them.
When we move into the nanoscale, we can work with new domains and physics that don’t really apply at any other scale. Nanoscience and nanotechnology can be used to reshape the world around us. Literally, everything on Earth is made up of atoms—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings and houses we live in, our own bodies.
Now think for a moment about how a car works. It’s not only about having all the right parts; they also need to be in the right place in order for the car to work properly. This seems obvious, right? Well, in pretty much the same way, how the different atoms in something are arranged determines what pretty much anything around you does.
With nanotechnology, it’s possible to manipulate and take advantage of this, much like arranging Lego blocks to create a model building, or airplane, or spaceship. But there’s a catch—and here’s where things start to really get interesting—the properties of things also change when they’re made smaller.
Phenomena based on quantum effects—the strange and sometimes counterintuitive behavior of atoms and subatomic particles—occur naturally when matters manipulated and organized at the nanoscale. These so-called quantum effects dictate the behavior and properties of particles.
So we know that the properties of materials are size-dependent when working at the nanoscale. This means that scientists have the power to adjust and fine-tune material properties, and they've actually been able to do this for some time now. It's possible to change properties such as melting point, fluorescence, electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability, and chemical reactivity to just name a few.
But where can we actually see the results of this kind of work? Well, everywhere. There are numerous commercial products already on the market that you and I use daily that wouldn't exist in the same way without having been manipulated and modified using nanotechnology. Some examples include clear nanoscale films on glasses and other surfaces to make them water-resistant, scratch-resistant, or anti-reflective.
Cars, trucks, airplanes, boats, and spacecraft can be made out of increasingly lightweight materials. We’re shrinking the size of computer chips, in turn helping to enlarge memory capacity. We’re making our smartphones even smarter, with features like nano-generators to charge our phones while we walk. We’re enabling the delivery and release of drugs to an exact location within the body with precise timing, making treatments more effective than ever before. There’s quite the list, and that’s only a few of the potential applications.
Let's delve into a few of these in more detail. Nanotechnology has been pivotal in advancing computing and electronics, leading to faster, smaller, smarter, and more portable systems and products. It is now considered completely normal for a computer to be carried with one hand, while just 40 years ago a computer infinitely slower was the size of a room. This has been made possible through the miniaturization of the world of microprocessors.
For example, transistors—the switches that enable all modern computing—have reduced drastically in the briefest amount of time, from roughly 250 nanometers in size in the year 2000 to just a single nanometer in 2016. This revolution in transistor size may soon enable the memory for an entire computer to be stored in a single tiny chip.
Increased systems have also been made possible using nanoscale magnetic tunnel junctions that can quickly and effectively save data during a system shutdown. It’s expected that using magnetic RAM, or random access memory, with these nanoscale junctions, computers will soon be able to boot almost instantly.
Flexible, bendable, foldable, and stretchable electronics have been developed using semiconductor nanomembranes, their mono-crystalline structures with thicknesses of less than a few hundred nanometers—in normal terms, they’re really small and super bendy. They’re particularly useful for applications in smartphones and wearable technology, like smartwatches.
Nanotechnology is a definite answer to a digital world that is focused on becoming smaller and more efficient, but it can also help us start to clean up some of the world's bigger and more pressing problems. There are many applications for detecting and cleaning up environmental contaminants. It is anticipated that nanotechnology could contribute significantly to environmental and climate protection by saving raw materials, energy, and water, and reducing greenhouse gases and hazardous waste.
From increasing the durability of materials so that they last longer and reduce waste, to the creation of insulation materials that improve the efficiency of paper towels, allowing them to absorb twenty times its own weight, nanotechnology really has the potential to do great things for the conservation of our planet and the human race.
The availability of fresh, clean drinking water is an increasingly pressing issue that can be linked back to population growth, urban mitigation, pollution, and the vast effects of events associated with climate change. Nanotechnology holds the power and promise to not only detect pollutants but to filtrate and purify.
The magnetic interactions between ultra-small specks of dust can remove arsenic. This is incredible, given that it is naturally present at high levels in the groundwater in a number of countries. Similarly, the development of nanoparticles that can purify water pollutants, which cost less than the process of pumping it out of the ground for treatment, also holds great promise. Basically, getting clean water is a huge problem, and nanotechnology can help solve it.
This all sounds almost too good to be true. There have to be downsides to the seemingly endless potential of nanotechnology for the environment. Actually quantifying and confirming the effects of a product on the environment, both positive and negative, is achieved by examining the entire life cycle—from the production of the raw material to its disposal at the end of its life cycle. There is a genuine concern that nanotechnology will further increase energy and environmental costs, given that the production of the nanomaterials themselves takes a large amount of energy, water, and environmentally problematic chemicals, such as solvents, in order to produce things that will help the environment.
Scientists are on the verge of new frontiers all the time. Nanotechnology is an act of exploration, and we're very much still in the early stages. But we're closer than you might think to this actual goal. The idea of subatomic disease-fighting machines has been in science fiction for decades. So this idea is not really a new one, but would definitely come a lot closer to making this idea reality in the past decade.
Sounds like a near-perfect solution to many modern medical problems, but let’s just explore how and where science fiction meets fact and what challenges may lie ahead. Nanotechnology is already heavily incorporated into medical tools, knowledge, and therapies already widely in use. Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology in medicine. It’s used for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.
Nanoparticles can encapsulate or otherwise help to deliver medication directly to cancer cells and minimize the risk of damage to healthy tissue. This could ultimately change the way cancer is currently treated and dramatically reduce the toxic effects of chemotherapy. Suffice it to say, researchers are working on it.
The increased capabilities of imaging and diagnostic tools enabled by nanotechnology are also paving the way for increased success rates for many different therapies. Quantum dots are tiny semiconductor particles just a few nanometers in size, sometimes referred to as artificial atoms due to their ability to behave like naturally occurring atoms or molecules.
Of those Quantum phenomena I mentioned earlier, quantum dots have optical and electric properties that differ from larger particles. As a result, they have many applications and are widely used in various sectors. However, creating quantum dots is an extremely expensive process which generates a huge amount of waste, and we find ourselves revisiting those environmental concerns.
Amazingly, though, scientists have recently developed a low-cost method to make these quantum dots using some chemicals and green leaf extracts—tea leaves. The procedure is economical and the byproducts are non-toxic. The results are genuinely amazing, with heaps of potential. The research proves that the quantum dots created with tea leaves can penetrate the skin and reduce the growth of cancer cells by about 80 percent. So not a cure, but a huge leap forward in progress that doesn't come with environmental payoffs.
It's not just how we face the big diseases that nanomedicine can transform. Researchers are now exploring ways to grow complex tissues with the goal of one day growing human organs for transplant. Nanotechnology can also improve the way vaccines are delivered and how successful they are, including vaccine delivery without the use of needles.
Still a work in progress—doing amazing feats once achieved. But the emerging era of nanomedicine really is the era of the nanobot. Nanobots are building tiny packages that can complete tasks in an automated way. They hold the ability to sense, respond, detect friend or foe within the body, and deliver payloads and cargo all at the nanoscale.
Why do we need them? Well, conventional water-soluble drugs are far from perfect and present difficulties in treatment. However, diagnostic nanomachines allow doctors to monitor the internal chemistry of the body’s organs, providing direct access to diseased areas.
Nanobots can also be equipped with wireless transmitters so that doctors can change the treatment method to respond specifically to the state of the medical condition. They also hold the potential to completely replace pacemakers by treating the heart cells directly. Research regarding nanobots and medicine offers several opportunities, such as artificial antibodies, artificial white and red blood cells, and antiviral nanobots.
They are super durable and could theoretically operate for years without any damage. Nanobots, in fact, hold the potential to address many health problems besides cancer, such as unblocking blood vessels in hard-to-reach areas, taking biopsies, or measuring the level of certain chemicals in otherwise inaccessible areas of the body. So we are much, much closer than you might have thought in the field of medical nanorobotics.
It holds considerable promise for advancing medical progress, but the phrase "so close yet so far" comes to mind. Because there are many challenges and roadblocks to face before surgical nanobots will reach clinical trials. A few months ago, I made a video on Neurolink, and they're facing the same exact issues I mentioned here.
Scientists have numerous challenges to overcome before the potential of nanobots in medicine can truly be realized—getting the nanobots precisely where we want them to in the body, and actually having them stay there long enough to carry out a procedure is incredibly difficult. Scientists also have yet to work out how to keep the nanobots from being destroyed and expelled from the body like any other toxic or foreign bodies. So while nanobots hold the key to an infinitely less toxic solution to treating cancer, the challenges in getting the solutions to the stage of becoming a viable treatment are still a bit in the future. We’re not quite there yet.
However, if past progress has anything to go by, I don’t think we’re so far off.
If you could spend one day in the year 2100 to see what life would be like in that time, what do you think you would find? The idea of seeing the future, seeing life as we know it in a far distant time scale, has been in the minds of people for thousands of years. What if you could see even further into the future—one thousand, ten thousand, a million, even a billion years into the future? What do you think the universe would look like? What events would occur in these vast time scales? What will we miss?
And it might be a good idea to get to Mars as soon as possible for many reasons. In 500,000 years, it is extremely likely that Earth will have been hit by an asteroid greater than one kilometer in diameter. This asteroid would most likely leave a crater over 400 kilometers wide and would cause massive fires across the globe, rendering the air practically unbreathable. If that isn't enough for you to want to leave Earth, then perhaps this will change your mind.
In one million years, it is likely that Earth will have undergone a supervolcanic eruption large enough to cover over 3,000 cubic kilometers with hot magma. This much magma could fill up about 75% of today’s Grand Canyon. The last supervolcanic eruption comparable to this event would most likely be the Toba supereruption. This was so powerful that it single-handedly sent the world into a global volcanic winter for over ten years. Nearly all vegetation on Earth was destroyed, and scientists estimate that this single event almost completely wiped out human life. Numbers estimate that only three to ten thousand human individuals survived this eruption.
If you have been around on this channel long enough, you’ll know that I made a video discussing the Kardashev scale—a theoretical scale that ranks civilizations based on the amount of power they possess. It’s estimated that in one million years, it’s possible that if humanity has survived and advanced enough, we could become a Type 3 Civilization. By the year one million, a Type 3 civilization harbors all of the power in the entire galaxy that it resides in, meaning that we could harness all of the energy of all the stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
If humanity has thrived and successfully terraformed Mars, then this next milestone may be a problem. In 50 million years, it is believed that the orbit of Mars’ moon Phobos will destabilize and come hurtling into the Martian atmosphere, inevitably being ripped apart by tidal forces. This destruction may result in Mars having a ring system much like Saturn does today.
But those rings may not last forever. Saturn and its moons have quite the strong gravitational pull. So in about 100 million years, it’s quite possible that all the rock and debris that form Saturn’s rings may be pulled in or ejected from the system, leaving Saturn without its iconic rings.
In 240 million years from our current position, our solar system will have completed about one entire orbit around the Milky Way’s galactic center, which is quite crazy to think about. For perspective, dinosaurs first set foot on the planet, which was at the time of supercontinent Pangea, about 240 million years ago—or coincidentally, one galactic orbit ago.
Speaking of supercontinents, in 250 million years, all of Earth’s land will most likely join together to become a brand new supercontinent: Pangea Ultima. This is what scientists estimate the planet’s continent will look like. Pangea Ultima is estimated to remain whole until the year 500 million, during which life on Earth may face another extinction event.
When stars die, they explode their stellar guts across the universe in what is known as a supernova. Supernovas tend to eject insanely large beams of radiation known as gamma ray bursts, or GRBs. Gamma-ray bursts are known to be some of the brightest and hottest events to occur in the entire universe.
Our sun emits 3.86 times 10 to the 26 watts of energy every second and has been doing so for the past 4.75 billion years. The gamma-ray burst emits more energy in 30 seconds than our sun will emit in its entire 10 billion year lifetime. By the year 500 million, it is extremely likely that a GRB will occur within 6,500 light years of Earth.
A gamma-ray burst from 6,500 light years away could destroy up to half of the Earth’s ozone layer and one simple 30-second-long beam. On top of that, mass extinction among sea and land animals would ensue, along with mass starvation, and this is the start of the end for our daily lovely blue marble.
If there is still life on Earth in 800 million years, it ends now. At this point, CO2 levels on Earth will fall to a point where photosynthesis is no longer possible. Without photosynthesis, there is no more oxygen being made, no more oxygen, no more multicellular life, and thus Earth is left as it was 4 billion years ago: a barren wasteland with no life whatsoever.
But there may be life on other planets by this time. In 1977, NASA launched two satellites, Voyager 1 and 2, on trajectories that will take them outside of our solar system into interstellar space. Both satellites carried identical golden records. Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and needle for playing it. Instructions in symbolic fashion explain where the spacecraft came from in the solar system as well as instructions on how to play the record. The record contains 115 images from Earth, along with greetings in 55 languages, sounds from Earth, and even music from the era when Voyager was launched.
Now, of the 27 songs on the golden record, one of the most iconic and inspiring songs is track 26, Dark Was the Night by Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson was diagnosed with a disability and blinded at a young age. His music sold very well and he was fairly popular in his time, but despite this he had very little wealth. His life was poorly documented, and this is in fact the only known image of Blind Willie himself.
But track 26, Dark Was the Night, carries the weight of the entire human species on a long dark journey into the abyss of space; a man with very little to his name and not much knowledge of the world around him, as his art traveling through the cosmos at a speed of over 17 kilometers per second.
And I believe this elegantly depicts us humans. We are very curious creatures who yearn to explore the universe around us. We have very little knowledge of what is truly out there to be discovered, much like Johnson, we are blind to what is outside our immediate vicinity. The golden records on the Voyager craft are us humans to any alien civilizations that may find the golden records.
That is exactly what this image of Blind Willie Johnson is to us: a snapshot of who and what we are. Farmer Carl Sagan was on the research team tasked with collecting a representation of Earth to put on the records and included Johnson’s song because Johnson’s song concerns the situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep, says humans appeared on Earth.
The shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman. In the same play, the struggles of humanity in the form of music will be one of the first and lastings alien civilizations may hear from us.
Once, there was a Chinese farmer who had a horse that he would tend his crops with every morning. One day, out of the blue, the horse ran off. All the villagers approached the farmer and offered their sympathies. "My, what bad luck you’ve had," they echoed.
"Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see tomorrow," replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned, and it brought with it seven wild horses. "You’re so fortunate," the villagers exclaimed. "Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see you tomorrow," replied the farmer. The next day, the farmer’s son tried to ride one of these wild horses. He was bucked off and broke his leg. "Oh, that’s too bad," the villagers cried. "Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see you tomorrow," replied the farmer. The next day, government officials traveled to the village and drafted young men for a gruesome war that was going on. The farmer’s son, with his broken leg, was rejected from the draft.
"Oh wow, isn’t that great?" the villagers asked the farmer yet again. "Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see you tomorrow," replied the farmer. The message of this parable is simple: nothing is permanent, and tomorrow always brings with it new possibilities, whether good or bad.
But first, what exactly is tomorrow? For some, it is quite literally the day after today. For others, it invokes the idea of a near-distant future where everything is possible. We hear this in many forms: The sun will come out tomorrow; it’ll get better tomorrow; tomorrow is a new day. For many, tomorrow is a symbol of hope; the hope that we’ll have the opportunity to do it all again, that our circumstances can improve, that we can be better.
In the 1990s, American psychologist Charles Snyder developed the Hope Theory. In this he defined hope as the capability to derive pathways to desired goals and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways. But he also defined hope as rainbows in the mind because hope is just that—it’s our ability to long for a rainbow in the midst of a rainstorm; the light show in the sky that requires the perfect combination of atmospheric conditions to shine.
Logically, they seem impossible, yet during every storm we still look out our windows with the hope that we’ll catch a glimpse of one. But how do we form rainbows in the mind? Do they also require such perfect and fleeting conditions, and must they be preceded by violent storms? According to Snyder’s Theory, there are four main ingredients for hope.
The first is the creation of goals. Our mind must have a goal so that it knows what to strive for. Second, our subconscious needs to form pathways to reach those goals. It’s one thing to want to go to the bottom of the ocean, and another to think, "I’m going to get a job in a submarine so I can get there." This kind of mind mapping is referred to as pathway thought. The third is agency thoughts; these mark our ability to take agency and self-motivate towards our goals. This is the most critical aspect of the Hope Theory.
It represents our inspiration to ignore our present desires and needs for the future and what we hope it will or will not be. Fundamentally, it is hope in action. Some modern philosophers feel that hope theory ends here, but if you’ve ever pursued anything that you’ve been hopeful for, you know that things hardly ever go as planned.
That’s where Snyder’s fourth pillar, barriers, comes into play. These are the external forces that cause adversity. These are the rainstorms in which we hope for the rainbows—the times when we lose our horse and hope it comes back with seven more the next day. The promise of tomorrow is a powerful tool. It inspires optimism and self-esteem. It allows us to believe in the best and settle for nothing less than we think we deserve.
These are both critical components of living a fulfilled life, and yet we wonder: does the promise of the future stop us from living in the present? We’ve all heard the new age philosophies that echo ideologies like "stay present," or like Drake said, "YOLO—you only live once." But the idea is nothing new.
In 4th century BCE, Aristipus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, created a school of thought that philosophers call hedonism. At its core, hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Aristipus believed that the only course worth pursuing is the one that brings you pleasure. It’s living for today without worrying about what tomorrow might have waiting for you.
It's rejoicing in the seven wild horses you see today without worrying that your son might fall off of them tomorrow. In a modern society that’s so focused on living for the future, saving for retirement, climbing corporate ladders, and paying it forward, it’s no surprise that this way of thinking has developed some negative connotations: lush, glutton, self-indulgent, excessive.
These are all modern synonyms to a school of thought that is simply focused on living happily. And isn’t that all we want? To live happily ever after. Yet, hedonism is feared because with so much pleasure and indulgence today, what can be left for tomorrow? What can be saved for a rainy day?
But the sad reality is: what if you never make it to tomorrow? In the words of Buddha, "the trouble is you think you have time." The promise of the future is great sometimes, but other times, it’s a haunting sentiment that prevents us from doing everything we want or should be doing in the hope that there’s still some time for us to do it in the future.
And this is perfectly captured in the phrase, "someday I will." Someday I'll sail around the world; someday I'll write a book; someday I'll learn to speak another language. But what if today is all we have? The Latin expression "Carpe Diem" inspires people to seize the day and give little thought to tomorrow; to make the most of it, to take advantage of it.
Because the reality is, as much as we can hope for the rainbows, all we have now are rainstorms. So why don’t we make the most of that while it’s here? Today really is the only day we’ll ever have. Tomorrow might never come, and if it does, by the time it gets to us, it’ll just be another today.
It’s an interesting premise to wrap your mind around, and it reiterates the idea that really all we have is this present moment. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards, which is to say that we don’t know what lies in the promise of tomorrow, and we can’t quite make sense of today’s events until we’ve lived through them.
Our life is fortunately made richer by things we experience, both the good and the bad. And, as we know, our Christmas today could be our blessings tomorrow. Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see you tomorrow.
However, as much as today is all we have, the promise of the future is still important, especially for human life. Because in the end, tomorrow might come, and we would be thankful we prepared for it. This is why we apply for our dream jobs and open savings accounts. We wash the dishes and do our laundry. We plant seeds and water the garden. Because as much as the future isn’t promised, believing that it is is essential for a healthy life.
There’s an Ebo adage that translates to "tomorrow is pregnant," which is to say we don’t know what it’ll give birth to. And that’s just it; tomorrow can promise great opportunities, but we don’t know if it lied. And even if it didn’t, we don’t know if it’ll deliver on these promises.
In stoicism, it’s preached that people should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Oftentimes, this is exactly what we find ourselves doing. We hope that no one will attempt to open our door in the middle of the night, but we lock it anyway, as we should. We have smoke detectors and emergency evacuation routes because while we don’t ever want to be in those situations, we can’t count on it—disasters happen, so we prepare because we have to.
And other animals do too. Originally, it was believed that mental time travel was absent from the animal kingdom, that humans were the only ones who could recall the past or plan for the future—migratory animals had south for the winter out of innate instincts, not preparation. And the same is true for hibernating animals that burrow as an evolutionary response. These findings made us believe that animals were incapable of preparing for the future and that they didn’t learn from the past, either—that they simply react to present circumstances via sheer instincts.
However, recent studies have revealed something different. The scrub jay, a bird native to the Northwest United States, has been proven to plan for the future. A 2007 study focusing on this bird debunked the idea that humans were the only animals to prepare for the future. Researchers observed that these birds reserve portions of their preferred food sources when it was unlikely that it would be available tomorrow. They were basically meal-prepping; they were acting independently of their current emotional state and immediate needs and thought of their future selves instead.
In a 2019 study, this was further explored by a group of scientists who observed orangutans in captivity. The primates were given a choice between an easily accessible food source and a tool that they could use to retrieve another food source. They found that the orangutans made profitable decisions relative to reward quality, which is to say they chose the preferred food; they picked the option that would give them more of what they wanted. Sometimes that meant opting for less work, but other times it meant taking the tool and the promise that it would provide them with the food that they really wanted.
They ignored their present needs for something better, which makes us wonder: do our primate cousins also bind to the hope of tomorrow, or is that trait uniquely human? But more importantly, can we continue to believe in the future promise to us by tomorrow? Or do we need to start living for today?
We might never know for sure, because in the end, we’ll see tomorrow.
What if the term we typically use to define the confines of our very existence is just wrong? What is the true nature of the universe? Wait, am I even asking the right question? We’re taught that the universe is all there ever was, all there is, and all there ever will be. I mean, that’s the very definition of it, isn’t it?
But maybe we’re not as confined as we think, and this idea isn’t really a new one. The earliest recorded examples of the idea of infinite worlds can be found in the philosophy of ancient Greek animism, which proposed that infinite parallel worlds were created from the collision of atoms. In the third century, philosophers also proposed that the world eternally expired and regenerated, suggesting the existence of multiple universes across time.
There’s this prevailing idea throughout history of a group of multiple parallel universes that comprise everything that exists—the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them—and we’re living in. This is the multiverse.
In 1954, this idea grew a bit more when Hugh Everett gave the many-worlds interpretation of the multiverse—the idea that quantum effects caused the universe to constantly split. He wrote it for his PhD thesis, but ended up having to publish a watered-down version when physicists at the time proposed the idea that every decision we make creates new universes to account for every single possible outcome. Presumably, each of those new universes also has the potential to do the same.
It’s enough to break my brain, or at the very least give me a pretty bad headache. But seriously, it’s a cool thought. But is it just that? Does Everett’s interpretation go beyond mere speculative reasoning? Is there any proof separating science from fiction?
When it comes to the existence of the multiverse, it can be really hard, especially when it’s essentially all theoretical. It’s important to remember here that the multiverse is not a theorem in physics per se; rather, it’s an inevitable result of a series of existing theories in physics. Recent progress in cosmology, string theory, and quantum mechanics has brought about a revolution in thinking of sorts, with some even considering the multiverse as non-optional. You can’t just opt out of the idea because you don’t like it; it’s there either way.
You can apply this to a lot of things nowadays, actually. The existence of a multiverse is one thing that continues to divide physicists, because let’s face it, we’re looking for evidence of something that exists outside our visible universe and leaves no trace within it. But wait, there are all sorts of things that we can observe that we know must be true. Decades before gravitational waves, disturbances and the curvature of spacetime were directly detected, it was largely accepted that they must exist because we had already observed their effects.
The Revolutionary periods of binary pulsars—spinning neutron stars orbiting one another—shortened something was carrying the energy away, and that thing was consistent with the predictions of gravitational waves. So that means there could also be indirect evidence for the existence of the multiverse too, right?
Well, that really depends on which multiverse you think you’re in. Yeah, there’s a few options, so I’ll circle back to the question of evidence. Let’s take a look at some different types. One way of distinguishing between multiverse models is by looking at how connected the universes proposed by each model are—that is, the extent to which they are part of a single system that is governed by the same physical and mathematical principles and how much they potentially interact with each other.
It sounds confusing, but just let me explain. Level 1 parallel universes are maybe the simplest and the most connected. It’s suggested that space is so big, possibly infinite, that the rules of probability surely must allow for the fact that somewhere else out there, there are other planets exactly like ours. In fact, if our universe is infinite—as some suggest—then it would have infinitely many planets, and on some of them events that play out would be pretty much identical to those on our own Earth, with physical laws exactly the same as ours.
It’s like taking a deck of cards and shuffling them. There’s a finite number of orderings that can occur, so if you shuffle the cards enough times the orders will eventually repeat. In the same way, with an infinite universe and only a finite number of combinations of matter due to the laws of physics, the way that matter arranges itself surely has to repeat eventually.
If only they weren’t so far away from us. More causally disconnected, this is why it's a parallel universe and not part of our own. We don’t see these other universes, and you can blame the speed of light for that. Let me explain a bit more. Light started traveling at the moment of the Big Bang, around 14 billion years ago, and so it’s impossible to see any further than about 14 billion light years.
It’s probably a bit further since space is always expanding, but let's just try and forget that for now. This volume of space we’re in is called the Hubble volume and represents our observable and contactable universe. So we pretty much definitely can’t travel or contact other universes in this scenario.
This is true, but it’s not entirely impossible. If you think level 1 parallel universes can happen, you’re making two important assumptions: one, the universe is infinite. And two, with an infinite universe, every single possible configuration of particles in a Hubble volume would take place multiple times. Perhaps the most supported by sound theoretical physics are actually level 2 parallel universes.
In these, it’s assumed that regions of space are going through an inflation phase. Inflation is a hypothetical process of the early universe, and I know, more hypotheses, I’m sorry! It suggests that space-time would have expanded exponentially at a much faster rate than it is doing right now—faster than the speed of light.
This would probably have been driven by an energy in the vacuum that would generate a repulsive force. This kind of exponential expansion would necessarily create a region of space-time unimaginably larger than our own universe. The result? A highly connected multiverse.
It would probably be a relatively boring multiverse thus compared to what I’m about to move on to. Because similar to level 1 parallel universes, all of them would inhabit the same space-time, be subject to the same principles and physical laws, and would be composed of regions very similar to our own observable universe. Remember that deck of cards?
Well, a level 2 multiverse would be like having multiple decks of cards that control different kinds of physical properties. What this does mean, though, is that interactions between neighboring universes might in principle produce observable effects. A good way to try and imagine a level 2 parallel universe is to picture expanding bubbles in a shared background. If and when the bubbles collide, the result could be a bruise appearing as a circular disturbance on the cosmic microwave background radiation.
And here it is—finally a hint of evidence. Well, maybe the original super void, a cold spot in our universe, could hold some answers. Long story short, our knowledge of how the universe works would simply not allow for such a massive void. We know that as the universe expands, voids are created, but not enough time has passed since the Big Bang for such a large void to grow.
But simply the odds of a redness existing are extremely unlikely and it shouldn’t be as cold as it is. Scientists have also noticed that the distribution of heat in our observable universe is, in fact, asymmetrical with higher than average temperatures recorded in the southern hemisphere near the supposed void.
In 2010, scientists analyzed some data; they thought that they found evidence to support the idea that the cold spot was in fact a bruise where our universe collided with another. Disappointingly, there is not that much evidence, but that doesn’t mean that the hypothesis should be discounted, especially since all other explanations for the existence of the cold spot are also equally unlikely.
In terms of indirect evidence, there’s actually plenty for level 2 parallel universes. First, cosmic inflation gave rise to the Big Bang and gave us predictions for our universe that match what we observe. Second, we have quantum uncertainty, a rule governed by quantum mechanics. The values of certain pairs of properties in the quantum world can’t ever be known at the same time with perfect accuracy—for example, both the speed of something and its position.
You can measure one precisely, but you won’t really know anything for sure about the other. Quantum uncertainty allows for a range in particle states and positions. This explains the fluctuations which gave rise to all matter in the early universe.
But according to this rule, it’s not just the values of pairs of properties that can’t be known accurately; there is also an inherent uncertainty in the value of a quantum field. A quantum measurement assigned to every single point in space, as time inevitably goes on, a field value that was certain in an earlier time now has a less certain value.
So now you can only talk about it in terms of probabilities, not certainties. The value of any quantum field spreads out over time, along with three parallel universes as a consequence of the many-worlds interpretation given to us by Everett. In these, every single quantum possibility inherent in the quantum wave function becomes a real possibility in some reality.
It’s based on an idea called superposition from quantum mechanics, which is to say that if an electron can exist in multiple places and multiple states at any one time, then why wouldn’t we also exist in the same way given that we’re made up of subatomic particles? When most science fiction fans think about the multiverse, they’re most likely thinking about this model. The possibilities are quite literally endless.
Level 3 parallel universes are different from level 1 and level 2 parallel universes in that they take place in the same space and time as our own universe, and you still have no way to access them. Even though you’re continually in contact with them, in fact, every moment you live and every decision you make is causing a split of your current self into an infinite number of future selves, all of which are totally unaware of each other.
Although I guess now you are. And this gives rise to an important ethical and moral questions, which I’ll come back to a little later. The evidence for this type of multiverse is pretty indirect. The empirical evidence for quantum mechanics is simply overwhelming. Quantum mechanics simply demands the existence of the multiverse.
It seems as if there’s a pattern emerging. Level 3 parallel universes raise an interesting extra question that other models don’t. Every decision you make may create any number of parallel universes where other yous and other people could either be negatively or positively affected by your choice. Your actions are not only shaping the course of just your life but of countless lives of duplicates in other worlds.
So should we be considering our decisions even more carefully? If you’re aiming to reduce potential harm or suffering by doing this, of course, you’d be more careful. Whether we live in many worlds or just one, shouldn’t we aim to minimize suffering regardless if there’s even a small probability of a very bad outcome? Right now, in this universe, wouldn’t it be equally worth avoiding a level 4 parallel universe?
Perhaps it has the potential to be the strangest place of all, and for this reason, it’s also the most controversial prediction. We’re talking about other universes here, obviously. It won’t make sense. Basically, any universe that you can get to work on paper would exist based on the mathematical democracy principle, which simply means any universe that is mathematically possible has an equal possibility of actually existing.
If the math works, chances are it could exist. That just covers the very tip of the iceberg of the different multiverse models and the science behind them. You can’t really argue with all of that, right? Well, of course, you can—and quite strongly.
It’s no secret that there’s a strong opposition towards the idea of the multiverse itself, and its general arguments are valid. There’s a quote, and it goes, "there’s no reality without observation," which shuts down level 4 parallel universes right away. To be honest, these arguments are all valid. There’s a ton of these potential weaknesses in the arguments for parallel universes, way more than I could ever cover here.
Checking it all out in detail involves a lot of physics research and time that I really don’t have or know how to do. I don’t know whether the multiverse exists; I bet you’re not really surprised by that answer, though. But if modern physics is to be believed, our own universe shouldn’t even be here at all. And if that’s the case, then the same could be said for the multiverse—it really shouldn’t be here either.
But against all laws, just like ours, it just might be. Up until I was like 15, the way I found new music was through friends or songs I’d hear in the background of my favorite TV shows or movies. This can be a really slow process if, like me, you have a somewhat unconventional taste in music, and so it was no surprise that I would only add a few new songs to my playlist every few months.
Because in recent years, that’s definitely changed. You see, Spotify has been able to identify my tastes remarkably well with this Discover Weekly and year-end playlist. Spotify seems to know what I like better than some of my closest friends. It follows a similar trend of surprising improvements in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning.
So when did Spotify and other apps get this good? And what does it mean for the future of technology? These and other recent advances are occurring at a surprising rate, or at least that's what it seems like. After all, they are progressing exponentially, and we humans are very ill-equipped when it comes to visualizing or imagining such growth. We simply never evolved to do so.
Animals—predators and prey—all move at a relatively constant rate. They don’t keep accelerating. Technological progress, however, does. As it turns out, this exponential growth means we might be stepping into some very uncharted territory in the near future. If technology continues to get better and better at its current pace, we will soon reach a stage where not only matches but surpasses the intelligence of a human.
Couple that with an ability to learn and an incentive to survive, and well, we don’t know what will happen next. This is the technological singularity. Borrowed from astrophysics, the term "singularity" refers to a tipping point beyond which all laws that are currently known simply fall apart—like how the laws of physics fall apart beyond the singularity of a black hole. A technological singularity is a similar tipping point.
When technological progress is so overwhelming that we will no longer be in control of it or the things that it will lead to. In 1875, Carl Landsteiner, an Austrian biologist, noted that when a man was given a blood transfusion from another animal, the foreign blood tended to clump up in the blood vessels of a man, which can cause shock, which then ultimately leads to death.
This and years of research that followed led him to discover blood groups, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930. Today, he is remembered as the father of blood transfusion medicine, and we have him to thank for being able to donate and receive blood safely. When there is a technological singularity, scientists predict computers will be able to make life-changing, Nobel Prize-winning discoveries just like this every five seconds.
That may seem like an incredible future or potentially life-threatening one, and that’s exactly why the prospect of a technological singularity is so complicated. On one hand, it may seem like rapidly progressing technology can eventually enslave humanity, but it also has immense potential to improve human life, and this potential is the reason why it is being developed so rapidly.
There are enormous incentives to devote even more resources to the development of artificial intelligence—economic and otherwise. For example, it can help companies curate products each customer is more likely to buy, as something practically impossible to do for men. It can predict when demand is going to be low to prevent wastage.
It can also conduct research faster than any human ever has. These innovations can lead to other less inspiring changes in human society too. After all, if scientific research can be done with a computer, what use is there for researchers anymore? If cars can drive themselves, and nanobots can repair organs and 3D printers can literally print bridges, are all jobs simply going to be replaced?
Well, at its current state, the technology we have is only good enough to replace repetitive labor, such as connecting a car door to its chassis. For most things that are more complicated, we still need human intervention. But it’s not about now anyways; it’s about the future.
And without thorough consideration, we may be headed for unemployment the likes of which humanity has never seen. And if recent events haven’t made it clear, it’s not just about the economy or salaries but also about the meaning that most of us tend to derive from our work. You know, not doing anything as it turns out is really, really boring.
Okay, sometimes it’s nice. We’ve established that technological progress is not slowing down anytime soon. What happens when computers replace not only our labor but also our intellect? What happens when they can mimic intelligence and learn on their own?
All this could lead to a scenario where technology is not so friendly to us. Or instead of just replacing us, it decides to do away with us completely. And in such a situation, without much preparation, we would be completely powerless to hypothesize what would happen to our species during such an event.
Scientists decided to look at what history tells us about how a more intelligent species, us humans, treats its less intelligent counterparts—monkeys. You know, the same monkeys that we caged up, killed, ran any and all tests on, and had no ethical qualms about it till very recently. Yes, those monkeys.
Sam Harris provides an analogy in his regard to help us visualize how we might be treated based on our own past behavior. He dwells on the relationship we humans have with ants by saying we don’t hate them. We don’t go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them; we step over them on the sidewalk.
But whenever they’re present, seriously conflicts with one of our goals, we annihilate them without a thought. This rather troubling thought has a lot of people concerned about the way in which we should be progressing towards the singularity. The best thing we could do as we head into the singularity is to ensure that AI develops into an ethically sound ecosystem, instead of using it to spy, scam, and steal from people—which in reality is what it is currently being used to do.
Then there are also concerns about defining when the singularity has been reached. What is consciousness? How do we know when machines have it? What is intelligence? What is of value to us? What is art and what is not? All these questions need to be answered for us to know when machines are indeed more intelligent.
This has the potential of triggering a modern renaissance that is not simply technological, but also philosophical, in that it causes us to try and define the human experience like never before. It can also help us reflect on what we, as the most intelligent species, have done to our planet and its other inhabitants.
But how near is all of this? Ray Kurzweil, renowned inventor and futurist, has said we may reach the singularity by 2049. He attributes this oddly specific date to what he calls price-performance calculations per consistent dollar. Look, I’ll explain.
He plotted these said numbers from 1980 through 2050. In 1981, in 2015, those numbers were roughly where he predicted them to be. Others are skeptical of such claims. Most notable amongst them are Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics and one of the most cited scholars alive. What makes this perspective interesting is that he perhaps possesses a deeper understanding of language than most of us.
This is a very important part of creating a generally intelligent machine, since understanding how we communicate with other humans will help us communicate with other potentially conscious machines. His perspective is that we are nowhere near where we need to be in terms of our understanding of the cognitive processes that go unconsciously and subconsciously to be able to mimic them.
Can we define a theory of being smart, he asks. He’s certainly right about the complexity of human language and the nuances of what we say versus what we mean. It’s why emotions like irony, sarcasm, and rhetorical questions are still unsolved puzzles in the world of AI research.
But do we really need to be able to mimic the entire process if we can simply reproduce the effect? What if we’re simply able to reprogram some aspects of learning and let computational ability take care of the rest? Max Tegmark, American-Swedish physicist from MIT, is interested in investigating the risk of extinction from artificial general intelligence. He likes to use the analogy of when man first discovered fire.
It was a wonderful discovery that has paved the way for modern life, but it hasn’t always been safe; it’s caused a lot of death, pain, and suffering in the process. But we are where we are because we were able to learn from our mistakes and devise things like fire escapes and fire extinguishers. AI might be the same at the start, but the only difference here is that we only have one shot. It’s all or nothing.
If AI lights a fire, we may never be able to extinguish it in hopes of next time. But there are critics who doubt that this is how the future will actually play out. Unlike Chomsky, they don’t doubt the exponential progress or its ability to mimic human-like computation in the future. Instead, they doubt whether the future will be so aggressively against their survival.
While a technological singularity is coming, we shouldn’t fear it; instead, we should embrace the progress it can bring. Such is also the perspective of Garry Kasparov, widely considered as