Neil deGrasse Tyson & Charles Liu Make Predictions About the Future

We're going to do predictions about the future. As Yogi Berra said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." But if you make a thousand predictions, one of them will come true. Are the Jetsons the most accurate prediction of the near future we have?

If you go to The Twilight Zone in its day and you look at sort of the disturbing stories that it told, and it didn't always have a happy ending, and you fast forward to Black Mirror, which has an authentic science fiction future found to it. All right, what's your best prediction? That within 25 years, there will be a professional sport played in orbit. Spaceball!

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This is Star Talk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a full house today. First, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how you doing, man?

I'm good.

Oh, good. Chuck Nice, how you doing, man?

I'm doing well, man. Your hair is looking especially…

Quaffed. It's very crisp today.

Is today? Yes. I, uh, I actually microwaved it and then I put it on.

People don't realize this is this is a Steve Harvey wig.

No, no, they don't even real… Come on, player. Anyway, it's, it's rocking like a mini version of a 1978.

That's exactly what I was going for. I was going for straight up Jim Brown, step right off the screen.

Yep. Success. There you go. Work on some comeback and you can say you're Jim Brown.

Sorry, um, I'm Jim Tan. So we're going to do predictions, yeah? About the future. Which I think is the only way you can make a prediction, right? And there's some stuff I don't tackle alone. I got to go to Geek and Chief.

Oh, Geek and Chief. There's only one Geek and Chief we know who that is. That is Charles Lou. Friend and colleague. Charles.

Neil, dude, great to see you.

Okay. I also microwaved my hair today.

Just leave your brain out. Thing is fine. So you're a professor at CUNY Staten Island, City University of New York, which has satellite campuses across the city? Yes. And you're in Staten Island, and you, you finally no longer have administrative duties there. Is that correct?

Were that the case forever? Is that the same as… Is that the same as quiet quitting?

Not the same. No. Professors, we're very lucky. As we're very lucky as professors because we can continually take on positions and leave them and not leave our jobs. So I could be a department chair for a period of time and leave. I could run an honors program and then leave. I could even serve as an acting dean or other administrator and then leave. And still, I'd retain my ability to come back and do the research and the coursework and the teaching that I love.

Each of those, they give you a little bump up in the in the…

Mul-ti-ple.

One H, one H. Every place is a little bit different. So we've got you here because you think long and hard and deep about predictions made in sci-fi. You probably have some predictions of your own. The accuracy of these predictions, and what they might have looked like at the time, and what they look like to us with the benefit of hindsight.

Well, so, so we're going to, we're going to get all in this. Yeah. I think it's good, but I think we should first say right away for everybody that, first say right away that you host a podcast called The Lunaverse. That's what we should say right away.

Oh, it's very sweet. Thank you. The Lou Universe. Charles Lou. You see what he did there?

I didn't do it. It was my family members. Not the Lou. The bathroom. Charles Lou. But he's Charles Lou. So it's the Lou-nerse.

No, no, no. I can't take any credit. The name… We talk to scientists who are earlier in their careers. We talk about people who are doing all the hard work and trying different things. Not just necessarily what we think of as straight-up science stuff, but also thinking about the future, thinking about pop science culture, things that we like to talk about here on Star Talk, but on a level for…

I got you. And a lot of fresh, unvarnished ideas come out of that first generation. Some of them can change the world, right? As you know, Neil, the really tough, new pioneer techniques are always done by our younger colleagues. We can have great ideas and we're like, "Oh darn it, if only someone had a way, a technology, a tool that could solve these problems." And then some guy comes along, some lady comes along, and says, "Yeah, I know how to do that." And they just bring something new. And that's how changes happen. It's no accident that some of the best discoveries, the Nobel Awards, come from people in their 20s and their 30s.

Awarded much later. Yeah. Well, they made their discoveries in their 20s. Right. Exactly. You know, they did a study on that, that you're more likely to think in a way that will lead to innovation in your late teens and 20s than at any other point in your life. That's right. Which is why when we here are talking about predictions, it's not so much our predictions, but what we're predicting other people will do in the future. That's an important distinction. Interesting. When we think about it from a scientific perspective, we don't want to say so much predictions as models. Right. We are taking what knowledge we have now and modeling it for the future. And models are always wrong, but sometimes they're useful. And therefore, we have the opportunity to think about the future and inform and educate. Right. Gary, set the stage here. Okay. So in your book, Star Messenger, in the chapter at the end of exploration, discovery, you kind of go on a fool's errand and make a raft of predictions for the year 2050.

Did he just call me a fool?

No.

Would you kick his ass over?

Can it wait? Okay. A fool's errand, yes. We, so we're not going to wait 25 years to find out if they're true. Let me set that up. So the whole, a big part of that chapter, titled "Exploration and Discovery," is an exercise in what do people think would be discovered or how differently did they think they'd be living in one era versus one generation later. And I just, I tightened it to 30 years. So I go 30-year increments from 1870 up to 2020. And everybody's getting everything wrong all the time, of course. Okay. And so I said, "Time for me to join the list." And I'm going to make predictions for 2050, so that in 2050, people can look back and see everything I got wrong. So that I'm not…

But I, I don't, I disagree. I don't think that these, um, predictions are wrong. I think they're inaccurate. And there's a big difference.

Don't get all, all semantic.

Actually, no. Get semantic. Get semantic. Teacher on this exam, I didn't get anything wrong. It was just…

Inaccurate. Oh my God. Now you know how all my teachers hated me. We can, we can explore that. Finish setting this up. Where do we go for our predictions? The tried and trusted sources. We'll have a look at that. Um, are the people that are making these predictions or writing examples? Are they, in fact, the influencers of the future that are being… in the past? Or if we leave it alone, does the future take care of itself? We'll get into all the sort of philosophical thoughts about that. But first and foremost, do you mean if we didn't predict the future, so that there was no groundwork for new ideas, would that, would the future still have a place to land where it's still unfold? Still unfold. So let's look to science. Let's look to science fiction as our go-to for what our lives might well be. Back. I mean, I'll kick it off. The Jetsons. Judy, who can make the sound? Who can make the sound of the…

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That's there you go. There you go. That's every flying car in the Jetsons. So this, this was made in the early '60s, 1960s, but it's set in 2062. So it's not that far away from where the future, but where we sit today, it's not that far. So you've got flying cars. There's a robot in every house.

Mmm-hmm. Yes. In some, in some places, that's the, that's the case. First of all, we do have flying cars. We have them now. They're just quadcopters, but they're flying cars. And if you go to Japan, you're going to find pretty much some kind of robot in every… Robots everywhere. So, in fact, are the Jetsons the most accurate prediction of the near future we have? Or do we have to look in other places for accuracy?

So I found this recently. Was it the year 2020? I was looking for years predicted for the future that are already in our past. And in the Jetsons, I think George Jetson, you can triangulate based on certain script lines, that he was born in the year 2020.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Kind of the Jetson's the other extreme of baby boomer.

Pandemic baby. Did he know? He did he know? I think it was 20, it might have been 2021, but it was somewhere in that window. Somewhere in there. That's the first point. So here's what I think they got wrong. They didn't understand that a robot can be anything that does something that you wouldn't otherwise do, right? Any task. Any task. Any task. So he's still flying his flying car. He doesn't push a button and say, "Take me to work," and have the car do the work as we have today. And by the way, if you have a robot who can run your home, you don't go. You have a car that will just take you to work, right? So they missed the fact that a robot did not have to have any humanoid features. This is the same with Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, which predates the Jetsons. Yeah. Okay. And I, Robot, the robots are humanoid. Yeah. And that's not necessary because it assumes the human form is something you want to emulate. And there's a lot, a lot of stuff we don't do well. Make a machine do it better. So all I'm saying is, I don't think they thought about a self-driving car, which is itself a form of robot. Yeah. If you ever seen an Amazon warehouse? Yeah. It's full of robots, autonomous. And they're just all boxes. Yeah. They're all boxes just moving around, moving stuff, moving boxes. But they're all robots, right? Everyone. And you know where they're going. We're going to put it. And they have their ID. And the thing. Now, what you don't know is what those robots do when you leave. Could be a quantum thing, right? The secret life of robots.

The secret life of robots. Like while you're looking at them, they're looking like they're busy. You look away, then they're partying. They're out the back with a cigarette.

Just like… I love that you have a book on quantum.

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

Yes. In a series. That's not your first rodeo.

I've done Handy Astronomy, Handy Physics, and right now, Handy Quantum.

Is it like Quantum Physics for Dummies?

Well, I assume that you guys aren't dummies.

See, that's where you make a mistake.

No, no, no. That's the biggest mistake. Quantum physics is not any harder than classical physics. It's different and strange. So all I'm trying to tell people by calling it a handy answer book is that don't think of it as this thing that's really difficult. Think of it as just you can flip to it and like a manual. It's like riding a bicycle or putting together a piece of furniture. Quantum manual. So I want the robots in the Amazon fulfillment centers to two quantum states: one where they're busy, and the other one where they're out back smoking.

Who came up with fulfillment center as a term? I don't know. It feels right.

Rob. From a long time. Robot. The robots. It's a warehouse. It's become a ful… Rob, give me a word here.

Sear's robot catalog from more than a hundred years ago had these warehouses.

Nothing but Amazon. That's right. It, but it's, they had human beings filling things. And at some point in the mid-20th century, the marketing decided to call that, instead of a warehouse, calling it a fulfillment center. And so the idea was that was, uh, we think it was Sears, but, um, certainly all the other big stores…

Time had that information. I mean, and sometimes you say things, but, you know, sometimes I have fact-checked you behind your back.

Please. No, no. I have to. I have to do my. And, and, and you're always, you're always right on point when you say something like, "Yeah, so 100 years ago." Just like, get out of here. Wait, Chuck, I got to do my once-per-show reaction.

Go ahead. Why do you know this?

Okay. But that was early in this show. Oh my gosh. I don't know if I have more than one in me. Well, I think Charles does. Keep going.

Wait. Also, also with the maid, Rosie the maid. Yeah. She's right. First, it's female, right? So there's still the genderized robot. That was sexist. And with the, with the little apron, French, a French… So she was a sexy robot. If we look at the movies, and generally, you're thinking about major budgets for production. Yeah. Things don't always work out. You take the 1982 Blade Runner movie. Harrison Ford, remember that? Based on… I don't know what it… Yes, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Yep. Well, thank you. And when did he write that? Well, early '50s, right? Was it quite early? Yeah. So it was set in 2019. The original. The original movie, right? The movie, yeah. The '82. But so much of it doesn't land true. None of it. I mean, we have hindsight, which obviously is perfect, right? But you're thinking about their humanoid and their off-world replicant. Yeah. Doesn't exist. Didn't happen. Replicants, right? That's… Did not happen. So we're not off-world. No. We don't have perfectly humanoid replicants. Right. And the sun sometimes shines, right? However, we were living in a dystopia. So that is a thing. And the dystopian future is debatable. Yeah. I, I have my issues with dystopian futures because it assumes that whatever the trend line is in a, in a culture, in a civilization, that it continues to descend without anybody doing anything about it at any time, right? Not the public, not the politicians, not the military, nothing. It just continues to descend and hits rock bottom, and then they make a movie out of it.

I have a very, uh, very quick… It can happen locally. I have a very theory on why that happens. Why they do it that way? Because most dystopian futures are a warning against authoritarianism.

Well said. And that's why that's… That's why it's… Authoritarians can take it down the toilet.

That's right. And that's why that's why it's like, that's why they're always written that way. Here's an interesting go-on thing that is going that happened in Blade Runner that we're kind of doing today. All right, all right. Do you remember the scene? Very tense scene where one of the replicants who's trying to pass as human is getting interviewed by someone who's tasked it is to identify the replicants who are no longer presenting themselves as replicants. And the replicants are so good that they have to go through a series of questions where they're testing his, the dilation of his eyes, and his emotional reactions to certain situations.

Oh, yes. Psych profile. Yes, yes, yes. And there's a point where he's, he's like, he can't react in a way a human being would or would be expected to. My point is today, when people show me stuff written by ChatGPT, I'm analyzing that. If they don't tell me that, I'm analyzing it for, is there a human emotion in here that's authentic? Or is this replicated by something that thinks it can be human? I'm doing the same thing.

Yes. Right. Yeah. You are conducting the Turing test in real time. But a better, not… Yeah. A really deep, discerning version. More discerning version. Tell me about the Turing test. Tell everybody. Turing, the famous guy, right? Who helped create computers and so forth. He… Yeah. Yes. It would be important for us to figure out whether or not a machine has become truly intelligent by seeing if you can tell the difference between the responses of a machine and the responses of a human being, without seeing who's behind the curtain, right? And from there, you develop all the details, right? The Turing test, as a general idea, became specific about, like, for example, the things you're talking about, right? Neil, analyzing text or analyzing responses, like in Blade Runner. And so, in a sense, it was a predictive strategy to try to figure out whether something is what you think it is, or whether not a test more for so much intelligence as consciousness.

It depends. Yeah. I was going to say, different versions. Does it make… If machines are intelligent, does it really make a difference? Well, that depends on what you think intelligence. Some dumbass people. And if a computer was dumbass, that would mean they're not…

That's what I'm saying. They're not a computer. Exactly. We don't get rid of dumbass people just because they're stupid. You know? So why can't we have stupid computers? And by the way, we do have smartphones and dumb phones. Like we're moving in that anyway. But this is our own bias against what is intelligent and what is not, right? When we judge a person to be stupid, that person's still very intelligent. There's intelligence. That person can adapt. That person is likely conscious. That person is likely able to figure out puzzles and so forth. But we claim that they're stupid because somehow they didn't get a joke that we told, or that they couldn't solve a math problem. Things like that.

Says the comedian. Hit it on the head, right? That's the measure. Comedic Turing test. Did you laugh at my joke? Did you laugh at my joke? You dumb…

Well, there's an episode of the classic Batman TV show where Robin and Batman try to test whether there's a robot or not. And what happened was that Batman and Robin told a super funny joke, which that robot was supposed to laugh at. And since robot…

That's right. They were trying to test whether this was a robot or not. And when the thing did laugh, they ripped his head off. And he went, "Because Batman just told him a super funny joke, and he didn't laugh." So we knew that it was a robot.

So you are the ultimate test, Chuck. You and your colleagues.

Intelligence. About actual consciousness. Punchline. Batman. We don't recommend pulling the heads off audience members that don't laugh at your…

That was the only part of the story I liked.

Around. I know something that maybe Charles does not know.

Uh oh. You know many things I do not know. Let me enjoy this moment. We got competitive touring. Obviously, did not call it the Turing test. Correct. Do you know what he called it?

I do not remember.

Did you ever know? I might have. He called it…

I'm not intelligent enough.

He called it the imitation game.

Oh, hence the name of the movie. The title of the movie, which profiled his life.

That's awesome. With Keira Knightley, Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, it's a good lineup. Sherlock Holmes. I got to watch this movie.

You never seen… You ever seen this? It's the first I ever heard of it, to be honest. Both the Turing story and the movie. I mean, it's his life story becomes tragic.

Don't give it away. For… I'm not… I've just let him think it has a happy ending. Please. So where else do we go? I mean, there's a series like historically, The Twilight Zone. Absolutely. That picks our interest. The Outer Limits. Limits. And we move through into more recently, Black Mirror. Yeah. What's his name? Charlie. Charlie Brooker, who is brilliant. So just to contrast the two, I think they both, they both leave you emotionally spent and disturbed at the end. Also, if you go to The Twilight Zone in its day, and you look at sort of the disturbing stories that it told, and it didn't always have a happy ending. Yeah. This is not the Ray Bradbury kind of school of thought. I need you to think. Yes. And if you look at Rod Sterling's comment on his show, he said, "Look, well, at the end of the day, we're just selling soap." All right? So how do you sell soap in a way that people don't feel offended or whatever? And he says, "If you said it in a fictionalized world where that's clearly not your world, then you can tell stories of people." Oh, that's just happening in that world. And later on, they pause and say, "Wait a minute, that was me, or that was my friend, or my neighbor, or that's how I behaved." And so he was a storyteller par excellence in that genre. And especially, like I said, the disturbing feature of so many of those. And you fast forward to Black Mirror, which has an authentic science fiction future always foundation to it. Yes. But, but highlight what that future is, because some people might not know. The future is this. Where Black Mirror is a Netflix… Yeah. I believe it's on Netflix. It's third season. The fourth season. The future is highly technologically driven. It's driven. Everything is driven by technology. But the stories are about, about how we respond to the technological advancements. It's really never about the technology itself. Very good. Uh, it's always about our human nature and how it is affected by the technology. And one thing that they do, which is just only a little out of reach in our imaginings, is in that future which prevails in almost all episodes because they share the same universe, right? Like the news that's on the TV is the same news casters that you see in multiple. So they're, they're in the same world, right? What they all have in common is that the human mind is accessible, right? In the way hard drives are accessible. Exactly. And and often meshed in, in the way, right? The way hard drives are connected. Go into someone's head, rewind an event, experience what they saw, see what they see through their eyes, pull it back out, manipulate it. Right? Uh, that's, that's a whole frontier of storytelling that's been unplumbed. But when you think about it, it's, it's a frontier of storytelling, but it is also a different facet of reality. Because the way you experience something, even though we experience the exact same thing, is totally different from the way I experience it. And so what he does is he blurs the lines between individual realities, collective realities, and a technologically measured reality, which is brilliant. Because I can look around this room and I'm seeing everything as it is seen through my, the Chuck filter, my, my filter. But I'm also seeing it through human eyes, as opposed to like the eyes of, you know, an eagle or an owl. I'm also, or Jordy, or Jordy, right? Where I was the next, where I was going. But what I can't do is see it through the eyes of, like, an infrared meter, you know? So all those realities exist at the same time, though. And that's what makes them so brilliant. I love. So the idea that you can download your brain and put it on a computer. Everyone's talking about that. Black Mirror makes it real. Yeah. And it's scary when you see… Scary. He does. And you see the nefarious ways people, well, the way they'll manipulate it, and the way that really explores the darker side of our human nature. One of my favorite episodes, man, is there's a guy, and he thinks that, um, he's been in some kind of accident. He's in a log cabin. And another guy shows up, and he's just like, "Hey, man." And he's like, kind of nursing him back to health. He thinks he's been injured. And then he gets him to admit that he murdered his family or some, some crazy thing that he did. Wow. Only to find out that he was in a simulation and he was under interrogation by the police. Oh, wow. And then what they did afterwards was they punished him by leaving him in the simulation for a simulated hundred years. Oh my goodness. So that he would come out of his prison sentence thinking that he had been, uh, in prison for 100 years, when really he had only been in prison for, whatever the time dilation mentally was for him, maybe it had been a year, but he would have thought he served a hundred. So do we all think this is our future? No. It, it has a possibility. Why? Why? Feels real enough. It feels like we're headed there. The reason I don't think this thing will work is simply because we are assuming that intelligence and perceptions and so forth can be so fully controlled that we can't tell the difference between a reality and what is not real. We already know that our brains can be fooled, right? We already know that. So technology is not going to change anything in that respect unless we allow it to happen. And so I don't think that adding technology here, uh, never mind the idea of whether or not our intelligence is actually digitized, right? If it's a quantum situation, then you can never pass…

Cubic. And digitize is something called the no-cloning theorem. That makes that very difficult. So you wind up with a circumstance…

I was going to say, now you got to stop. You got to stop, man. You got to bring it back to the no-cloning theorem because you can't just walk, just walk past that. You walk by and just like, drop that down, just like, "Oh, here's the no-cloning theorem. Boom. All right, I'm moving on." Like, well, okay. The no-cloning theorem is just one of many different pieces of quantum computing, sort of like the laws of quantum computing. The same way that Asimov had laws of robotics. This particular one, the no-cloning theorem, means that if you have a quantum bit of information, you can't just make as many copies of it as you'd like. You can't make copies. So like us, we can digitize a photograph, taking little, little pixels, and then make each pixel exactly the same as another pixel on a hard drive or a USB stick or something, and then you get an exact copy of the previous picture. Absolutely, right? The no-cloning theorem says that for quantum information, you can't do that. So anytime you have some…

Why wouldn't you be able to do that with a qubit as opposed to bits and bytes, which we're able to do it with?

As soon as you read a qubit, it is destroyed.

That makes sense because it existed in a superposition.

To be with. Yes. Right. So the, so the moment that you actually realize the superposition, all other positions are made null and void at that particular instance.

That's a great way to describe it. So damn. So you damn Chuck, give that man a degree. Can you only capture a freeze frame of that your consciousness at a certain time? Because if you were to do it five minutes afterwards, it would potentially be different.

That is one consequence of this no-cloning idea, right? You can know what you are this very moment, but you cannot know what is the next moment, the moment after that, the moment after that.

Oh my God. That's right. Let me… This is why this show is so… Do you understand? This is science. This is what makes it so awesome. Why'd you make him blow a gasket?

I'm sorry. Just reboot. Okay. I'm sorry. All right. So if we're thinking about the future, if we're thinking about getting on and thinking about 50, 100, so many years in advance, yes, what you describe in Star Messenger is the exponential growth of our lives, our inventions, our ideas, and our understandings. Yes. Right? So, and then you sort of frame it in a 30-year gap. Yes. I'm just wondering, and we return to exponential growth because I need to know how far away we are from being vertical on the graph. If you took someone from 1995 and brought them to 2025, would they be completely out of sorts with the way we are today?

Yeah, let me tell you why that is definitely the case. All right. Okay. They would not know how to function. All right. Little things like, you sit them at a restaurant and say, "Where's the menu?" "Oh, here's the QR code." They'll have no idea what that is or what it means or what it… But they have no, they don't know what social media is. They, they barely, lucky them, they barely have an email address because those were on the rise, beginning in the 1990s, for the general public. The idea that you would have self-driving electric cars just on the road with no driver. If you walk around LA, these cars are just all over the place. Okay. And what role the smartphone has played in our lives, beginning from 2007 onward? Yeah. The idea that you can walk and talk to someone with something smaller than the size of a pack of cigarettes to someone on the Riviera in… Where's the Riviera? French. French. French. So what I'm describing is, yeah, how the way we currently live and take it for granted would be wholly foreign and exotic and unfamiliar to someone transported from 1995.

Respectfully, and with love, I disagree completely. Because from '95 to 2025, or just in general, a 30-year interval? No, it's specifically for 1995 to 2025 because we had Star Trek. We already saw what could be. We have Jules Verne. We had H.G. Wells. We had Lucian from the 2nd century AD.

Lucian? Wow. Yes. Uh, he wrote…

I love Lucian. Well, I do, actually. But he, uh, he was a guy from sort of the area of the world which at that time was fertile with culture and imagination and so forth.

About when was this?

About the second century. You know who else was the second century?

I don't know if they had…

He wrote *A True Story*.

I do not think it was a coincidence that's that period of laying out the universe. All the people that Charles has named there, they're historic. Yes. Wait, wait. Lucian is not the name. That's the name of the… Lucian is the name of the person who wrote is credited with writing a science fiction novel called *A True Story*. Wow. Voyagers are on a boat and they are caught in a storm and they wind up on the moon. And at the moon, there are creatures who don't look like humans, but they're engaged in a great war. These are the… Greeks want to be. So clearly other people would be fighting as well. These are the kinds of things that have been imagined for a long, long time. And I don't think that anyone in '95 showing up in 2025 would go, "Oh my gosh, people are talking into a box." They'll say, "Oh, wait, did that happen in Star Trek?" "Okay, how does this work?" And they just tap, tap, tap. And because everything was built for humans by humans, they would be able to adapt instead.

By aliens. Right, right, right. Almost immediately because of the commonalities of humans from 1995 to 2025. Okay. So now let's take it back to, and let's forget second century AD, sure, which is a time of enlightenment. Let's go to a time of darkness. Uh oh. All right. So like now, now let's go to the Middle Ages. You know what I mean? Where… Dark Ages. Dark Ages. Not the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages. Where we go where we're consumed by superstition and everything is squelched in terms of any enlightenment. With those people transported to today? And by the way, just to be clear, or would everything be witch?

Chuck, just to be clear, in the book, I localized it to the era of the Industrial Revolution, where you can fully expect that inventions will change how you live. There was a period where no one expected their great-great-grandchildren to be living any differently than they did. Absolutely. So I don't know that you can go that far back.

You can. I'll say that because, first of all, we should understand that "Dark Ages" was a term coined by European historians. True. In fact, historians who claim that Rome fell in the year AD 476 did not take into account what we know to be true, that other people ran that area known as the Roman Empire in many different ways for centuries thereafter. And then there was the Holy Roman Empire that happened starting at 800 with Charlemagne. Meanwhile, there was an Eastern Empire that was based at Constantinople. That's right. All of that concept. And by the way, Rome still here today. That's right. I was there the summer. It's a beautiful place. It was very hot. Still happening, right? So, so our sense of what history is, right? Also makes us think about predicting the past. What has been framed for us as the Dark Ages was actually a period of great innovation, and people were thinking about a lot of things, but not necessarily in Europe. In the Arabic-speaking world, things like algebra were being created. Things like mathematics. Yes.

Chuck, you can't be talking about what brown people did. It doesn't count if it didn't happen in Europe.

You're making my point exactly.

Truer words were never spoken. See, this is the point. Thing, you'll be telling me there were pyramids in Africa? Get out of here. Right? I mean, surely no Egyptian could ever have made these. It must have been by aliens because what Egyptians aren't as smart as people who look like Europeans and they couldn't do geometry. So if we use the imagination of these authors, these filmmakers, yes, and then we kind of replicate some of the things that they came up with. So we follow… We have sliding doors. First saw them in Star Trek.

I first saw them in Star Trek. So yeah, okay. So the thing is, are they shaping the future from their position in the past? Oh, and we follow that great idea. Great point. That's a… Are you asking if we never saw sliding doors as a future feature of our lives, would it have been pursued? And would we be trying to open the grocery store door holding our bags?

Great question. Here, here's my thought on this. We make predictions all the time. Probably there are a thousand predictions about the future that are in the literature or, um, just around on newspapers or even written down by people from 100 years ago. As Yogi Berra said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." Right? But if you make a thousand predictions, one of them will come true. And we're looking backwards, you cherry-pick the ones that… And if the future shows up with sliding doors, you go back and go, "Hey, remember that sliding door?" We don't talk about anybody who, um, predicted doors would go up and down or that doors would swirl out, but they exist, you know? So somebody probably did that. Even though Star Trek, as a show, itself didn't have door doors that swirled out, there are ways to do this that we have all thought of. They just didn't dominate our society for whatever reason. Okay. All right. Let's go to your 2050 predictions from Star Messenger.

No, no. By the way, I put in my predictions so that in 2050, people can make fun of me.

Well, we're going to do it right now. As I highlighted everybody else, exactly. Everybody else's wrong predictions. Just, just quickly to put this in context. In the book, I describe a prediction in 1900 made for the year 2000. Oh. And in the year 1900, steamships were setting records across the ocean. Steamships. Railroads crossed the continents. And so in this, for the year 2000, they had a steamship coming out of the ocean with railroad wheels flip down, it goes straight onto a railroad track, a railroad track, and then continues on land. Worst Transformer ever. So this was… And another one that's just linear thinking again. It's linear thinking. It's another one. Also, how were people getting around? Through, uh, lighter-than-air balloons, dirigible blimps, this sort of thing. So they imagined in the year 2000, everyone would have their own personal balloons. So there these balloons that wrap under your armpit, and you have two, and so it shows them sort of walking on water, kept buoyant by these by these balloons. And it's like, "Okay, because that's that's that's the extent of their imagination. Couldn't go much farther than what was available." That's kind of it. What was available. Amazing. All right. One of your predictions: "The space program becomes a space industry." Already happened. "Funded not by taxpayer dollars, but by space tourism and other projects." That part didn't happen.

Well, it's not 2050 yet.

Okay, dude. Well, that… What do you think? What do you think about that?

No. Prices are not going to drop low enough for people to want to go into space just for the heck of it. Not for 30 years. Not for 30 years, unfortunately. You're watching the prices now, extrapolating outward into the future. You just don't see that pattern happening because right now, what's happening is that space is still controlled by countries, governments that are willing to subsidize private corporations. Once those subsidies…

Country on Earth has the same equity in space. You would hope so. But at the moment, as with any other parts of the world, the dawn of flight, it was very expensive. Very few people. If you flew on a plane, that was like the news of the cocktail party that you attended. And then now, everybody can fly because the plane, we figured out how to make it cheap. The plane was and always was from the very beginning, in 1903, a private enterprise activity. Space has since its beginning been a governmental activity.

That's missing some information. So the rapid development of flight between 19, call it 10 and 1920, 30, well-funded by World War I. Well, yes. So you had, you had government investments in, in the advancement of an advanced aviation. And the government wanted to deliver mail by plane, the birth of airmail. So the government said, "We're going to give a contract to whoever can outbid whoever else and you do it and you win." I said, "I want the contract." So I make my plane better because I can carry more for the same amount of money that yours does. Now I win the contract back from you. And this continues until somebody says, "Hey, I, instead of sacks of mail, I can carry sacks of people." And then I can… That was the birth of commercial aviation, driven by the government's interest in you making a better airplane. But it made money. And when we tried to do that with the space shuttle, we didn't make money. So until money is made, that track will not start.

And your sentence had the word "until" in it. Fine. I'm saying by 2050, the "until" will happen within there. I do not think so. Okay. That's, that's what it is. So here's what I think in response to both of you. What's going to happen is there's a lot of money floating around in space. And it's really where… You and me, let's go this afternoon. Yeah. I looked in the wrong place. And it's in mining. And if we can mine what's out there instead of destroying the Earth to bring back all these precious rare earths, that… Well, they wouldn't be rare earths. Rare space. If we can bring that back, what happens is to get there, it's going to propel the advance so fast, like a gold rush. Like a gold rush. People are going to go so crazy, so fast to get out there and get that money, that space tourism will be a natural byproduct. Byproduct. So not the target, but the byproduct.

The happen so often, right? I want to read to you. We don't have time for this before we're doing anyway. I want to read to you a letter that I own. All right. Written December 19th, 1918. Oh, oh. I think I know what this will be. I didn't know you were that old. No, this is too… Mr. Allan Holly, President of the Aero Club of America. Didn't I know who wrote this? Madison Avenue. Dear Mr. Holly, many thanks for your very nice telegram remembering the 15th anniversary of our first flight at Kitty Hawk. Whoa. Although Wilbur as well as myself would have preferred to see the aeroplane developed more along peaceful lines, yet I believe that its use in this Great War will give encouragement for its use in other ways. Sign, sincerely yours, Orville.

Look at that. And war, take the high ground, and they took it to another level. Pun intended. Um, right. Let's take another look. Self-driving electric cars. You go there and I don't think that's in there. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's not a limb that's going to be breaking. That's… Well, no. There are people who say that it'll never happen or whatever. People like driving. And we already have HOV lanes. Right. If you say you can only go in that if it's a self-driving car. Right. And the self-driving cars are going 120 miles an hour, three car lengths between each other because they have instant reflexes and they're not putting on makeup and they're not texting and they're not… If they could. And they still… There are cars being made right now that don't have steering wheels. So we are going to live in a self-drive…

Think faster than most people do. Do you agree or not? I think that self-driving vehicles will be as prevalent as public transportation is. Right. There will still be private transportation for which drivers will still bear…

And, and listen. You'll drive on the back roads and stuff like that. You'll be able to drive your car. Okay? But one day… Wait, wait, wait. At some point, they'll become like horses. Yeah. Okay. You can still ride your horse. There's your horse at the stables. Right. You go get your horse and you and you ride it. Right. So, so now your car, your car at the…

At the track. No, it's a special place where…

That's what I mean. Back roads. Who still want to drive their car? They go there and they drive their car. Here's when it's going to happen. At some point, you have to make the cars talk to one another. And the road itself talk to the car. And at that point, at that point, you won't be allowed to drive on the road. You want to switch lanes? It tells the other cars switching lanes, and they open up for you. Half of all the accidents happen that way. You don't see who's in your blind spot. But building that infrastructure into the highways and byways is going to be so expensive, dude. We went from horse-drawn buggies in 1905 to you couldn't give away a horse in 1915 with gas stations and paved roads for automobile tires. And that happened in 10 years. I don't know if you've noticed lately, but things are a bit more expensive. Yes. And there are still millions of…

You want society? Science. Science side of science. There are still millions of square miles of North America where there isn't high-speed internet. So you got to remember that these are very regional solutions right now. We can extrapolate on what's going to happen in New York City, but the driving from Laramie, Wyoming to Fargo, North Dakota is not likely to be the same as driving…

There's no LA Sunset Boulevard. 1905. Many of those farmers still had horsedrawn tractors. Yes. So it… But I'm talking about we're talking about the entire world. You're going to have… We're talking about the freeway system, a highway system in the United States. It's going to be limited to certain areas.

Neuroscience will advance so far, we understand the human mind well enough that mental illness will be cured. You've also gone into developing antiviral serum and cures for cancer.

Do some cancers? Yes, absolutely. So with the neuroscience, which is still kind of in its infancy, so I have very high expectations for it. Psychologists hate it when I say this, but I mean it with love. That to me, psychology is to neuroscience what alchemy is to chemistry.

How can you mean that with love? Like, "Hey, listen, I like what you're doing, but one day you're just out of work." Okay? Just know this. You got someone on the couch and you for months and months and months trying to cure their illness. The neuroscientist said, "Where is it?" "Oh, it's a nip tuck right here. There's a neurosynaptic thing there." And they and tuck, and you're done, and you're out. And no one is on the street crazy. No insane asylums.

Is this where we get to implants that just bypasses?

Point. I, I don't, I don't know if it's surgery or implants or that are removable, then you go back to your original state. So let's look at AI. Let's look at the influence AI will have in the world of medicine. Is this now us getting to a more vertical line on on the exponential? The line always looks vertical when you're at that end of the exponential. It's always looks vertical to you. Like all the advancements happen in recent years. But I want to get to the to the AI point to the extent that it can help.

With medicines, I think one of my predictions was we have medicines that this is not some new prediction, I'm just echoing what's already been floating around, but I'm putting a timestamp on it that medicine will be tuned to your genetic profile so that there are zero side effects.

Yes, you did make that. Yes. And one, if we know your "why" is it that you break out in hives and you don't ingest the same chemical? There's something different about your genetic profile or your hormonal profile. We will know that, understand it, so that side effects will be a thing of the past. That's one of the predictions.

You do make that prediction. I'll get in there. Yes. Uh, I think what will happen is that we'll be able to control behaviors very well by 2050, right? But we still won't be able to cure the diseases by 2050. You, there's a lot to.

You think eventually, just not by 2050? Yes. Okay. It's an issue of when we are able now, technologically. Did you say when? No, I said when. Good. Thank you. Do you say Cool Whip? It depends if I'm speaking to ten [Music] or yes. And I never like Cool Whip.

In in in a quarter century, we'll be able to help everybody who has behavioral problems solve their behaviors. But that doesn't necessarily mean we'll have solved their diseases. And that is what I would like to see. So that means they'll be living with the disease, controlled by some medication or implant, rather than have it removed from them entirely. That's my opinion.

Is it safe to say that going forward into the future, the changes will happen even quicker? That is the nature of being on an exponential. That's that's my point. Yeah, that that there's no doubt. If you look at the pace of patents, the pace of research papers, the doubling times are which is how you know you're on an exponential, are they've been consistent over the decades. So what that means is in a few years, there'll be double the number of research papers on a subject in a field than has appeared up until that point. That's that's how you know you're on an exponential.

And the caveat is, sometimes the exponentials turn over. There's a period of exponential growth followed by a leveling off, right? For example, the human population. Thomas Malthus, a couple hundred years ago, predicted that if you do exponential growth, soon there will be so many people in the world that there will be not enough food production ever. But now we know that our predictions, and here's one that we could test in 30 years. 30 years from now, the exponential growth of the human population will turn over. We're going to top out worldwide around 10 billion.

And stock. Yeah, but that's but you gave the wrong. Actually, start falling, as it has in many places already. People have already made those. Hold on, you put a cart in front of a horse there. Oh, okay. Malthus is is wrong, not because our exponential growth of the population will level off at 10 billion. He's wrong because we applied science to farming, so that now we are producing more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. That's why he was wrong. He did not imagine that farm production would ever become more uh efficient or more voluminous than it was at the time. And he was just doing a linear extrapolation against the population of the planet. We are a wash in food. Anyone who was starving in the world, how much of our food goes to work? A third of it or something? I saw the numbers. So anyone who's starving, it's not because the world doesn't have food to feed them. There's some geopolitical circumstance that prevents it. So nobody like my predictions. No, a good predic. Last time I I credit you for being brave enough to step there. Yeah. And I even got some critiques in the moment.

Give me each of you one final prediction about something that you would like us to know. See, so here's my prediction for it's going to go. Don't confuse what you want to be true from what will likely be true. This is my honest assessment, not my desire. Good. Okay, that we are at a global tipping point with respect to democracy globally. And it's either going to be that people want to govern themselves through democratic processes, or that we're all so sleep that uh, we descend into authoritarianism worldwide. And if we do, getting back is going to take so many generations, none of us will be here to see it.

Gary, a prediction that we find a desire to fully engage with climate change because the knock-on effect has influence on so many global societies. We we're suffering for climate migration, we're suffering from rising sea levels. And if we can bring the desire to challenge and tackle that positively, I think that will be something we can all look to as a step. I hope you're right. So do I, but I'm not sure that we will. I hope we find the desire. That would be great.

By the way, a little known fact, because I only realized this months ago when I first saw Steven Spielberg's movie AI, M from the 1990s, there's an entire sustained scene underwater. Yeah. And you go underwater and there's a Statue of Liberty completely submerged. Yes. So they already took climate change. They did to the limit at the time that movie was supposed to take place. And that was just a side fact. Real movie was about the AI that they were creating. So cool, man. Yeah. Once once again, it's take it to the extreme to make the example to make you think. You do not create the future that they invented for years. All right, what's your best prediction? That within 25 years, there will be a professional sport played in orbit. Wo. Satellite shooting. Shot headlights. Be look at that. Yeah. Spaceballs. There you go. [Laughter] I like that. Yes, because we, you know, Chuck is our geek in chief when we talk about sports too. Oh, yeah. So when that happens, you you this will be the first thing you do. We'll do it after you can do an episode on your own podcast, Universe. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Zero G BK. All right, we got to we got to wrap this up, dude. I enjoyed this topic. Come up with these cool topics for special editions is great. Yeah, I have time on my hands. Okay. All right, dude. Charles, Chuck, Gary, thanks for this. Has been Star Talk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up. [Music]