Soul of the World (19 page)

I enjoyed my brisk ride through the October sunlight and found a parking spot right in front of my dentist’s building. Riding the elevator up to his office, I looked at my watch and saw that I was ten minutes late. That wasn’t too bad, I thought, since my dentist is usually running behind schedule himself by this time of the morning. I opened the door to the waiting room and I could immediately tell by the expression on the receptionist’s face that I was unexpected. “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Dr. Kier,” I told her. She consulted her appointment book. “That’s tomorrow,” she said. “Isn’t this the eighth of October?” I asked. And she said, “No, today is Wednesday the seventh.”

I was one day ahead of myself. I had somehow gotten a day out of synch earlier in the week, and it was only this collision with the real calendar that put me back on track.

Afterwards, with my unexpected free time, I went to a sidewalk café and ordered a cappuccino. While drinking it, I tried to recollect the exact moment or day that I’d skipped twenty-four hours ahead. I remembered that Monday had felt more like Tuesday to me for some reason, so perhaps a subtle, unconscious association had triggered the time lapse. But in the end, I thought, how we measure time is arbitrary. We could have thirty-six 40-minute hours in a day, a week could be ten days long, and our calendar could have twenty months. What
isn’t
arbitrary is that time, like gravity and mass, is a fundamental quantity. No matter what we do, or where we go, we glide into the future at a rate of one second per second.

The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.

—
William Gibson

Indian summer arrived yesterday, right in the middle of October. A few cicadas must have survived the cold nights last week, because in the heat of the afternoon they sang as loudly as on any August day. I hadn’t heard the cicadas for weeks, and their rasping buzz sounded almost wistful—the swan song of summer. During my jog this morning, I couldn’t make out the distant plume of vapour from Niagara Falls because the air was filled with a fine blue mist. It was as if sky pigment were flaking off in a dusty powder, and it tinged the far landscape blue and indistinct, like an impressionist painting. I’ve seen this blue mist before, not only in the city but in the country as well, as far away as the Appalachians. It isn’t pollution and it isn’t the smoke from hundreds of leaf fires.

I like to think of it as time vapour, as if time, normally invisible, thickens and reveals itself in this particulate haze. There is a nostalgic, slightly somnolent ambience to these misty fall afternoons. They remind me of the autumn afternoon in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle fell asleep after bowling with the ghosts. Maybe his stupor
wasn’t just a narcotic effect of the enchanted liquor he drank, but a consequence of inhaling too much time vapour from the mountain air. Like someone in a coma who, at least from his or her perspective, wakes up in the future, so did Rip Van Winkle awaken to a country transformed by revolution. Who would have predicted such change in a mere two decades?

As Yogi Berra once reportedly quipped, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The future has a way of throwing curves at even the most conservative prognostications, and as a result the history of prediction is strewn with disastrous prophecies. We can look back with irony at Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace in our time” as he waved the ill-fated treaty with Hitler. Not every prediction is wrong, though, and indeed, weather forecasting seems to be steadily improving, even if the long-range forecasts are still sometimes uncertain. According to today’s five-day forecast, there may be a frost this weekend, so I’ve arranged for my palm tree to be picked up and taken to the greenhouse for the winter.

Planning for the future is a basic condition of existence. We arrange for mortgages with twenty-five-year terms, we schedule vacations and we make payments towards the university education of six-month-old babies. We even plan for our own nonexistence—a paradox, and probably the most palpable evidence of our abstract relationship to time. All life prepares for the future, even if it doesn’t do it abstractly, as we do. Plants are constantly thinking ahead. My rhododendrons have already set their flower buds for next year. The horse chestnuts in the park have ripened, and the branches are laden with hundreds of spiked green globes, every one cleaving open and containing two chestnuts, like polished wooden geodes mated belly to white belly, a future tree within
each. The squirrels have stashed their hoard of black walnuts in my yard and even in my garage; I keep finding walnuts lodged earnestly in the woodpile.

On that rainy day last April, when I went to my publisher’s and we discussed the timetable for the production of my book, we agreed that there would likely be galleys (the first typescript version of the manuscript) by February, provided I delivered the manuscript in September. Well, here it is almost November already and I’m still writing. If my publisher gets impatient, maybe I’ll just quote Einstein, who once wrote, “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.”

Even though most scientists are great skeptics about anything remotely paranormal, physicists don’t even skip a beat when they claim that the past, present and future exist at once. The Einstein quote about the illusory distinction between the three realms of time comes from a letter he wrote to console the widow of his friend and associate Hermann Weyl. Einstein himself was only weeks from death and was wrestling with the problem of the present. In conversation with the philosopher Rudolph Carnap, he said that there was “something essential about the now,” though that essential core lay “just outside the realm of science.” To Weyl’s widow he seemed to be intimating that her husband still lived, and would always live, somewhere in the timescape. He knew it was possible.

But if the timescape does indeed exist, it seems to be dominated by the one-way flow of time, and that flow, the flow of “now,” is terrifically fast—a billion billion femtoseconds per second. How could anything cross such a bottleneck from the past or the future? Oddly, there is an outside chance of it happening. A handful of scientists, most notably
William Unruh, Theodore Jacobson and Renaud Parentini, have been publishing reports about space-time behaving like a fluid. They are particularly interested in black holes because of the way black holes contradict the general rules of physics. Even light, the fastest thing there is, gets sucked into the monstrous gravity of a black hole. Yet, as I discussed earlier, in a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation a small number of photons escape the hole, driven out by the very energy that sucked them in.

Jacobson and Parentini believe that Hawking radiation is evidence that something extraordinary could take place—that ripples travelling through space-time could, with enough speed, move upstream of a quickly flowing medium, much the way that a stationary rock in a river creates a little series of upstream ripples around it that move against the flow of the current. The unstated implication of this theory is that perhaps the flow of time itself, though tremendously fast, could also retroactively transmit similar sorts of ripples “upstream.” If, as most physicists believe, the future already exists alongside the present and past in the timescape, then perhaps a large enough event in the future might be able to broadcast ripples backwards against the entropic flow of time towards the future. What form those ripples might take, or if they’d even be detectable, is wide open to speculation, but it seems to provide a mechanism for a kind of physical precognition.

Many philosophers have contemplated the idea of the future influencing the past, though in more practical ways. Aristotle was one of the first to come up with the notion of entelechy, or the acme at which the entire potential of a thing’s or a person’s essence is realized. The thing or person moves towards and is influenced by it. Entelechy is similar to
teleology, the doctrine of final causes, defined as that which lies at the end of tendencies, goals, aims, directions. In other words, the end of the means. More recently, a number of technologically minded thinkers, including Ray Kurzweil, have come up with the idea of a future singularity, a decisive, watershed event in the evolution of technology that will change what it means to be human. Some think that this singularity (a word that seems borrowed from black-hole terminology) will occur when the first replicator, a microscopic nano-robot capable of building other nano-robots, is created; others believe that the singularity will arrive with the advent of artificial intelligence.

Interestingly, many of these individuals are convinced that a kind of entelechic or teleological field surrounds this event in the future. For them, our present age is converging irrevocably towards a singularity and, what’s more, the singularity is so massive it casts a reverse shadow, backwards in time, from the future, through the present and into the past. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was thinking along the same lines when, in his 1821 book
A Defence of Poetry
, he wrote, “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” This singularity is, I suppose, not that much different from manifest destiny, except writ large for all of mankind. If you are fascinated, as I am, by the notion of a singularity, you’ll have to take these theorists on faith. Keep in mind, though, that scientists have got things fantastically wrong in the past.

The Victorian era was a golden age of science that laid down the infrastructure for the achievements of the twentieth century, but its fearless enthusiasm also produced claims that turned out to be dramatically amiss. In 1874 Sir J. E. Erichsen, one of England’s most preeminent surgeons, wrote, “The abdomen, chest, and brain will forever be closed to operations by a wise and humane surgeon.” Who could have predicted neurosurgery and heart transplants back then?

Twenty years after Erichsen’s pronouncement, Albert Michelsen, one of the scientists who measured the speed of light, declared the end of physics. “It seems probable,” he said, “that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established.” He then went on to quote Lord Kelvin, who apparently once mentioned that “the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” In other words, if you’re a young aspiring scientist, don’t bother getting a physics degree—there’s nothing left to discover. Less than two decades after Michelsen’s premature pronouncement, X-rays, radioactivity and relativity were discovered.

And still eminent scientists predicted that certain possibilities were forever closed. In 1932 Albert Einstein said, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.” Ten years later, underneath the squash courts at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi fired up the world’s first nuclear reactor. (But Einstein gets the last laugh, at least in terms of bogus predictions. His high school teacher once told Einstein’s father, “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will never amount to anything.”)

Contemporary scientists would never make the mistake of saying they know all there is to know. On the contrary, they are fond of repeating Ralph W. Sockman’s adage, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” Like the Victorians, they believe in the ultimate power of science, but they appreciate that science is far from finished. It seems to have a limitless ability to reveal new worlds and create wonders. Of course, they continue to make predictions, even as they realize that the likelihood of being right is far from certain.

Stanley Kubrick based his film
2001: A Space Odyssey
on Arthur C. Clarke’s premise that the moon would be colonized and civilian space
liners would have regular service between the earth and the moon by 2001. In 1969 lunar exploration was in its infancy. Thirty-two years no doubt seemed like a conservative estimate. But the future isn’t what it used to be. Clarke later pushed forward his 2001 date by ten years, and he also prophesied that astronauts would land on Mars by 2021, nine years sooner than NASA’s best guess.

A future project that might surpass the achievement of moon bases and Mars landings, at least on an engineering scale, is the construction of a space elevator. Consisting of a rigid tube assembled in stationary orbit (built downwards at the same time as it is built outwards, in order to compensate for gravity and centrifugal force), such a structure is, apparently, quite possible. When complete, passengers would simply ride it up into space. In 2004 Bradley C. Edwards, head of the Institute for Scientific Research, envisaged the existence of a space elevator by 2020. Authur C. Clarke was a bit more ironic about the idea. He said that a space elevator “will be built about ten years after everybody stops laughing.”

The advent of robots is yet another magnet for futurist prognostications. In 2003 Marshall Brain, creator of the How Stuff Works website, forecast that robots would perform at a human level of skill in most manual jobs by 2030, though Helen Greiner, the chairman of the corporation iRobot, put it a little later, at 2034. In 1997 the computer scientists who organize the yearly RoboCup soccer games were confident enough to claim that by 2050 a team of robots would beat the human world champions in soccer.

Of course, as robots become more complex, their intelligence will begin to approach our own. Many computer scientists and science fiction authors believe that artificial intelligence—the attainment of human-level consciousness—is inevitable. In another of his predictions made in the year 2001, Arthur C. Clarke forecast that artificial
intelligence (AI) would be attained by 2020. Ray Kurzweil came in a year earlier at 2019, while Hans Moravec, the visionary computer scientist and mathematician who’s in a position to know just how complicated human consciousness is, has his money on 2050.

Nanotechnology, one of the fastest-rising fields of research and development, is a wholly new frontier in science and, reminiscent of X-rays and radioactivity, something that wasn’t even imagined a few decades ago. The grail of nanotechnology—the building of a cell-sized programmable robot that can build replicas of itself—garners a wide range of predictions regarding its advent. In 2001 Arthur C. Clarke put the date at 2040, though the U.S. Army’s Future Force Warrior Project recently estimated that by 2020 nano-machines embedded in body armour would be able to transform the properties of the armour from flexible to bulletproof, filter out biological weapons and even treat wounds. And for the record, Clarke also predicted the successful cloning of dinosaurs by 2023.

Who knows exactly when, or even if, any of these wonders will come about? I remember watching newsreels in the 1960s that showed men flying in jet packs, which the commentator said would be as common as cars within a decade or so. The future is slippery, especially when it comes to the adoption of technology. Virtual reality smacked of the future, but who could have predicted cyber-sickness? It is the inventions we didn’t expect at all that have turned out to be the biggest. A decade before the Internet, very few would have guessed just how pervasive it would become. And technology keeps throwing new devices at us at an ever-increasing, sometimes overwhelming, rate. It seems that you either adapt to the future or you become its victim. Even science cannot tell us what’s in store, though not for lack of trying.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace, one of the great mathematicians of the scientific renaissance that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conjectured that science and mathematics would eventually be able to predict the future perfectly. In his treatise
Théorie analytique des probabilités
, written in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he explained how: