Hypothetical exoplanet of a brown dwarf star--similar to a future Earth? Credit: Jeff Bryant

Every now and then, when seeing fresh examples of the world's problems, local or global, I take a deep breath, sigh, and think, "In a million years, what difference will it all make?" It may sound fatalistic, and of course current events do matter to our short-timer existences on Earth, but the thought gives me an odd sense of peace and gets me to thinking about the future—the far distant future—of the Earth. It's hard to imagine what the future will bring in ten, a hundred, or even a thousand million years. Where will evolution take life on Earth—including us? How far will human civilization stretch, and what turns will it take? What exciting twists and cliffhangers are in store for the climate? What will be on television?

Some things are a bit easier to predict: what the Sun will do and how the Earth and the Earth-Moon relationship will change.

I ran across a web version of the H.G. Wells novel "The Time Machine" a couple of weeks ago, and re-reading Chapter 11 I was reminded how insightful the story is with regard to visualizing future possibilities. In this chapter, the Time Traveler probes forward in time, going millions of years into the future and arriving in a tidally-locked Earth under a bloated, reddened Sun, with no Moon in the sky. The ocean was calm and cold, sporting only gentle, lazy swells, and the air was considerably less stocked with oxygen than today. Snow peppered the land and ice fringed the sea, and the only ubiquitous sign that life still existed was a green slime that coated the rocks of the shore.

"All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over."

An alien, cold, and pessimistic view of the future? Well—it can hardly be classified as pessimistic; pessimism is an emotion based on the seeming unchangeability of things we can in fact change. But the Earth's future is commanded by forces scarcely within our power to affect.

For one, the Earth's rotation is slowing down. It used to spin much faster—maybe three times as much—but tidal effects of the Moon and Sun have been slowing it down for four and a half billion years. Imagine an eight-hour day, with the Sun crossing from horizon to horizon in about four. Wake up, it's only a couple of hours until lunchtime, and another two ‘til dinner. I got a whole three hours of sleep last night! Ahh!

Where is Earth's spin going? Shakespeare had the answer: "The Moon's an arrant thief…." The momentum of Earth's spin is being slowly siphoned off by the Moon through tidal interaction, which is simultaneously causing the Moon to move farther from the Earth. Once much closer to Earth, even today the Moon continues to inch away into space–quite literally, at less than two inches per year.

So in the very distant future, we can project that the Moon will have moved much farther from the Earth, and the Earth's rotation will have slowed down even more. At some point the Earth's rotation would match the Moon's orbital period and the Earth will become tidally locked with the Moon, always keeping the same face to it, just as the Moon is currently tidal-locked to the Earth.

In H.G. Wells' vision, the far distant future Earth is tidally locked to the Sun, and the Moon is apparently gone. Would this happen? Will there ever be an Earth with an unending day and unending moonless night (depending on your address)? That could happen, but the Moon would have to leave the picture first, perhaps wandering far enough out that a chance gravitational disturbance by another planet would knock it off the edge of its orbit.

The Sun is changing too—has changed, and will continue to change—as the dynamics of its nuclear fuel supply mix shifts. As atomic fusion converts hydrogen into helium, helium to carbon, and so forth, the availability of easily released energy will diminish, causing the core to shrink and heat up, in turn causing the outer layers to inflate, becoming more expansive but also cooler and redder. In the very long run, the outer layers will expand beyond Earth's present orbit.

So there is a future out there that we can be more certain of than the future shaped by human affairs. It's further out in time than the decades or centuries ahead—and frankly further out than H. G. Wells penned in at 30 million years (little will have changed with the length of a day and the mile markers to the Moon in that time, and I believe the Sun won't make much of a fuss for at least a billion, or more).

In the meantime, it's captivating to think what the scenery may be like around the place I stand today, a million or a billion years hence.

Robotic domination in I, Robot

Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near is becoming something of a cult sensation. The 672-page paperback version of the book is ranked 1,494th on Amazon (on par with The Great Gatsby). Recently, Kurzweil announced a Google-backed Singularity University ($25,000 for a 9 week summer program; $12,000 for a 3 day "Executive Program"), lending a touch of academic rigor to an idea that has lived mostly in science fiction. For the time and budget conscious, a rash of Singularity-themed documentaries is now on the horizon.

The Singularity, as I understand it, is the point in time when computers will be smart enough to build even smarter computers, effectively removing humans from the design-build loop of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Kurzweil predicts 2050. That means I'll be 68 when the robots take over!

Predicting the future is no walk in the park, but when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, everyone's packing a lunch. So while I won't try to argue that Kurzweil is wrong (I think he is), it's good to place his predictions in the cultural history of wildly inaccurate AI speculation.

Consider these predictions, both made by outstanding computer scientists actively involved in AI research:

• 1965, Herbert Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
• 1970, Marvin Minsky: "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."

As it turned out, these claims were not even remotely true. In fact, the whole history of AI has been one of boom and bust cycles, the product of misplaced exuberant optimism.

Take, for example, the case of machine translation. During the Cold War, the problem of automatically translating intercepted Russian messages received considerable military funding. A 1954 Georgetown-IBM demonstration (translations of 49 chemistry-themed sentences with a 250-word vocabulary) captured public interest and spawned considerable investment, especially as the researchers claimed that the general translation problem would be solved in 3-5 years. When progress turned out to be much slower, funding was cut, and research all but stopped between 1965 and 1993.

Translation research has seen a significant resurgence, especially since I've been in graduate school (for computer science), mostly due to statistical methods. Rather than frame the translation of Russian into English as a series of rules (translate word R3 into word E3; switch the order of words E2 and E4; etc.) written by expert bilingual humans, research consists of building models trained from many examples of translated sentences (word R3 translates to word E3 with probability 0.6; word E3 appears after E2 with probability 0.2; etc.) so that the translation of a Russian sentence is the sequence of English words with the largest total probability, according to the model. The statistical approach is less ambitious-today's models are too simple to capture all of language's nuances-but far more successful.

Kurzweil's Singularity prediction is based on exponential growth. The idea is that because computers have been doubling in speed every two years or so (that's a factor of 1,000 in just 20 years; 1,000,000 in 40 years) huge paradigm shifts are actually quite close. But aside from the issue that computer chips have plateaued due to limits imposed by silicon's insulation ability and the speed of light (new computers have multiple CPUs), progress in automatic translation does not follow the law of exponential progress. Rather, there have been a few periods of dramatic improvement, followed by long periods of very gradual development. This is the trend for the majority of important AI problems.

So, while speculating about the future is both interesting and important, I'd be wary of anyone trying to sell you $12,000 of it.

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In the future, will you get late-night pages from your furnace?
photo by: philcampbell

I’ve been thinking a lot about cell phones, since I finally just got one myself. Millions (billions?) of people around the world who don’t know the difference between a BTU and a kWh are experts at phoning, e-mailing, texting, surfing the Web, and watching TV using a device that fits in their pocket without making a noticeable bulge. Maybe the answer to our home energy challenges is to attack them with our iPhones?

Patti Harper-Slaboszewicz, Senior Director, AMR and Demand Response with UtiliPoint International, an energy and resources consulting firm, thinks a lot about the future of home energy management systems. In the UtiliPoint e-newsletter Issue Alert, Harper-Slaboszewicz writes:

"More and more devices will include communications—dryers, washers, air conditioners, heaters, refrigerators, lights, hot water heaters, coffee pots, microwaves, ovens, fans, humidifiers, cars, bicycles, freezers, pumps, sprinklers, sensors, outdoor lighting—to the Internet."

Imagine it’s 2020 and you are taking BART (running on 100% biodiesel produced from Switchgrass) into the City to your job directing the organic farm at Golden Gate Park. Harper-Slaboszewicz writes, “Your washing machine may ‘ping’ you to let you know the load is done. A sensor may communicate to the air conditioner that it's cooler outside than inside. Another sensor may communicate that it's too windy for the sprinklers to continue to run.” So you pull out your iEverything and go to the icon for home energy management on the touch screen, to tell your air-conditioner to take a rest, to stop the once-a-month drought-tolerant plant watering sprinkler system, and to turn your washing machine to dryer mode. It’s cheaper to do your wash in the morning before peak hours in the afternoon when energy prices triple. PG&E produces 80% of it’s energy from renewable fuels, but the rest comes from coal, which carries a huge carbon tax; oil, which is $250 a barrel; and natural gas, which comes to us from a foreign country, Alaska.

In order to solve our energy and environmental challenges, we all have to be involved; we all have to be motivated. Punishing some for using more than the average amount of energy works some but it will never get us to where we need to go. Technology that works well, and that is intuitive and easy to use, will take us the rest of the way. It’s the answer we can all carry in our pockets.

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"Do you plan to change your bottled water habits?"
( polls)

Josh Rosen is Series Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

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