Three Great Revolutions

Dr Michio Kaku Is A Physicist With His Eyes Fixed Firmly On Our Future. We Find Out What He Has In His Sights.

There’s a curious image contained in theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku’s vision of the future. No longer a terrestrial concern, traffic jams have been transplanted into outer space, and the scene involves Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and a team of NASA astronauts gridlocked, in their moon rockets, in a lunar peak hour.

The image forms part of the first of three predictions Kaku makes. “Three great revolutions are going to change our lives,” he says. “The first is space travel: we’re entering a new ‘golden era’ of space exploration, as costs drop and more nations are going into outer space. The second is a revolution in artificial intelligence, which is going to turn the job market upside down; and the third is the biotech revolution.”

Kaku illustrates the plummeting costs of space exploration by way of a striking comparison. The Hollywood blockbuster The Martian, released in 2015 and starring Matt Damon, cost more to make than it cost the Indian government to send a space probe to Mars: US$108 million for the former, compared with US$74 million for the latter. The increasing ease (and decreasing cost) with which new technologies can be applied means that “a Hollywood movie about going to Mars cost more than actually going to Mars”. Private enterprise is making its presence felt in this sphere, and accounts for the appearance of Musk and Bezos, alongside NASA, in the earlier tableau.