Burn, Heretic!

Freeman Dyson is a famous physicist and futurist who has had a number of ideas in several fields. First William Connolley at stoat, and now Lubos Motl have posted on a commencement speech Dyson gave at the University of Michigan last December.

Aside from getting in a few digs at the Ph.D. system, he focussed on what he called his "three heresies." The first involves global warming, about which he says all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Secondly, he thinks that biotechnology will become sufficiently domesticated that:
Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. Designing genomes will be a personal thing?a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture.

Finally, he says:
So lastly my third heresies, I say the United States has less than a century left as top nation. Since the modern nation-state was invented, about the year 1500, a succession of countries has taken turns as top nation. First it was Spain, then France, then and Britain, than America. Each term lasted about 150 years. Ours began in 1920 so it should end in about 2070.

Dyson has had lots of good ideas, but he is 84 years old, and he has spent his career at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which Einstein famously called "a quaint ceremonious village of tiny demigods on stilts." I was hardly shocked by his "heresies" but rather disappointed. They seem trite, boring, and unsupported (at least in his talk) by fact or logic.

He criticizes climate models for their limitations, and says we shouldn't waste valuable money on them. He thinks climate modelers should be out doing measurements. Well duh. Climatologists are well aware of the limitations he mentions, and busy measurement programs are looking at the questions he mentions and others more profound. The modelers are busy trying to devise refinements of their models, which are much more complete than the "hydrodynamic codes" he discusses.

The bit about biotech reminds me of the Popular Science magazines I used to read in the 60's and 70's. Practically every cover had personal spacecraft and nuclear reactors for the families of the year 2000. If we do get to the point where kids can design three-eyed cats for their amusement, and moms the perfect little football star, the technology is more likely to be used for designing more addictive drugs and sinister bioweapons for terrorists.

I think he is generalizing from an awfully small and unrepresentative sample in his geopolitical prognostications. All the powers he mentioned were based on overseas empires, unlike the US. In any case, the question that interests me about the next hundred years are whether civilization, or the human race, will still be around.

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