Ask A Genius 324 – The Feynman Thing (1)
October 18, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: That Feynman thing that he said in a speech about the future of science which there are three possible futures.
Science figures out everything within or almost everything within a reasonably short time frame say a few centuries or number two science continues to make steady progress, never gets to the point where it gives us an understanding of everything, we learn more and more but it turns out that you can’t understand everything or three science it’s the law and we reached we reached the limit of what can be understood via science which equals what can be understood period and your question postulate a number three situation that turns out that you have a limited ability to understand and gain power over creation.
And so that we rise to a certain level of technology and then we stay there and for as much of the future as we can imagine and that could be a thing, much science fiction takes place in that world because it’s easier to imagine like things space opera which is a casual term for Star Wars is the best-known space.
Opera, it’s human civilization as we know it now extended to cover a big chunk of the galaxy, but it’s humans being humans but on a larger spatial and temporal scale, but what humans want the forms humans to have the forms other species have are all basically human and humans do what they’ve always done which is fight wars, build civilizations they just do it on a bunch of planets instead of just one and that’s what you get, maybe you don’t even get that because Star Wars depends on faster than light travel you can’t have an empire if you can’t travel faster than light because the time required just makes it completely undoable but I don’t think that’s what will happen I think we have enough of an understanding of the potential of future technology to know that at the very least, the lives that we’re living now will be completely transformed.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 