Predictions for a Science Fiction Future

Everyone makes predictions. How about some that are genuinely out there?

It’s the start of the new year and everyone’s making prediction for 2025, things like “NVIDIA stock will top out” or “Bitcoin to 200k.” These are all reasonable and fine and good. Well within the realms of possibility too. What does the more distant future look like?

I’m generally optimistic about the future but only because its a long-run accurate and useful heuristic - things generally get better when people work hard to make them better, and I’m fortunate to be surrounded by ambitious people who work hard to build cool things. This is the benefit of being a “deep tech” guy - rockets, jets, new computing chips, robots, fusion and fission energy. These days I spend more time organizing events that help those people raise money or else writing science fiction.

Drawing out the trajectory of things we know for sure currently leads to a pretty good future. A lot more energy thats a lot cheaper. Faster planes. Better health care, surgical robots. Cheaper access to space. Maybe even flying cars. We’ll have to see how it pans out.

That is the science fiction future people think we’re going to get. Predicting those things will happen no longer carries much risk, it seems pretty locked in. How about predictions for a truly science fiction future? Here’s my list:

Aliens Confirmed Real and Totally into Us

This is probably the most interesting open question in the world right now and likely one of the most polarized. It seems a good deal many serious thinkers are completely convinced that intelligent life in the universe is extremely rare. On the other hand, there are a good deal many people who both claim direct experiences with extra terrestrial entities, and recently Congressional hearings covering ‘crash retrieval programs,’ that recovered alien bodies. My personal opinion had always been that this was essentially a government psy-op, some remnant of the Cold War where the United States wanted to entrap all the Soviet spies by fabricating the most elaborate, secretive, and high-tech weapons program possible by producing and then suppressing reports of flying saucers, aliens, and all that jazz. Lately it seems the ‘anomalous drone sightings’ are only increasing as time goes on and the fervor and attention UAP's, aliens, and sightings of things that are clearly not drones is at an all-time high.

There have been a number of high-ranking military personnel from several countries who have come forward on this topic: Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer who said aliens are already here and there’s a “Galactic Federation,” that there are at least four types of species that have different agendas, the “Tall Whites” are working with the U.S. government, and living E.T.’s on the Earth right now disguised as humans. Additionally the former Israeli space security chief Haim Eshed made similar claims about aliens visiting the Earth and having relationships with humanity, that the “Galactic Federation” exists, and even more-so that Earth isn’t ready to join the cool space club because “humanity isn’t ready.” Haim Eshed isn’t a nobody: he served as head of Israel’s space program for 30 years. Why is he saying this now? “I have nothing to lose. I’ve received my degrees and awards.” The rapid accumulation of disclosure reports and the incoming Trump’s administrations views towards transparency means we will likely soon find out whether this is a long-running propaganda campaign at taxpayers expense, or else, the biggest news story in history.

Higher Physical Dimensions

It’s discovered that, yep, there are higher physical dimensions and they’re relevant to what goes on ‘down here.’ This isn’t a radically new idea; it was first proposed in the 1920s as part of Kaluza-Klein theory which unified Electromagnetism and Gravity. That started the long history of ‘additional dimensions to unify more stuff’ which culminates in String Theory. Now, String Theory gets bad rep these days and thats okay - still, the prospect of higher physical dimensions is exciting. There’s two things that connect this to the last point about aliens: for some reason all these government whistleblowers around UAPs keep saying that aliens are transdimensional, and secondly, they keep saying the craft work via electrogravitic propulsion. Meaning electromagnetism and gravity are somehow coupled together, such that we might be able to produce these craft or already have but in secret. Anti-gravity here we come.

Additional spatial dimensions are usually described as being “compactified” and all around us, in other words, they’re embedded like little tiny points in our current 3D world. In Kaluza-Klein theory, the reason gravity is so much weaker than electromagnetism is that the strength of that field ‘leaks into’ these high dimensions and so we don’t feel it nearly as much. The reason Kaluza-Klein theory hasn’t really panned out is that it predicts a couple particles we haven’t found: the graviphoton and the dilaton; additionally it predicts particles with masses separated by a regular interval or spacing determined by the dimension of these tiny compactified dimensions. This doesn’t mean “extra dimensions” has died out as a concept in physics altogether, rather it lives on with newer names like Warped Extra Dimensions.

Zero Point Energy

Zero Point Energy is energy that comes from the vacuum of space itself. As it turns out, the vacuum isn’t empty - rather its filled with ‘virtual particles’ in one conception, or else just filled with many modes of the electromagnetic field. Since there are infinitely many modes in empty space it leads to an ‘infinite energy density’ and because this is pretty silly it leads to the need for renormalization in quantum electrodynamics. We don’t really need to worry about that for now - but, the existence of electromagnetic modes even in the vacuum or ground state of empty space is a real thing that’s been experimentally measured and confirmed by the Casimir Effect. The experiment is simple: bring two parallel metal plates very close together. Since the plates are conductive they enforce a boundary condition that the electric field is zero on the boundary. Just like making a string shorter on a guitar by pressing down on a fret, this limits the number of modes or vibrations that can fit into that space. Reducing the number of electromagnetic modes means there’s less energy between the plates than on the outside, and the plates feel a very tiny force that pushes them together.

The existence of the Casimir effect is awesome and cool, but it’s yet to be seen exactly whether it can lead to the useful extraction of energy. The rabbit hole on this goes deeper, however: Hal Puthoff is a physicist who has explored the concept of vacuum energy in great detail, laying out arguments for how Zero Point Energy may actually explain the emergence of gravity itself and furthermore that by polarizing the vacuum of space we can achieve propellantless propulsion. In essence, you get the same anti-gravity drives as if there were extra physical dimensions just by creating extremely intense electric fields. It get’s even more out there however: polarizing a medium means changing the effective dialectric constant also known as the permittivity, and the speed of light depends on the permittivity. If you can change the permittivity to make it lower, the speed of light goes up. This means you can travel faster than the conventionally measured value of the speed of light of 3e8 meters/second. It’s not faster-than-light travel but rather making light faster itself.

Psychic Powers are Real, but Rare

Paranormal psychology has long been one of the most favorite topics for skeptics and scientists alike to dismiss, since witness testimony is often so easily mis-remembered and humans are all-to-apt to look for patterns in noise where there is none. Yet this topic still hasn’t gone away. Most recently the Telepathy Tapes claims to show extremely consistent ‘psychic powers’ possessed by people with autism (i.e. 95% accuracy) in guessing what number a person has written down on a piece of paper they can’t see, or similar trials of that nature. This rabbit hole goes deeper, of course: the CIA has declassified extensive documents describing even more profound psychic abilities, like the ability to write on pieces of paper that are sealed in envelopes, or ‘remote view’ distant regions of space and time by just sitting there and letting your mind wander without even knowing the space-time coordinates you’re supposed to view. The place and time are written in sealed envelope in front of you on a desk and you look at it afterwards.

Remote viewing is not limited to just the CIA , in fact the CIA learned it from a fellow named Robert Monroe who was a businessman that owned a successful media company and just one day started having surreal out-of-body experiences where he floated around and could see himself. Being an otherwise completely normal guy he decided to dedicate a good portion of his wealth to exploring this phenomenon and establishing the Monroe Institute which exists to this day and has courses on how to learn remote viewing among other consciousness-expanding techniques.

Consciousness is Quantum Mechanical

When you dig into the basics of quantum mechanics it quickly appears that there’s something special about observers: they influence things just by observing. Starting with Schrodinger’s Cat experiment and moving into Wigner’s Friend thought experiment you can reach all sorts of out-there conclusions like: there is no such thing as a single objective reality, or else, things outside the future light-cone can influence you. Both of these go against our hard-felt intuition that we all live in the same universe and that the speed of light limits the speed of causality; in fact, a finite speed of light is necessary for causality to be well-formed. We don’t really know how it is that an observer ‘collapses the wavefunction’ (or alternatively, chooses from a branch of the multiverse) in terms of a physiological process. For an engineered instrument to measure a quantum mechanical property you need to have some property of the instrument that can entangle with the thing being measured, which means it has a set of quantum mechanical states that can ‘link up’ with the states of the system. Then, the state of the instrument is amplified up to a classical limit of detection to produce something like a voltage spike or current pulse which is then stored in memory. Voila, you’ve measured a quantum mechanical property.

It’s not immediately apparent that human-scale observers are ‘collapsing wavefunctions’ because we only perceive and interact things at a classical scale far above the length scale of quantum mechanical systems. Nonetheless there do seem to be experiences and measurable phenomenon that can’t be explained classically at all, especially the previous sections about psychic powers, remote viewing, and all that jazz. While it’s a scientifically lazy short-hand to just say that “all the voodoo magic in the world is quantum mechanics” there really is no other way of explaining paranormal psychological effects if they are determined to be reliable and consistent.

Where is this all leading?

The science fiction future most people believe we are now heading for looks a lot like what Arthur C. Clarke wrote about in the 60s and 70s. Moon bases, rocket ships, AI, robots, space colonization. This is the ‘trad sci-fi’ that I like to call the Rocket Future. It’s something we know we can reach just by improving the engineering methods working with the fundamental physics we’ve firmly established to-date.

The science fiction future I’m describing above looks very, very different. But it’s not something Arthur C. Clarke hasn’t written about. Perhaps his greatest novel, Childhood’s End, discusses how a race of aliens comes and hangs out in the skies above Earth and guides humanity towards a golden age of abundance right up until the last generation of children all develop extreme psychic powers that seem to bend reality itself. This is in stark contrast to novels like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Rendezvous with Rama that portray a grounded vision of human affairs in a future that just has better rockets and AI.

If all these predictions come true at once the future will be so profoundly bizarre as to be unrecognizable to the current generation’s mainstream scientific consensus, at least as bizarre as the modern world would look to someone from the Roman Empire. People telepathically communicating with aliens from higher dimensions and getting aboard faster-than-light spaceships to explore the entire known universe, although by then the spaceships aren’t even necessary since we can just remote-view our way there anyway. Unlimited energy removes the central limiting factor of industrial civilizations and brings about the collapse of capitalism leading to unfettered human abundance. In short we basically enter the Star Trek future right up to and including being welcomed into the Galactic Federation.

What’s there left to do at this point? We might as well engineer ourselves into higher dimensions like the rest of the advanced alien species so as to remain hidden from the newly emergent technical civilizations, so they can just figure it all out on their own like we did.