The Future According To Dr. Michio Kaku

Imagine walking through Rome and seeing the Coliseum resurrected in its full glory in your contact lens. Imagine going to a party and, with a simple scan of the room, instantly reading the biography of a new acquaintance. Imagine a computer the size of an aspirin beating cancer in your body on a molecular level.

All these goodies and more will become available in the coming century, told a sold-out audience at the Cubberly Community Center Monday night. What Kako found after he interviewed 300 of the world’s top scientists reads like a Jules Verne science-fiction novel. These are the people who are building the future in their laboratories, he said.

Kako, author of his newly released book, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, said new cancer technology the size of an aspirin will make today's chemotherapy look like the “bloodletting” of the 18th century.

“How would you view your own flesh and blood living in the year 2100? You would view them as gods,” Kako said. Like Zeus, our children will be able to merely think of something, and “it would come to be.”

“DNA is the code of life,” Kako said. “Today, it costs $50,000 to sequence all the genes in your body. In the future, it will cost $100 to have an owner’s manual for your body." With your owner’s manual you will have all your genes displayed, telling you all your propensities for certain diseases, he said. “As your body parts wear out, you replace them. After all, you are a god.”

Intelligent wallpaper in your home will give you voice-activated Internet access, he said. This technology will “change your love life.” People will never be lonely. The dateless college student on a Friday night merely has to say to his wall: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is available tonight?” And the wall will contact all the other people who are also staring at their walls and set up a date, Kako said to a roomful of laughter.

You will be able to say to your movie screen: “Remove Humphrey Bogart’s face and put my face instead,” he said.

Since microchips will only cost a penny, computers will become disposable. At the office, you could scribble on an electronic pad, then throw it away. Your scribble would then become a file and follow you down the hallway, he said. Everything would be metered in a “cloud,” he said. “The computer would be everywhere and nowhere. The computer will disappear. It will go into the fabric of our life.”

By mid-century, computers will be so powerful that we will control them via telepathy and telekinesis, he said. At Brown University, scientists have already implanted a chip into a stroke-victim’s brain, he said. That paralyzed person can now write emails and surf the Web with his thoughts.

Japan has robots that detect brain patterns and move like surrogates, he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had these robots going into high-radiation fields” instead of people, he said. “We could clean up the mess in Japan very easily.”

“Cars of the future will be driverless, because GPS will take over and guide your car,” Kako said. “This is actually safer than a human being,” he added. “Human begins get drunk, fall asleep, like to drag race, like to show off. Computers never get drunk.”

The aging process is now being deciphered at the genetic-molecular level, he said. Although we are 98 percent genetically identical to the chimpanzee, we live twice as long. Only a handful of genes doubles our lifespan, Kako said, and we will find a gene that can control the lifespan gene.

Kako’s ties to Palo Alto go back almost 50 years. He graduated from Cubberly High School in 1964. His “atom-smasher” science project, which he built on the Cubberly football field, landed him a ticket to Harvard University.

“I put 22 miles of copper wire on the goal posts,” he said.

Kako co-authored the string-field theory, and was recently named one of the 100 most intelligent persons in New York, by New York Magazine. He teaches at the City University of New York.

The event was organized by the Commonwealth Club of California, Silicon Valley.