R

E

A

D

T

H

I

N

K

C

R

E

A

T

E

I think that the problem with this picture is, we will not reach kika, science and technology, and the final status of the stable. Any time for 10,000 years, since the last ice age, humans, the country's fixed ongoing consciousness and technology. As part of the frustration of the previous experience since the collapse of the Roman Empire's darkest periods. But the world's population, and this is our ability to measure their lives in order to protect the feed, and the steadily rising only a few hiccups, such as the black death. Past 200 years, and the index's annual rate of population growth in the population growth rate is now about 1.9%. I want to sound, but it means the world's population will double every 40 years.           Computer, Is Star Trek Future Likely?     The reason Star Trek is so popular is because it is a safe and comforting vision of the future... Star Trek shows a society that is far in advance of ours in science, in technology, and in political organization. (The last might not be difficult.) There must have been great changes, with their accompanying tensions and upsets, in the time between now and then, but in the period we are shown, science, technology, and the organization of society are supposed to have achieved a level of near perfection.   I want to question this picture and ask if we will ever reach a final steady state in science and technology. At no time in the ten thousand years or so since the last ice age has the human race been in a state of constant knowledge and fixed technology. There have been a few setbacks, like the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. But the world's population, which is a measure of our technological ability to preserve life and feed ourselves, has risen steadily, with only a few hiccups such as the Black Death.   In the last two hundred years, population growth has become exponential, that is, the population grows by the same percentage each year. Currently, the rate is about 1.9 percent a year. That may not sound like very much, but it means that the world population doubles every forty years.   Other measures of technological development in recent times are electricity consumption and the number of scientific articles. They too show exponential growth, with doubling times of less than forty years. There is no sign that scientific and technological development will slow down and stop in the near future—certainly not by the time of Star Trek, which is supposed to be not that far in the future. But if the population growth and the increase in the consumption of electricity continue at their current rates, by 2600 the world's population will be standing shoulder to shoulder, and electricity use will make the Earth glow red-hot.   If you stacked all the new books being published next to each other, you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of line. Of course, by 2600 new artistic and scientific work will come in electronic forms, rather than as physical books or papers. Nevertheless, if the exponential growth continued, there would be ten papers a second in my kind of theoretical physics, and no time to read them.   Clearly, the present exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely. So what will happen? One possibility is that we will wipe ourselves out completely by some disaster, such as nuclear war. There is a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by extraterrestrials is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development, it becomes unstable and destroys itself. However, I'm an optimist. I don't believe the human race has come so far just to snuff itself out when things are getting interesting.   The Star Trek vision of the future—that we achieve an advanced but essentially static level—may come true in respect of our knowledge of the basic laws that govern the universe... [T]here may be an ultimate theory that we will discover in the not-too-distant future. This ultimate theory, if it exists, will determine whether the Star Trek dream of warp drive can be realized....   On the other hand, we already know the laws that hold in all but the most extreme situations: the laws that govern the crew of the Enterprise, if not the spaceship itself. Yet it doesn't seem that we will ever reach a steady state in the uses we make of these laws or in the complexity of the systems that we can produce with them.           — Stephen W Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, Chapter 6 – Our Future? Star Trek or Not?                     Indexes/17