Our species is a migratory one. Over the past seventy thousand years, we wandered out of Africa and kept on wandering. We climbed mountains, forged forests, swam rivers, crossed continents, sailed oceans, and, eventually, managed to work our way into every corner of the Earth. It was an exodus-driven influx of innovation. While we left the old and sought the new, we brought our ideas, technologies, and cultures along for the ride. And this process is not just how the Harlem Shake got to Hong Kong, it’s how we—all of us—got to now.
This has not been an easy journey. A great many of our mass migrations began with people fleeing from danger, disaster, and all the unspeakable horrors we now know as “history.” Yet, despite originating in strife and tragedy, in the long run, migration has a positive impact on culture. In their book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, Oxford’s Ian Goldin and Geoffrey Cameron explain it this way:
The history of human communities and world development highlights the extent to which migration has been an engine of social progress. By viewing our collective past through the lens of migration, we can appreciate how the movement of people across cultural frontiers has brought about the globalized and integrated world we inhabit today.… As people moved they have encountered new environments and cultures that compel them to adapt and innovate novel ways of doing things. The development of belief systems and technologies, the spread of crops and production methods, have often arisen out of the experiences of, or encounters with, migrants.
Migration, as Golding and Cameron recount, isn’t just people on the march, it’s ideas on the move. It is, as it has always been, a major driver of progress. Migration is an innovation accelerant.
A few years back, a Stanford economist named Petra Moser (now at NYU) decided to try to quantify the impact of this acceleration. It was something of a personal inquiry. “More than half of my colleagues at Stanford are immigrants,” she once told reporters. “I [wanted] to find out how policies that alter the flow of such highly skilled immigrants affect science and innovation.”
To answer this question, Moser and her team turned to an old rumor—that German Jews who fled Nazi Germany had an outsized impact on innovation in the United States. If true, it was an outsized impact produced by an outsized exodus.
The outpouring began in April of 1933, when Adolph Hitler passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” banning all “non-Aryans” from government employment. Tens of thousands lost their jobs: firefighters, cops, teachers, and, most important for this discussion, academics. Only two months after Hitler became chancellor, the writing was on the wall. Over the next decade, more than 133,000 German Jews fled for America. In context, it’s as if every living soul in Charleston, South Carolina, relocated to Texas or, it would be, if the population of South Carolina also included Albert Einstein and five other Nobel Laureates.
To measure the impact of this influx, Petra Moser started with chemistry patents. Then, she expanded into nearly every technical field, measuring the number of patents applied for and received from 1920 to 1970, tracking the impact of migration through the records of more than a half-a-million inventions.
What did she find? That migration is an innovation accelerant on par with nearly every force we’ve so far discussed. In every field entered by German Jews, she found a 31 percent increase in patents. Back then, as anti-Semitism was rampant in the United States, a great many of these immigrants were prohibited from working in their chosen professions. When Moser and her team adjusted the data to account for this fact, they found that émigrés actually accounted for a stunning 70 percent patent increase.
While Moser’s work confirmed the rumors, and gave us a different way to look at both the power of immigration and this extraordinary period in history, it’s also worth noting what’s not extraordinary—that migration drives innovation. This same pattern continues today. A 2012 study by the Partnership for a New American Economy, for example, found that three out of four patents issued to America’s top ten patent-producing universities have at least one foreign-born inventor.
A different look at this same trend comes via “product reallocation,” which describes the rate at which new goods and services enter the market and force old ones to exit, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Far more than patents, researchers consider product reallocation the gold standard for innovative impact.
A few years ago, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, found a direct link between migration and this gold standard. By tracking the product reallocation rate for every American company that hired a highly skilled foreign-born worker between 2001 and 2014, they found a very clear signal. Companies with high-skilled foreigners saw an increase in both their rates of innovation and the impact those innovations had on the market: A 10 percent rise in skilled foreigners on the payroll led to a 2 percent increase in product reallocation. And this was true regardless of how much the company spent on research and development.
What’s true for migration’s impact on invention is also true for entrepreneurship. While much has been made about immigrants taking work away from citizens, the data shows the opposite. Rather than stealing jobs, they are far more likely to create new ones.
In America, immigrants are twice as likely to start a new business than natives, and are responsible for 25 percent of all new jobs. Between 2006 and 2012, 33 percent of venture-backed companies that went public had at least one immigrant founder. Among Fortune 500 companies, 40 percent were founded by immigrants or their children. In 2016, half of all unicorns—those rare startups valued at more than $1 billion—were founded by immigrants, and each provided at least 760 new jobs.
And why does this matter so much?
Two reasons. First, the challenges outlined in the previous chapter are going to require significant innovation. We’ll need new ideas to counter environmental and existential risks and new jobs to replace the ones that robots and AI are about to make obsolete. To implement those ideas, we’ll also need greater global collaboration and cooperation, and a deep empathy that crosses borders, cultures, and continents. And thanks to five of the greatest migrations the world has yet seen, we’ll soon see all of this and more.
In this chapter, as we widen our view from the next decade to the century that follows, we’re about to witness mass migration on a massive scale. In some cases, we’re moving for familiar reasons—to avoid environmental disaster and chase economic opportunity—but in shorter time frames and greater numbers than anything yet seen. In others, we’re crossing borders we’ve never crossed before. Moving off world and into outer space; moving out of regular reality and into virtual reality; moving, if the cutting-edge of brain-computer-interface development continues apace, out of individual consciousness and into collective consciousness, a technologically enabled hive mind, or, for those who speak “Trekkie,” a kinder, gentler Borg.
So ladies and gentleman, fasten your seatbelts and please keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Migration is a serious accelerant. And over the next hundred years, thanks to five great migrations, we are about to play now-you-see-it, now-you don’t with the world as we know it.
While the last chapter examined technological ways to mitigate climate change, this one acknowledges that our ability to implement these solutions at scale is nowhere near where it needs to be. And make no mistake, when the weather shifts, people shift with it.
Estimates of this impact are startling. And climbing. In 1990, the very first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that even a slight rise in sea levels could produce “tens of millions of environmental refugees.” In 1993, Oxford scientist Norman Myers controversially updated the IPCC’s prediction, arguing that climate change could displace as many as 200 million people by 2050. By decade’s end, as Mark Levine explained in Outside magazine: “The weather [had] come to assume the shape of our collective anxieties, our fantasies about technology, nature, retribution, inevitability.… We have overstepped, we whisper, we have changed the weather. Now the weather is going to change us.”
How much will it change us? In a 2015 meta-analysis of all available data, Climate Central, an independent group of leading scientists and journalists, reported that even if we manage to halt warming at two degrees, extreme weather will still displace 130 million people. If we don’t? Climate Central’s prognosis isn’t good: “Carbon emissions causing 4 degrees C of warming—what business-as-usual points toward today—could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people.”
To figure out what this level of displacement actually looks like, Climate Central also made a series of maps depicting the effects of global warming on every coastal nation and mega-city on the planet. Unless you’re a fish, the news is not good.
With four degrees warming, in many of the world’s mega-cities—London, Hong Kong, Rio, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, Calcutta, etc.—swimming becomes the fastest way to get from point A to point B. Entire island nations vanish forever. In America, twenty million people end up underwater. In Washington, DC, sea levels reach the Pentagon. And if you thought real estate in New York was expensive today, just wait until everything south of Wall Street disappears.
Beyond the deluge, global warming also puts the ancient nemesis of drought on the horizon. Drought drove us out of Africa some seventy thousand years ago, and is still driving us today. Syria has the highest number of refugees in the world, and it’s partially because of drought. In Europe, even if we halt warming at two degrees, the Mediterranean will continue to dry, with Italy, Spain, and Greece being especially hard hit. “In other words,” as journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan wrote in the Guardian, “the Mediterranean countries currently trying to cope with migrants from other parts of the world may eventually have a migrant crisis of their own. One day there could conceivably be Italians and Greeks in Calais, as their own countries become even hotter and more arid.”
In historical terms, the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan is considered the greatest forced migration in history, upending some 18 million people. Even if we put climate migration at the low end of the prediction spectrum—meaning two degrees warming and 130 million displaced—we’re still looking at a global reshuffling seven times larger than anything seen before.
Yet climate migration is a peculiar kind of forced migration, as we ourselves are doing the forcing. The cost in both hard dollars and human suffering is much higher than we should be willing to pay. With a population of 38 million, Tokyo is the largest mega-city on Earth. Consider what it would cost to relocate fifteen Tokyos. Now consider that this is an entirely voluntary expense.
As our prior chapter explored, we have a great many of the strategies and technologies required to address climate change. Whatever it might cost us to implement these solutions, it’s going to be a whole lot cheaper than finding new homes for 700 million people. Either way, in the long run, as the weather sends us hither and yon, the rate of innovation will, as it has always done, continue to climb.
The immense scale of climate migration—those 700 million on the move—represents the largest demographic reshuffle in history. Yet, measured against our second torrent, it’s barely a trickle. As over the next few decades, damn near everyone is moving downtown.
Three hundred years ago, 2 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Two hundred years ago, it was 10 percent. But the Industrial Revolution’s steam-powered punch forever altered those numbers. Between 1870 and 1920, 11 million Americans left the country for the city. In Europe, 25 million more crossed an ocean to settle, predominantly, in US cities. By 1900, 40 percent of the United States had urbanized. By 1950, it was 50 percent. By the turn of the millennium, 80 percent.
The rest of the world wasn’t far behind. Over the past fifty years, in low- to medium-income countries, urbanization has doubled, sometimes tripled—think Nigeria and Kenya. By 2007, the globe had crossed a radical threshold: Half of us now lived in cities. Along the way, we got cities on steroids. In 1950, only New York and Tokyo housed 10 million residents, which is the figure required for “mega-city” status. By 2000, there were over eighteen mega-cities. Today, it’s thirty-three. Tomorrow?
Tomorrow is when the numbers go crazy. In fact, we have a new word for the crazy, a “hyper-city,” a locale with a population above 20 million. By comparison, during the French Revolution, the world’s entire urban population was less than 20 million. By 2025, Asia alone will house ten, maybe eleven hyper-cities.
And we’re going to need ’em.
By 2050, some 66 to 75 percent of the world will have urbanized. With over 9 billion expected by then, this is the growth spurt to end all growth spurts. It’s an exodus three times larger than the one about to be produced by climate change, the real largest migration in history, a mass movement some 2.5 billion strong.
And when the masses move, they move masses.
By 2050, Tokyo loses its title, as Delhi is expected to become the world’s most populous town. And China out-urbanizes India, adding three hundred new million-plus cities and two mega-cities. Africa just explodes. From Cairo through the Congo, the continent’s urban population grows 90 percent by 2050. By century’s end, Lagos, Nigeria, could be home to 100 million.
Add it all together, every week from now until 2050, a million people move downtown. University of Toronto urban studies professor Richard Florida calls this the “central crisis of our time.” Like any crisis, this one brings both opportunity and danger.
First the upside.
From an economic perspective, cities are good for business. In 2016, the Brookings Institute examined the 123 largest metro economies in the world. While housing only 13 percent of the planet’s population, they produced almost one-third of its economic output. The following year, the National Bureau of Economic Research took a second look at this relationship between productivity and population density. They found the same pattern: more people, more productivity.
London and Paris, for example, are significantly more productive than the rest of Britain and France. In America, our hundred largest cities are 20 percent more productive than all others. In Uganda, urban workers are 60 percent more productive than rural ones. Shenzhen’s GDP, meanwhile, is three times larger than the rest of China.
Density also drives innovation. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that every time the population of a city doubles, its rate of innovation, as measured in number of patents, increases by 15 percent. In fact, in West’s research, no matter the city studied, as population density increases, so do wages, GDP, and quality-of-life factors like the number of theaters and restaurants.
And, as cities grow, they require less, not more, resources. Double the size of a metropolis, and everything from the number of gas stations to the amount of heat needed in the winter—only increases by 85 percent. Turns out, larger, denser cities are more sustainable than smaller cities, small towns, and suburbs. Why? Travel distances drop, shared transportation rises, and less infrastructure—hospitals, schools, garbage collection—is required. The result is that cities are cleaner, more energy efficient, and emit less carbon dioxide.
And smart cities could take this further. A 2018 McKinsey study found smart city solutions could reduce urban greenhouse gases some 15 percent, solid waste by 30 to 130 kilograms per person per year, and save water—some twenty-five to eighty gallons per person per day. In fact, using today’s technology, we could achieve 70 percent of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals merely by transitioning to smart cities.
Now the downside: Calamity is a definite possibility. Unplanned urbanization is a fantastic recipe for crime, disease, the cycle of poverty, and environmental devastation. Yet, as this book makes clear, our tools are equal to those challenges. The tricky part is matching visionary technology with plain old vision—good governance and civic cooperation. Get it right and urbanization becomes one of the most effective tactics in our fight against many of today’s pressing problems. Get it wrong? Then the largest migration in history will produce the biggest messopolis in history.
By the numbers, the 12 million Africans uprooted by the slave trade, the 18 million people rerouted by the division of India and Pakistan, and the 20 million rearranged on Europe’s chessboard in the years following World War II were history’s three biggest forced relocations. Each was propelled by a familiar driver: economics (and depersonalization), religion, and politics, respectively. Each reshuffled the world. Yet their combined impact will soon be dwarfed by a new exodus, the first to be triggered solely by technology.
Our next migration begins with the flick of a switch.
Sometime over the next few years, someone, somewhere, will jack themselves into the Matrix and never look back. Welcome to the strangest mass exit yet encountered: our migration from normal reality into virtual reality.
Our bags are already packed. Globally, video games consume three billion hours a week. In America, digital media devours eleven hours a day. Internet gaming disorder is a recognized mental health condition, and tales of excess are myriad. In 2005, the BBC reported that a South Korean man died after spending fifty consecutive hours playing an online video game. His demise was the first of many. In 2014, the Guardian broke news of a couple who left their three-month-old baby to starve to death while they raised a virtual baby online at a local internet café. In Japan, there’s even a word for it: hikikomori, the lost generation, the invisible youth, the nearly 1 million teenagers who have locked themselves in their rooms and only venture out online.
These people are migratory pioneers. They’re setting up beachheads for virtual exploration. But over the next few decades, two factors will amplify this influx. Let’s call them psychology and opportunity.
We’ll start with psychology. While all previous migrations have been triggered by external drivers, or things happening in the world, this next one will be triggered by internal drivers, psychological drivers, or things happening in our brains. This next migration begins with our own addictive neurochemistry, against which there is no known defense.
Video games are addictive. At the root of this addiction is the thrill ride known as dopamine, one of the brain’s primary pleasure drugs. We feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take a risk, expect a reward, or encounter novelty. Once hardwired into a reward loop—meaning, once our brain establishes a link between an activity and dopamine—the desire to get more of this chemical becomes our overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, by way of comparison, is one of the most addictive substances on Earth, yet much of what it does is flood the brain with dopamine.
Video games are chock-full of risk, reward, and novelty—they’re dopamine dispensers dressed up like joysticks. But it’s not just video games. When your phone buzzes with a message, that urge to see what it says, that’s dopamine too. The little rush of pleasure you get from checking that message, dopamine as well. Nearly all the major uses of the internet—gaming, surfing, social media, texting, sexting, and porn—are dopamine drivers. Yet none of these drive dopamine like VR.
Research shows that the immersive nature of the virtual environment spikes dopamine to heights typically unattainable by traditional video games or any other kind of digital media. While numbers vary slightly, most researchers believe that video games are truly addictive to about 10 percent of the population. Virtual reality will significantly increase that percentage. “Facebook is an addictive technological drug that, like every drug, gives people temporary pleasure and, ultimately, causes people to become psychiatrically ill,” psychiatrist Keith Ablow recently explained in an article for Fox News. “Oculus Rift will make matters worse.”
Yet dopamine is merely one of the brain’s major reward chemicals. There’s also norepinephrine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin to consider. All are massively pleasurable. Digital media isn’t incredibly effective at producing any beyond dopamine, but the immersive nature of VR makes it able to trigger all six. It’s the full cocktail of feel-good neurochemistry, hard drugs delivered by headset—and only the start of this story.
The next part emerges out of research into flow states. For those unfamiliar, flow is technically defined as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” It’s a state of peak performance, and part of what produces this state are all six of the brain’s pleasure chemicals. This is why researchers consider flow to be one of the most addictive experiences available. Yet it’s also one of the most meaningful. In over fifty years of research, the people who score off the charts for deep meaning and overall life satisfaction are the people with the most flow in their lives.
While video games can drive users into flow, the immersive nature of VR makes the technology significantly better suited for it. This means, as flow science and virtual reality continue to converge, we’ll soon gain the ability to create an alternative reality that is both more pleasurable and more meaningful than regular reality. Now hold on to this idea for a moment, as we explore the opportunity side of this story. Three opportunities in particular: jobs, education, and sex.
On the jobs front, we already know there’s economic possibility tucked inside of virtual reality. Second Life was the first virtual world. Back in 2006, BusinessWeek put on the cover real estate tycoon Anshe Chung, who, through deal-making within Second Life, became the first real-world millionaire to earn her fortune entirely in the virtual. We’ve seen similar profiteering inside of video games and social media, and virtual reality will bring more of the same. Which is to say, if robots and AI start to take a lot of our jobs over the next few decades, then the one-two punch of a shrinking job market in regular reality and an exploding job market in virtual reality makes for a potent migratory impetus.
The second trend is education. VR lets us create distributed, customized, accelerated learning environments. Whether it’s our burgeoning global population looking for an education or our suddenly techno-unemployed population looking for retraining, we’re seeing a force in the making. VR’s ability to drive people into flow makes this even more potent, as the state amplifies our ability to take in and retain new information. Research conducted by the Department of Defense, for example, found soldiers in flow could learn 230 percent faster than normal. This is also why, in Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel Ready Player One—where much of the world has already moved into VR—education was the primary driver of that migration.
Our final opportunity is sex. From VCRs to the internet, nearly every major communication technology has been driven forward by pornography. VR is clearly the next wave. Yet VR, augmented by haptics, makes pornography a multi-sensory experience. For the first time ever, you can look and you can touch—which brings with it a much bigger cocktail of addictive neurochemistry.
Plus, it’s more than porn. It’s also social media. Imagine VR Tinder, or the ability to sext your partner actual sensations. Stanford emeritus professor of psychiatry Al Cooper, who conducted one of the largest and most detailed studies of cybersex, described the Web as “the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity.” According to his research, two hundred thousand Americans are already digital sex addicts. Globally, that number creeps into the millions. If you consider that VR sex is better at producing dopamine than digital sex, then you begin to understand that there’s another migratory driver here—one that mega-taps a primal evolutionary impulse.
Added together, our three largest migrations—the slave trade, the bifurcation of India and Pakistan, and the diaspora of post–WWII Europe—produced a combined 44.5 million exiles. Yet 321 million Americans already spend eleven hours a day online, and VR’s neurochemical cocktail will definitely increase that figure. Now toss in serious human motivators like meaning, mastery, money, and sex, and the pull becomes much stronger. It adds up into another great migration, an exodus of consciousness, and one only now just beginning to get under way.
“[The] Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever,” said Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the late 1800s. Tsiolkovsky was a true visionary. Considered the father of space flight, he’s the Russian scientist credited with first dreaming up airlocks, steering thrusters, multistage boosters, space stations, the closed-cycle biological systems needed to provide food and oxygen for space colonies, and much more. Over the course of his career, he published over ninety papers on these topics, envisioning nearly every aspect of what it would take to conquer this final frontier except, of course, what it actually took to conquer this final frontier: competition.
In the 1960s, what first drove us off-world was the messy showdown between ideologies and ideologues known as “United States v. Soviet Union.” And it’s competition that’s still driving us today. Only now, while a handful of governments remain in this game—the US v. China, for example—the real story is a rivalry of tech titans: Jeff Bezos v. Elon Musk.
Each of these men has a deep desire to move us out of our cradle and into the stars, to open the space frontier and “back up the biosphere,” creating a second human civilization in space in case things don’t go so well here on Earth. And it’s these dreams and this competition that has become a force of its own, both a great big push off-world and the only migration in history that comes with its own Twitter battle.
@JeffBezos, Nov. 24, 2015: The rarest of beasts—a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy. Check out video: bit.ly/OpyW5N
@elonmusk, Nov. 24, 2015: Not quite “rarest.” SpaceX Grasshopper did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around.
We’ll start with Bezos, whose passion for space began in high school. Both a child of the Apollo era and a serious Star Trek fan, Bezos’s valedictorian speech focused on “a future where millions of people are living and working [off-world],” and closed with the line “Space, the final frontier, meet me there.” In college at Princeton, Bezos was the chapter president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). His time there overlapped with the late physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, the founder of the Space Studies Institute. In the early 1980s, O’Neill asked a key question of his students: “Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to live while they expand into the solar system?” Eventually determining that the answer was no, O’Neill instead proposed we build massive rotating cylinders, now known as “O’Neill colonies,” manufactured from resources already outside the deep gravity of planets like Earth or Mars, manufactured, specifically, with materials gathered from the surface of the Moon.
These space lessons never left Bezos. After college, they helped carry him from Wall Street to Amazon as the first step in what he’s jokingly called “a simple two-step plan. First make billions, then open the space frontier.”
Once he did make billions, Bezos plunged them back into space. In 2000, he founded Blue Origin, committing a billion dollars a year to the project. His initial goal, then announced, was the construction of rockets capable of shooting people and payloads off Earth, into space, and, eventually, to the Moon—which he still believes is the best launch spot for our colonization of the cosmos.
“We were given a gift,” said Bezos at a 2019 event in Washington, DC, “this nearby body called the Moon. It is a good place to begin manufacturing in space due to its lower gravity.… Getting resources from the Moon takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth. That is a huge lever.”
As the next step, Bezos announced the Blue Moon Lunar Lander, which would travel to the Moon aboard his reusable New Glenn rocket, depositing 3.6 metric tons of rovers, cargo, and humans on the lunar surface. He also argued that we have no choice in this matter. “There is no Plan B. We have to save this planet. [Yet] we shouldn’t give up a future for our grandchildren’s grandchildren of dynamism and growth. [In space], we can have both.”
Bezos then resurfaced O’Neill’s work, proclaiming that Blue Origin’s post–lunar landing vision was the development of O’Neill colonies, each supporting an independent population of 1 million, or one of the big drivers of our next great migration. “The Earth is the gem of our solar system,” he explained. “It should be zoned residential and light industry. Heavy industry should be moved into space… where there’s unimaginable room.… The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be.”
And even though there’s a heathy rivalry here, Elon Musk doesn’t disagree: “History is going to bifurcate along two directions: One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event… the alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanetary species. I think the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species, than if we’re not.”
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk sold his first computer company at age twelve. After earning a degree from Wharton, then dropping out of Stanford’s PhD program, he repeated his software success with first a $307 million sale of Zip2, next a $1.5 billion sale of PayPal. Finally, with what he considered sufficient resources to make a difference, Musk set out to pursue what he considered the two missions most critical to our survival: breaking our fossil fuel addiction with a thriving solar economy—i.e., his work with Tesla and Solar Cities—and making humanity a multiplanetary species. But unlike Bezos’s lunar launch point for this migration, Musk’s obsession has always been Mars.
In 2001, a year before the sale of PayPal, Musk came up with the idea of sending a plant—plant seeds, really—to Mars. In his “Mars Oasis” project, his spaceship would include a sealed chamber with an Earth-like atmosphere, a healthy collection of seeds, and a nutrient gel to speed their growth. “When you’d land,” explained Musk, “you hydrate the gel and you have a little greenhouse on Mars.”
Musk wanted to take photos of the plant growing on the surface of the red planet, an image so impactful he felt sure it would inspire the US government to fund missions to Mars and establish a permanent human colony there. But when he investigated the cost of buying the rockets required to send his greenhouse up, up, and away, he realized the available launch options were way too primitive and expensive to ever facilitate a human colonization of the stars.
To solve these problems, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. In June 2008, after several spectacular failures and a close brush with bankruptcy, Falcon 1 got off the ground and into orbit. This success was followed by dozens more, each cheaper than the last. Next came reusability, a rocket that could take off and land without destroying itself and a longtime dream of the airspace industry. Finally came Falcon Heavy, the largest rocket on the planet, which, in early 2018, launched Musk’s cherry-red Tesla roadster past Mars and on a trajectory toward the asteroid belt. Finally, SpaceX announced they would soon stop production of the Falcon vehicles—which lacked the oomph to send humans to Mars—and instead began work on “Starship.”
Musk views the establishment of a Mars colony as a contingency plan for humanity and a problem to be solved this decade. Starship test flights are already under way and his stated goal is to have humans on the planet’s surface before 2030, with a full city up and running by 2050. To achieve this, SpaceX has scheduled ten major launches between 2027 and 2050, one every twenty-two to twenty-four months, when the distance between the Earth and Mars is at its shortest.
The current plan goes like this: A Starship gets launched into orbit around Earth, then several tanker Starships would launch as well, meeting up with the first one to top up its fuel. From there, these rockets would head straight toward Mars, ferrying a crew and roughly a hundred passengers at a time. The cost per person for a one-way ticket? Musk thinks about $500,000, or, as he said: “low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth and move to Mars.”
One thing for sure, whether it’s Musk or Bezos who wins this particular space race, as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky also pointed out, a great many of the things that humanity has come to prize here on Earth—metals, minerals, energy, fresh water, prime real estate, endless adventure, lust, love, meaning, and purpose—they’re all in near infinite quantities in space. And it is the quest to claim this treasure—today being played out by battling billionaires—that is blasting us out of our cradle and into the stars, on the front end of another of this century’s great migrations, our first real foray across this, the final frontier.
In 2015, Harvard chemist Charles Lieber was trying to solve a difficult problem in the new field of neuro-modulation. Over the past few decades, deep brain stimulators had been developed to help sufferers of Parkinson’s disease. While the patient remains awake, a hole is drilled through the skull and a device that sends electrical pulses to areas of the brain responsible for movement is inserted. It’s become almost a routine procedure. Over a hundred thousand devices have been implanted, and for patients who have exhausted all other medical options, deep brain stimulation remains the only way to improve motor control and lessen tremors.
Unfortunately, there are side effects. Weird side effects. The tendency to develop a compulsive gambling problem is the most frequent issue. Workaholics becoming couch potatoes overnight is another. Chronic depression is a third. The reason? Size.
If they had their way, neurosurgeons would like to impact the brain at a single neuron level, but today’s deep brain stimulators are too big for this precision. Trying to target individual neurons with today’s implants is, as MIT professor of materials science and engineering Polina Anikeeva pointed out in her 2015 TED Talk, “akin to trying to play Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with fingers the size of a pickup truck.”
Making matters more complicated, these devices require surgery to install and, as the brain treats them like foreign invaders, serious medicine afterward. There’s also the issue of design. The body is a flexible 3-D environment, but most of today’s brain implants—be they deep brain stimulators or otherwise—are inflexible 2D devices that have more in common with traditional silicon chips than anything that exists naturally in the body. In the squishy, hot, and wet of the brain, it’s no wonder signals get crossed and side effects occur.
Charles Lieber, though, took a very different approach. To help regenerate bone, doctors often implant a “bioscaffold” into damaged areas to provide a support structure for new tissue to grow around. About five years ago, Lieber decided to try to build a microscopic bioscaffold made from electronics. He used photolithography to etch a four-layered probe one layer at a time, creating a nanoscale metal mesh with sensors capable of recording brain activity.
After rolling that mesh into a tight cylinder, Lieber sucked it up into a syringe, then injected it into the hippocampus of a mouse. Within an hour, the mesh had unfurled into its original shape, doing no damage to tissue along the way. The result: Mouse-Brain TV. Lieber could monitor the activity of the mouse’s brain, in real time, in a living animal. The mouse’s immune system treated the implant as friend not foe. Instead of attacking the mesh as a foreign invader, neurons attached themselves to it and began multiplying.
In a separate experiment, Lieber injected the mesh into the retina of a mouse, where it once again unfurled, doing no damage to the eye along the way. The result is a device that neither impairs sight nor blocks light, yet remains capable of recording mouse vision, at a single neuron level, across sixteen channels at once, for years on end. The work brought accolades to the Lieber Group and helped the technique spread like wildfire. How-to tutorials are available online. As are plenty of videos of Elon Musk describing the next step in the evolution of the idea, what he’s termed “a neural lace,” an injectable brain-computer interface, an “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interface to connect humans to computers.”
Brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) are the ultimate tale of convergence. They sit at the intersection of nearly everything in this book, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and materials science—which, as we’ve seen, are rapidly becoming all the same industry. There’s also quantum computing, which gives us the ability to model complex environments like the human brain, and artificial intelligence, which allows us to interpret what we’ve modeled. And high-bandwidth networks that allow us to upload neurological signals into the cloud. In fact, packed into this single advancement, we find most of our advancements.
If we consider our development of exponential technologies to be among the leading examples of human intelligence, then BCIs are the crowning achievement of those examples. They might also be a way to survive our own success, as, in the minds of many, BCIs are the upgrade we desperately need to fully participate in an AI-dominated world.
The leading proponents of this view are Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson, who have both created companies, Neuralink and Kernel respectively, to speed development along. But everyone from Facebook to DARPA has gotten involved. Facebook wants neurotech that allows you to think instead of type, replacing the keyboard with the mind as the ultimate social media interface. DARPA sees BCIs as a next-generation battlefield technology, and wants one that can record 1 million neurons simultaneously while stimulating a hundred thousand. There are also a multitude of startups crowding into the space, from health and wellness to education and entertainment.
And progress has been made.
Over the past decade, utilizing EEG-based brain-computer interfaces—which require no surgery to install and instead just sit atop the head like a crown of electrodes—researchers have performed real miracles. BCIs have allowed paraplegics to walk again. Stroke victims, paralyzed for years, are regaining the use of their limbs. Epileptics have been cured of seizures. Quadriplegics can now control cursors with their mind. And, piling atop Dracula, flying cars, and personal robots in our list of childhood fantasies turned into realities, telepathy is also now possible.
Back in 2014, a team of Harvard researchers sent words from mind to mind via the internet. Technically known as “brain-to-brain communication,” this was an example of the long-distance version—with one subject in France, the other in India. The researchers used a wireless, internet-connected EEG headset as their transceiver and a transcranial magnetic stimulator—which sends weak magnetic pulses into the brain—as a receiver. The subjects didn’t exactly get thoughts, but rather could accurately read flashes of light that corresponded to the message.
And that was then. By 2016, we were using EEG headsets to play video games telepathically, and by 2018, we were piloting drones with our thoughts. The next step is figuring out how to seamlessly link our brains to the internet via the cloud—which is why Lieber’s injectable mesh matters so much. The general thinking is that neurotech sitting atop the head won’t be able to capture signals at any useful resolution, while devices that require surgery to implant—however minor the procedure becomes—remain too risky for widespread adoption. But an injectable neural-lace, to borrow Musk’s term, solves these problems and then some.
And this brings us to our final migration, a sojourn out of our normal brain-based singular consciousness and into a cloud-based collective consciousness, both a hive mind and a reminder that the greatest journeys are often inward toward our psyche, rather than outward toward the stars. Economic considerations alone, as both Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson have argued, necessitate this shift. In a world where humans are competing with artificial intelligence, the ancient motivator of “paying the bills” comes into play.
But there are other motivators at work.
Connecting our brains to the cloud provides us with a massive boost in processing power and memory, and, at least theoretically, can give us access to all the other minds online. Think of it this way: Computers, on their own, are interesting. But connect a bunch of those computers together, wire up a network, and you get the beginnings of the World Wide Web. Now imagine what happens when those computers are actually brains, which are already the most complicated machines in the known universe. And imagine that we don’t just get to transmit thoughts, but feelings, experiences, and maybe, just maybe, meaning. If this were possible, would we hang on to our singular consciousness for long, or would we start to migrate into the collective mind that’s evolving online?
Before you answer, consider three more details. First, we humans are an extremely social species. Loneliness, according to too many studies, is one of the great and deadly terrors of the modern era. The desire for connection is a foundational human driver, an intrinsic motivator in the psychological parlance. But it’s not the only one in play.
The closest humans have come to a hive mind is the experience known as “group flow,” the shared, collective version of a flow state. Group flow is a team performing at its very best: an incredible brainstorming session, a fantastic fourth-quarter comeback, a band coming together and blowing the roof off the auditorium. It’s also considered the most pleasurable state on Earth. When psychologists ask people to rank their favorite experiences, group flow always tops that list. So the opportunity to have this experience essentially on demand will be a potent migratory driver as well.
Finally, there’s evolution to consider.
Since the origin of life on this planet, the trajectory of evolution has always been from the individual to the collective. We went from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms to the massive multi-cellular organisms known as human beings. This is the typical thrust of natural selection, and why should today’s selections be any different? There’s little reason to believe that humanity has reached the pinnacle of intelligence, of development, of possibility, that reality television, that our megacities of tangled steel and endless asphalt, represent the best that life on Earth has to offer. Rather, we are merely a point on a spectrum, the ultimate “You are here” arrow.
There is, however, strong evidence that we won’t be here for long. Neuralink has a plan for a two-gigabit-per-second wireless connection from the brain to the cloud and wants to begin human trials by the end of 2021. More and more—as this, and so many of the discoveries discussed in this book illustrate—the once slow and passive process of natural selection is being transformed into one rapid and proactive: evolution by human direction. This means, over the next century, technological acceleration may do more than just disrupt industries and institutions, it may actually disrupt the progress of biologically based intelligence on Earth. This break will birth a new species, one progressing at exponential speeds, both a mass migration and a meta-intelligence, and, ultimately, here at the tail end of our tale, yet another reason the future is faster than we think.
A meta-intelligence would be quite the innovation accelerant. If solitary minds working in collectivist organizations—aka, business, culture, and society—produced converging exponential technologies—aka, the fastest innovation accelerant the world has yet seen—imagine what a hive-minded planet—aka, a kinder, gentler Borg—might be capable of creating. Put differently: How fast is our future if we’re all thinking together?
And if you’ve come out the other side of all this thinking or feeling a little unsettled, there’s actually a technical term for this as well: loss aversion. One of our most potent cognitive biases, loss aversion is the evolutionarily programmed suspicion that if I take away whatever you have today, whatever I replace it with tomorrow will be a whole lot worse. This is why people stay stuck in ruts, it’s among the main reasons companies have such difficulty innovating, and why cultural change is so molasses slow.
Yet, who knows, maybe our hive mind will get us past this particular blind spot, but, until then, that sense of converging exponentials meets five great migrations meets holy-shit vertigo that you might be feeling is perfectly natural. As is the trepidation, the excitement, the unlocking of imagination. We feel it too. And all we can really say is what we’ve been saying to each other along the way: Take a deep breath and don’t blink, because, ready or not, here comes tomorrow.