Physicists Predict the Future: Fusion Power, Androids, and Lunar Colonies Incoming

Forget about jetpacks. And we’re never going to see time travel, teleportation, spaceships with warp drives, or the inside of a worm hole. But cheer up, futurists—lifelike androids, nuclear fusion power, and lunar colonies are still in the cards.

Or at least so say the respondents to astrophysicist Tom Murphy’s thoroughly interesting—and entirely unscientific—survey of which sought-after advancements the future will actually likely bring. Murphy asked a bunch of physicists at top 20 universities whether they expect 20 ‘futuristic’ innovations (flying cars, terraforming, traveling to a black hole) to be widespread in the next 50, 500, 5,000 years—and what they expect will never move beyond the science fiction pages.

Murphy polled undergrads, grads, and faculty, and, as you’d expect, there was a statistical difference of opinion; the estimates grew more conservative the closer to tenure you get. But still; interesting results abound. For instance, while the physicists laugh off jetpacks, they’re bullish on self-driving cars: They’ll be here in 50 years, some of the smartest men around say. Check out Murphy’s first graph, which charts the responses to the first three items on the list: autopilot cars, jetpacks, and flying cars.

Oh yeah, here’s the answer key:

0- No Opinion
1- likely within 50 years
2 – likely within 500 years
3 – likely within 5000 years
4 – likely to happen for humans eventually
5 – unlikely to happen for humans
6 – < 1% likely to ever happen, or impossible

So autopiloted cars are coming, stat; physicists of every stripe agree. Jetpacks, not so much—though it’s interesting to see the hopeful impulses of the undergrads registered here, we were promised jetpacks, you know. Flying cars follow a similar pattern; the professors give them the axe.

Teleportation, warp drives, worm hole travel, visiting a black hole, and artificial gravity all get struck down as infeasible. But then we get here:

Lunar colonies, Martian colonies, and terraforming are within the realm of possibility—even just 5,000 years off—though opinions are deeply split on the latter. The other big surprise is fusion power, which the scientists say will be widespread in under 500 years. Anyhow. You really should spend some time sorting through Murphy’s findings for a more careful explanation of the results and their import. But, just for the fun of it, here’s the cheat sheet—the list of what the physicists see coming, and don’t: