Entropy is correct, on my view. Despite the invention of transistors and other space-saving and energy saving devices, our demand for energy just keeps increasing. Consider what future, human, basic ecological niches, or as I prefer, adaptive zones, will be like. Think about what is common to most and perhaps all “new” adaptive zones: the presence of unexploited free energy (i.e., energy available to perform work). Consider the transition from water to land. Plants originated in the oceans, but there was all this unexploited solar energy falling onto the continents, creating an opportunity for land plants to evolve. Once land plants became established, this in turn created an opportunity for land-based herbivores, that in turn created an opportunity for land-based predators.
Arguably, the human species has already entered three new adaptive zones since it left the jungle for the savanna. First, humans learned how to make stone tools and to control fire. This allowed them to hunt big game, and to process hides into clothes and shelters, allowing the colonization of colder climates, and fire expanded the range of foods humans could eat. The capacity to gather more free energy took another quantum leap when humans mastered agriculture and tamed wild beasts of burden. The third quantum leap in our capacity to gather free energy occurred with the advent of the industrial revolution. Thus, physicist Michio Kaku has argued that the future stages of human civilization will be marked by ever increasing capacity to gather free energy and channel it to our ends, regardless of the actual details of human evolution. That is, regardless of whether humans in the future remain pretty much the same as they are now, or genetically engineer themselves to have 500 IQ’s and 1,000 year life spans, or whether we turn into human/machine cyborgs, or whether we are replaced entirely by inorganic, artificially intelligent robots, we can be sure that the future adaptive zones that humans or their descendants will occupy (assuming we survive long enough) will involve quantum leaps in our ability to gather free energy.
According to Kaku, we are now in what he calls a Type 0 civilization. A type 1 civilization will be able to capture the free energy of an entire planet, and will have mastered the interplanetary environment. A type 2 civilization will be able to gather the free energy of entire solar systems, allowing the colonization of nearby star systems. And finally, a type 3 civilization will be capable of roaming entire galaxies. A type 1 civilization would be able to survive calamities natural or man-made limited to the Earth itself, but would still be vulnerable to nearby supernovae and gamma ray bursts, the impending collision with the Andromeda galaxy in 4 billion years, and the death of the Sun itself. Type 2 civilizations would have more survivability, and a type 3 civilization would be for practical purposes immortal—until, that is, the entire universe runs out of free energy.
Granted, we humans have our dark side, and we may cause our own extinction. On the bright side, it should be noted that human evolution seems to be accelerating. After 100,000 years of stone-age technology, it took only 10,000 years to reach the industrial revolution that began 200 years ago. Therefore, we can predict that humans will reach full type 1 status within the next 800 years or less. Indeed, considering that humans already co-opt 40% of Earth’s net primary productivity, that we have sent men to the Moon and probes to every planet except Pluto, and that we could—if we had the political will—manage the Earth’s atmosphere to maintain any desirable, global, average temperature, it would seem that we are already half-way to type 1 status. Michio Kaku himself has suggested that we will achieve type 1 status within a century—as long as we can stave off the terrorists who would have us return to a type -1 civilization.
An interesting suggestion; but how could biological-like evolution through natural selection occur at such tiny scales? Think about Von Neuman's essential elements for *any* self-replicating system. What would be the mode of heredity? What would the bodies be like? How do branes control other branes? Can branes make copies of themselves? What would an ecosystem in 11-dimensional hyperspace be like? If it really is possible for branes to be intelligent, space-faring creatures, then where are they?
