This book reads like a compendium of essays. Well, it technically is. Some essays provide great insights into the topic, others are simply a recreation of secondary school composition pieces.
The section on the future of our planet – demographics, conservation and climate change was quite hard to get through because we are incessantly bombarded with information we already know.
The future of us – medicine, genetics and transhumanism is slightly more interesting, but the latter two uninsightful because even I as a layperson have come across these these topics in junior college. Nonetheless, I loved the chapter on medicine, especially given the current global climate of anxiety over the propagation of the COVID-19 disease.
I finally started to appreciate the book at the future of AI – quantum computing and the internet. However, while the topics are fascinating, there is something rather shallow inthe way the authors went about their exposition. The description of quantum mechanics and quantum computers were particularly horrible lmao I find the Jim Al-Khalili’s explanation of the topic in his penultimate chapter much more intelligible.
There’s also making the future – engineering, transportation and energy, which again I find shallow and uninspiring especially because they managed to lessen my intrigue on Elon Musk’s vision for the underground highway.
And finally, my favourite section: the far future – time travel, apocalypse and living in space, which is just fun to ponder and watch others ponder. With all the talks about the apocalypse and humans succumbing to every plausible means of extinction, I thought the idea for a back-up save file for human civilisation is very interesting. Much better than the short-term Y2K doomsday prep with fingers crossed for deus ex machina lmao. It seems that knowledge really is the key to human civilisation as we know it today.
Introduction
Yet even the best science fiction sometimes makes the error of imagining what technology will do to us, without recognizing how much technology responds to us. Technologies are rarely, if ever, truly foisted upon us, however much that might feel to be the case. They arrive because, as a society, we accept, welcome, and ultimately normalize them, often to the extent that they become more or less compulsory.
So futurology can and must force us to hold up a mirror to ourselves. I’d suggest that many of the forecasts in this book are better viewed not as what the future will be, but as what we yearn for it to become.
Medicine
Some 70 percent of infectious diseases have zoonotic origins.
Drug-resistant infections are likely to dominate medical headlines in coming decades. With overuse of antibiotics in humans and farmed animals leading to bacterial infections that cannot be treated, familiar procedures such as caesarean sections and hip operations could one day become extremely risky. Antibiotics are expensive and difficult to develop, but most patients need to take them for only a week or two, which means pharmaceutical companies have increasingly focused their research on other drugs instead. Tackling resistance to antibiotics will therefore require better stewardship of existing treatments, which means changing populations’ attitudes and behavior.
Bespoke medicine
Customized methods will become common in other areas of medicine, too. In 2015, US President Barack Obama launched the Precision Medicine Initiative. The aim was to develop treatments that accounted for a patient’s genetic profile, environment, and lifestyle, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. It was part of a wider trend in medicine, with methods increasingly focused on the specific patient as well as their condition. Although procedures like blood transfusions already account for individual variation to some extent (by considering blood type), these specific methods will use genome sequencing and other new tests to make it easier to predict how certain treatments may affect certain patients. For example, some cancer drugs are effective only against tumors with specific genetic characteristics. Similarly, a cystic fibrosis drug called Ivacaftor works for around 5 percent of patients with a certain genetic mutation.
Precision approaches will make medicine less reactive and more proactive. Instead of treating illness once it appears, detailed data will help us tackle risks before they become a problem. Genetic tests already make it possible to predict hereditary conditions, but these typically focus on a single harmful mutation, such as the BRCA1 gene mutation. If a woman has BRCA1, it means she has around a 65 percent risk of developing breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. In this situation, it is possible to reduce the risk through preemptive surgery.
Rather than just looking at specific genes, it will eventually become common to examine whole genomes. This will mean a lot of data: researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island have estimated that by 2025 human genome data will require more computer storage space than YouTube or Twitter. However, the cost of sequencing a genome doesn’t include the complexity of analyzing the data. Ideally, we’d have a simple set of rules that links a particular mutation in a gene to a particular condition. Unfortunately, if multiple genes are linked to a condition, or if the condition is rare, it is much harder to assess the risks involved. And that can make it tough to decide on preventative treatment.
To illustrate the difficulty of interpreting medical test results— whether genetic or otherwise—suppose there is a condition that affects 500 out of every 1 million people. There is also a test for the condition, which is 99 percent accurate. If you take this test and it comes back positive, what are the chances you will develop the condition? Remarkably, the answer is a mere 5 percent. This is because for every million people tested, we’d expect 495 to test positive and develop the condition (not the full 500 that will be affected because the test is only 99 percent accurate). Meanwhile, 1 percent of the remaining 999,500 people, or 9,995 people, who won’t get the condition will mistakenly be tested positive (again, due to the test being only 99 percent accurate). So, the total number of people who would test positive will be 495 + 9995. Of these, only the 495 (i.e., 5 percent) will actually have anything to worry about.
As genetic testing becomes more common, options may become more complex and the choices more difficult, particularly if there is limited treatment available. Would you want to know if you were at risk of developing an incurable condition? How would you handle the uncertainty of inconclusive test results?
The structure of society will affect our health in other ways, too. In 1970, only two urban areas had more than ten million inhabitants: Tokyo and New York. Fast-forward to 2017 and there are thirty-seven such “megacities.” Many people living in these cities do so in poverty, and this is likely to get worse in the coming years: the UN has estimated that up to two billion people could be living in slums by 2030. Infections like Ebola and dengue fever can spread quickly in these impoverished and densely populated environments, which can sometimes catch health agencies off guard. For decades Ebola wasn’t seen as a major health threat. It had caused two dozen small outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever in Central Africa, mostly in rural locations, but there was little suggestion that it could ever cause an epidemic. Then, in 2014, this same infection hit three cities in West Africa and behaved very differently. We may soon discover other such pathogens that struggle and stutter in rural locations, but spread quickly in built-up areas.
Large cities will bring other health risks as well. Research led by the US Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests that over 5.5 million people die early each year as a result of air pollution. More than half of these deaths are in China and India, home to twelve megacities between them. As well as getting larger, cities will also become more connected. Every day, over 100,000 flights depart from airports around the world. This is why the 2009 pandemic flu virus could circumnavigate the globe within weeks, and why that colistin-resistant strain of E. coli—first identified in China in late 2015—could crop up in Pennsylvania a few months later. The flight network is also changing the geometry of infection: Traditional world maps, which show distance as the crow flies, can give a misleading picture of how we are really connected, and how contagion might spread. Once flight paths are taken into account, some cities may be much closer (or farther) than they initially appear.
Cyber-Security
For both individuals and companies, there’s the risk that any connected device is a gateway for a hacker. Could a hacker take control of your home by hacking into your kettle? Could a government take control of another’s power plant by hacking into one of the connected machines? The answer to both of these questions is yes. One of the earliest major cyber hacking stories was Stuxnet in 2010, a worm virus written to very specifically target programmable logic controllers on the Iranian nuclear program’s centrifuges. The virus caused the centrifuges to tear themselves apart and was reported to have ruined almost one fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. In 2015, a cyberattack in Ukraine temporarily cut the power to eighty thousand customers. These two attacks suggest that the future may also see warfare being played out across the internet, and the IoT and Cloud may become weaponized by hostile governments.
Also in 2015, a group of hackers demonstrated taking control of a jeep on the freeway, having hacked in through the infotainment system. Since this “benevolent” hacking, the automotive industry has stepped up the efforts to protect connected vehicles from attack. The risk of a cyberattack to connected vehicles or homes, to national infrastructure such as power or water, or to key businesses, remains very real. Commentators say that this will be one of the ways that future wars are fought, so cybersecurity is likely to be a headline topic for decades to come.
It is also likely that the IoT will help to create a sharing economy—a world where ownership is less important. We already no longer own our music or movies, we just pay for services to access them. It is likely that we will also be sharing cars, kitchens, and even pets in the future. In South Korea, the shared living room is already thriving. As apartments are relatively small and young adults often live with their parents, there is a healthy trade in social spaces to rent by the hour so that young people can socialize in home-like spaces. It’s also possible that we will eat out more often, so the amount of space needed for a kitchen at home will be harder to justify. Future apartments may have many communal kitchens rather than a kitchen for every apartment. Parking garages in apartments built in California today are being designed with alternative future use such as gym or cinema in mind once shared cars are the norm. The sharing economy raises issues around the future of manufacturing—in theory, we will need less manufacturing if everyone is sharing. Our appetite for consumption of products may actually decrease as our consumption of services increases.
The original internet (known as DARPANet because it was developed under the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) was created to allow researchers to share resources freely. This philosophy continued when Tim Berners-Lee developed the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), which became what we now call the World Wide Web. Then, in the mid-1990s, the internet was commercialized and everything changed.
What about situations where humans cannot be involved directly? What about the Internet of Things—that growing army of unattended smart devices that communicate without any intervention from us? Fridges, kettles, and toasters will all be networked to provide ever more convenient features. While your networked toaster might not be worth hacking to plunder some valuable source of data, it can be forced to join an army of zombie devices in a botnet, ready to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks where so much useless data is sent to a system that the system can longer deal with legitimate users. The size of the Internet of Things (IoT) will be staggering; millions more devices will be linked together than are networked today, and hackers will be able to subvert the spare capacity of these IoT devices. We face the somewhat ludicrous situation where a country could be brought to its knees by its own domestic products.
We could go back to basics, the basics of the technology upon which the internet was built. It would be possible to change some of the underlying technology such that wherever you go on the internet you are clearly identified, as are those with whom you interact. If you receive an email you could be sure that it came from whomever it claims to be from. If a website was launching malicious software, it could be easily traced and blocked. If an attacker probed your system you would know exactly who it was and where it came from. This all assumes that we change over to what is known as Internet
Protocol version 6 (IPv6). It has existed since the 1990s and is probably running on your computer today, but every attempt to spread its use has been disappointing. Most seem content to stick with the original IPv4 despite its inherent problems.
You would not need a new computer, but to make it secure does require (a) everyone to adopt it and (b) everyone being willing to have a digital identity. And there’s the rub. Not everyone is willing to be identified online. People have become used to the internet as a place where they can roam free of the norms they may experience in their physical lives. We quite like being able to browse the mountain of websites in pseudo-anonymity. Some take this further and actively protect their anonymity through the use of software such as TOR (The Onion Router), which masks even their IPv4 address.
TOR was developed in part by the United States Navy with good intentions but has become infamous as the basis for running what are known as Hidden Services—websites that can only be reached by using the TOR browser and for which you cannot determine the physical location. This is what people refer to as the “Dark Web,” and it hosts sites that offer to sell you everything from drugs to components for weapons of mass destruction. The Dark Web has now been joined by a new form of anonymous virtual currency, the best known of which is Bitcoin. These are “cryptocurrencies” and are intended to be the equivalent of online cash: untraceable and easily transportable. It’s not surprising, then, that the European Police Office found that 40 percent of criminal-to-criminal money movements were done using this technology.
So, let’s suppose IPv6 and its security add-ons become the default basis for the internet. There might actually be some law-abiding users, as well as criminals, who wish to remain anonymous. Technologies like TOR might well persist (although they would require slightly different configurations), which seems to make introducing IPv6 pointless. However, the lack of success in introducing IPv6 and the security that can then be deployed with it has not stopped the enthusiasts. It will catch on, eventually. We might end up with a situation where we have a two-tier internet: those who are happy to be identified and potentially tracked and those who wish to remain outside this system. In some countries it will not be a choice, but where it is you could envision a walled garden within which you can operate free from fear of attack. But, if you viewed this walled garden as more of a gilded cage, you would be free to leave the walled garden and enter the remainder of the internet—a part of cyberspace rather like the Wild West. The choice would be yours, but you might find that if you have actively chosen to leave the sanctuary of the walled garden you might not be allowed back in. After all, if you live in a sterile zone you cannot leave and reenter without a whole series of checks being done to ensure you haven’t brought something nasty home with you.
AI
Some ambitious AI/AGI tasks may be so difficult that, even if they’re achievable in principle, they’re forever impossible in practice.
This is denied by people who believe in “the Singularity”—the imagined point that some AI scientists say is only twenty years ahead and at which AI will equal and then surpass human intelligence as machines rapidly, and intelligently, improve themselves. (The forecasts vary: Many AI scientists foresee the Singularity happening by the end of the century.) All our major problems, say some Singularity-believers, will be solved. War, poverty, famine, illness, even personal death: all banished.
This view is hugely controversial. Is it really credible that some non-human system could solve the political crises in the Middle East, for instance? That AI could ever do so is a belief that requires a leap of technological faith; the political sensitivities and historical background involved are far too complex and subtle for AI to cope with.
Another futuristic scenario foreseen by (some) Singularity believers is one in which “the robots take over,” with horrendous results for humanity. In this scenario, the super-intelligent AIs will follow their own goals relentlessly, perhaps greatly to our detriment. They needn’t (although they might) actually try to harm human beings. But, much as most humans are indifferent to the fate of ants, the super-intelligent AIs may harm or even destroy us if we get in their way. A future AI designed to manufacture paper clips, for instance, might grind up human bodies so as to extract the metallic atoms—the iron in our blood, for instance—that are usable in the production of paper clips.
There is a Turing Test competition (shown live on the Web) held every year at Bletchley Park, where Turing helped break the Germans’ Enigma code in the Second World War. The contestants hope to win the Loebner prize: $2,000 for the “best” entry each year—with $25,000 promised for “the first computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human’s,” and $100,000 for a human-seeming system possessing audio-visual capabilities as well as language.
As yet, the $25,000 remains unclaimed. No program has fooled the judges for the required 30 percent of the time. Admittedly, the Loebner competition was won in 2014 by a program that fooled 33 percent of the interrogators into thinking that it was a human being. However, the human being they had in mind (i.e., the choice they picked, out of the several offered to them by the test organizers) was a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy. In other words, the (English) language used by the computer was far from perfect. Its errors and clumsiness were forgiven by its human interlocutors, much as we naturally make allowances for the mistakes of foreigners, especially children, who aren’t speaking in their native tongue.
The obvious question, here, is “So what?” Suppose that an AI system did pass the Turing Test one day—or perhaps what’s called the Total Turing Test, which would involve a robot with human-like sensorimotor behavior. What would that prove? Would it mean that some computers can really think? Would it show that some can actually be conscious?
“Consciousness” is a slippery concept. But one can distinguish between functional and phenomenal consciousness. The first of these categories covers a variety of psychological distinctions. These include: awake/asleep, deliberate/unthinking, attentive/inattentive, accessible/inaccessible, reportable/non-reportable, self-reflective/ unexamined, and so on.
Those contrasts are functional ones. There are good reasons to believe that they can be understood in information-processing terms, and therefore modeled in computers. (The most interesting model of machine consciousness at present is LIDA, which addresses the distinctions just listed—and is based on a widely accepted theory of brain functioning.) So, some future AI system might well be conscious in that sense. A robot passing the Turing Test, for example, could properly be said to plan and to think.
Phenomenal consciousness, or qualia (such as pain or sensations of the color red), seems to be very different. Its very existence, in a basically material universe, is a notorious metaphysical puzzle. Explaining phenomenal consciousness is sometimes called “the hard problem,” because solving it is so much more difficult than explaining how functional consciousness is possible.
AI on Employment
Some might say that employment doesn’t matter. Wage packets, they suggest, will be substituted by some “universal basic income,” provided to every citizen as a right. (Experimental versions are being run or planned in various countries.) But that is problematic. Where is the tax base to support such societal largesse? And what will people do with so much leisure time? Social psychologists have shown that having a job, even a menial one, provides very much more than money.
There have been a number of suggestions about what we could do with a very high level of job displacement. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has suggested that companies pay tax for a robot replacing a human. This would feed into a universal basic income (UBI), which could take a number of different forms, such as giving everyone the same amount and then taking some away for every dollar earned. Although a number of UBI trials are taking place, no country has yet introduced a policy for UBI. [taken from chapter on Transportation]
Quantum Computing
In short, quantum physics is a theory that explains the world around us. However, it is a rather strange theory. For a start, it predicts that something can be at two different places at the same time. Yes, you heard that right: Quantum physics, in principle, allows me to sit on my desk in Brighton in the UK to write this chapter while simultaneously going for a swim on a beach in Florida. Unfortunately, this does not happen with very large objects such as people (I certainly wish right now that it did). However, it is quite regularly observed in the laboratory when studying the behavior of individual atoms. Indeed, an atom can be at two separate locations at once. This phenomenon is referred to as “superposition.”
And as if superposition were not strange enough, things get even wilder! There is another phenomenon, called “entanglement,” that’s even weirder. In fact, the only correct way to explain entanglement is via mathematical equations. However, let’s try to use a much simplified description. It is possible to entangle two quantum objects, such as two atoms, so that if I were to do something to one of these atoms this would instantly influence the other one, even if it is located far away and there is no possibility for it to communicate with the first atom.
Predicting and calculating quantum mechanical processes using conventional computers is very difficult. In fact, solving nearly any quantum-mechanical problem exactly is intractable even for the most powerful conventional computers, as quantum physics calculations require extensive computational powers. It would take conventional computers billions of years to find the solution for many of the really interesting problems to be computed. One could maybe summarize the work of the majority of scientists around the world today as creating highly simplified models of quantum processes in such a way that they can be computed on a conventional computer.
Smart Materials
Imagine what life would be like if your possessions could sense, react, move, adapt, morph, and repair themselves completely independently. In the future, this will be a reality; solid objects will carry out useful functions for us without any need for human interaction, not by using robotics or electronics, but by being made of “smart materials.” These are solids with properties—such as color, shape, or magnetism—that change autonomously in response to stimuli such as light, temperature, applied force, or moisture. The scope of this topic is vast. Within our lifetimes, we will see smart materials everywhere: on color-changing roofs to regulate the temperature of buildings, as wearable displays, as the fabric of human-like robots, or even as self-opening cans of baked beans.
Smart materials are not new. Indeed, nature got there before us with pine cones that close when it rains and plants that grow toward the light. Today there are millions of patented inventions that use them. Broadly, their functions fall into six categories—color changing, sensing, moving, heating/cooling, self-healing, and phase changing (freezing and melting).
A ride on a futuristic smart bicycle will be a carefree experience, since smart materials will make potholes, punctures, and paint scratches a thing of the past. You’ll be able to cycle whatever the weather, thanks to clothing that quickly adapts to body temperature and rain. If you get caught out after dark, roads will be lit sustainably by the weight of passing vehicles, and if you happen to fall off, any ripped smart clothing will self-repair on the roadside.
Traveling farther afield will require a trip in a futuristic aircraft, which will be more like a bird than a plane. These shape-changing airplanes will adapt to flight conditions and provide passengers with the ultimate smooth ride. They will set records for quick journeys while using less fuel to do so, all thanks to smart materials. This is the future of the material world—and it’s an exciting place to be.
Energy
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves attaching a large chemical plant to a power station that captures most of the carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases. This carbon dioxide is then transported by pipe and injected into something like a disused gas or oil field, where it is trapped forever (in theory). If, instead of burning fossil fuels in a CCS power station, you burn biomass and capture the carbon dioxide, then you can have negative carbon dioxide emissions! This is because when a tree grows, it absorbs carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—so if you burn it and capture the carbon dioxide, you reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as long as you are replacing the trees).
Scientists have also imagined putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back down to Earth. This sounds like the plot of a James Bond film, but it has been around as a concept since the 1970s. It’s called space-based solar power (SBSP), and there is sound logic behind it. Around 60 percent of solar energy is lost on its way through the Earth’s atmosphere, so putting solar panels outside the atmosphere increases available solar energy massively. Once you overcome the question of how to get solar panels into space, the next challenge is how to get the energy back to Earth. Microwave or laser beams are the best bets for this. Finally, you need something to point these beams at—a “rectenna”—perhaps several miles wide, which receives the beams and converts them to electrical power
Transportation
My third prediction concerns the much-vaunted prospect of near-sonic land-based transportation (“Hyperloop”). This idea has received a lot of press coverage since it was originally proposed by Elon Musk in 2013. It is, in effect, an electric airplane in a tube. Imagine the effect that a fast and frequent service between distant cities could have if the frequencies and journey times were comparable to those of a modern urban metro system.
Inter-Planetary Species
Mars today, despite its reputation, has the most clement and almost welcoming environment in the solar system after the Earth. If we assume we can surmount the physical obstacles of humans reaching the Red Planet, including the up to three-hundred-day journey time, radiation risk, extended periods in microgravity, and extraordinarily dangerous landing (the current success rate for unmanned craft setting down safely and in one piece on Mars is less than 30 percent), building an outpost is a reasonable goal. And once there, we would have far better conditions to work with than are present on the Moon.
Mars has a similar length of day and is tilted on its axis at an angle comparable to that of the Earth, creating similar seasons; and it has an atmosphere (albeit thin), water ice, and habitable environments. It is this climate, however, that is the main challenge we will need to overcome. Mars’s atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide. This means it is toxic to humans and encourages low atmospheric pressures (0.006 atm), making our existence on the surface unaided impossible. Additionally, it has only 38 percent of the Earth’s gravity, is always cold (–121°F to 23°F), and there are no liquid bodies of water on its surface. Where would we live on Mars? Well, alongside the stereotypical inflatable domed housing on the surface, there are also impact craters and lava tubes across Mars that could be used to structure habitats. Indeed, these would enable larger structures to be assembled for long-term living (the only real way to live on Mars) and would provide decent protection from the outside environment. Such structures could be built in stages during a series of missions, taking inspiration from the piece-by-piece construction of the ISS. These habitats would need to be self-sustaining from day one, growing their own food, extracting water, and producing oxygen. The first Martians will therefore be of two species—plant and human—the perfect traveling companions, exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen, keeping each other alive.
Back-Up File for Human Civilisation
James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia hypothesis of the whole Earth as a self-regulating system, wrote an article in 1998 lamenting the fact that “we have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail.” He described his conceptions for a “Book for All Seasons,” like a complete school science textbook furnished with practical information. Kevin Kelly, a former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of Wired magazine, has also suggested a “Forever Book” or “Library of Utility”: a remote mountaintop vault of perhaps ten thousand books that collectively stores the essential knowledge required to re-create the infrastructure and technology of civilization. The Long Now Foundation is an organization dedicated to long-term thinking; one of their projects is constructing a giant mountainside clock that is self-powered and will keep accurate time for at least ten thousand years. And unlike the other suggestions above, they have actually started gathering books for their own “Manual for Civilization” library (which I helped set up and to which I contributed a number of books, including, egotistically, my own popular science book, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World After an Apocalypse).
But with modern technology, these seeds for rebooting civilization could be encapsulated in a much more compact format. With a Kindle or other e-reader, you can hold ten thousand books—an entire library of knowledge—in the palm of your hand. The problem here is that when the apocalypse comes and the grid goes down, you won’t be able to simply plug your device into the wall to recharge. You’d experience the exasperation of having the wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips, but with no way of accessing it. So to solve this, I hacked for myself an apocalypse-proof kindle—a device loaded with all the knowledge you’d need to reboot civilization, in a ruggedized case with integrated solar panels wired into it.
You now have an entire library of practical knowledge in a portable format, and when the batteries run low you simply leave it in the sun to recharge. The screen and solar panels will eventually degrade, of course, but by that time your community should be well on the road to recovery. And with instructions saved on how to make your own paper, ink, and a rudimentary printing press, you can then download the information in the device’s memory back into the lower-tech format of paper books.
So if we do take seriously the possibility of a future global catastrophe and sudden collapse of our industrialized world, we should take steps now to preserve the kernel of all that we’ve achieved: the most crucial scientific knowledge and technological know-how that’s taken us centuries to accumulate over history. This would be like a backed-up save file for our entire civilization, and enable the survivors to reboot a capable society for themselves as quickly as possible.
Time Travel
It seems that the most feasible, or should I say the least ridiculous, way would be by traveling through a wormhole. Wormholes are exotic structures in space-time that are allowed by the equations of general relativity, which give a description of them as theoretical entities. Think of wormholes as shortcuts through space-time. They link two different regions of space together via a route that is in a different dimension from those of our own universe. And because space and time are intimately connected, the two ends of the wormhole can also in principle link two different times—one being in the past of the other. Therefore, passing through a wormhole would amount to time-traveling into the future or the past, depending on which direction you go.
Conclusion
I will end this chapter with an exciting idea that a number of theoretical physicists are now thinking seriously about. It may—just may—be that teleportation and time travel are intimately connected. A new idea, known among physicists as ER=EPR, suggests there may be a deep and profound link between quantum entanglement (the teleportation idea) and wormholes (the time-travel idea). Two papers, published by Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, which had hitherto been thought of as completely unrelated, may turn out to describe the same concept. The EPR paper (from the initials of its three authors, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen) was the first to describe the weirdness of quantum entanglement in the way two distant particles are connected instantaneously, an idea that Einstein in particular felt was impossible and that therefore hinted at our incomplete understanding of quantum theory. The second paper (the ER bit, made up of the Einstein and Rosen subset of the team) was the first work to describe the idea of a wormhole, known then as an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
So here we are, over eighty years after these two papers were published, asking a daring question: What if pairs of entangled particles are in fact able to “communicate” with each other because they are joined by a wormhole.The more I read up on and think about this crazy idea, the more I like it. It’s just so neat. Thus, wormholes, assuming they are physically possible of course, could act as both teleporters and time machines. Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?
Lexicon of Beauty 