The New Stagnation and Old Civilizations
What if all fundamental scientific discoveries stopped tomorrow? How long would society keep innovating before it starts to stagnate? In some ways, we are about to find out.
Our modern world is enchanted with magical wonders. We each have a Magic Rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to All Human Knowledge. We can transport our words and visage across the globe at the speed of thought. We ask the air to tell us the fastest route to work or the weather next week — and it answers.
The fundamental physics discoveries that made computers and the internet and phone screens possible1 we mostly made in the 1920s through the 1950s. It typically took about 20 years to get a strong technical prototype (like the transistor), and another 15 or so years to get that technology out into public. Sometimes it went much faster. From the discoveries of how atomic nuclei really worked until the first atomic bonb test at Trinity was only about 8 years.
Atomic weapons are a terrifying example of this technologization of fundamental physics, but most of the breakthroughs had useful and beneficial applications. The first three quarters of the 20th century were replete with physics breakthroughs that resulted in an almost complete reworking of society, with tremendous benefits (and some detriments). The productivity, wealth, and individual powers granted by those breakthroughs are still filling our days with magic.
But something happened in 1973.
Gross, Politzer, and Wilczek postulated the exact color nature of the quark interactions, giving us a working fundamental theory on how the protons and neutrons in the middle of all atoms work. How they stick together, why they are different, why they have the charges they do. Over the next 20 years, particle accelerators proved that this basic theory of how most matter works is indeed the correct mathematical framework. It correctly explains most radioactive decay works (along with theories on the Weak Force), how stars shine, and more generally how a huge swath of important fundamental particles called quarks interact with the Strong Force and its gluon force carriers.
And it was the last fundamental physics discovery made by humans that has been proven to be correct.
Since 1973, there has been zero confirmed progress in fundamental physics theory.
Yes, there has been hypothetical progress, but none of it has been confirmed by experiment. The vast, vast majority of Earth-bound experimental data that can be taken in our labs agrees with the equations in theories postulated before 1974. And the very few deviations from those theories (neutrinos changing type, possible inconsistencies in muon magnetic moments, and some rare matter/antimatter decay rate asymmetries) are either arguably explained by current theory or of debatable precision.
We don’t know if Dark Matter exists or what it’s made of, we don’t know if Hawking radiation is real, and we don’t have any clue what kind of Dark Energy is making the Universe accelerate its expansion. So there are still a lot of open questions, don’t get me wrong. And of course Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity can’t calculate well together in some interesting situations.
We still have open questions. But since 1973, no one has postulated a new fundamental physics theory that has been shown to be true.
That is almost 50 years of stagnation.
Granted, one of the reasons for this “stagnation” is the wild success of the physics theories we have Quantum Field Theory is widely called “The Standard Model” because it works incredibly well. Thousand of researchers are constantly looking for experimental deviations from the Standard Model, and none have been strongly confirmed as of this writing. And the 107-year-old General Relativity has never been proven wrong by any experiment.
So I’m not really complaining. Good job, physicists! But I am noting that we don’t have any new hotness coming into our society the same way we did in the first three quarters of the 20th. We have no path toward anti-gravity or faster than light spaceships. No one has proven that the universe is fundamentally informational rather than being fields of energy and matter. There are no basic new physics making their way into our technologies.
There are still breakthroughs in “non-fundamental” physics. Material Science is arguable in a Golden Age right now, and that will power many wonderful advances. Technological breakthroughs in AI are going to be transformational, and the insane progress about to be made in neuroscience, microbiology, and related molecular medicine will likely affect every human alive in profound ways by 2050.
But those are technological breakthroughs. They all use 50-year-old (or older) physics. Humans still have a lot of progress to make in playing with the intellectual building blocks physics has discovered, but what if it is centuries before we get any new blocks to play with?
Let’s presume going forward we have no new fundamental physics breakthroughs for the next two centuries. This is entirely possible. I am beginning to think it actually likely. I think we may figure out what the Dark Matter effects are caused by, but I don’t think we’ll be able to incorporate Dark Matter into the Samsung Galaxy 18 phone.
Predictions of the New Stagnation Paradigm
Here I will describe what I think the societal results of this New Stagnation in physics will be.
1. Human brain power will be at a premium. We need someone to think of more and more creative ways to use the old 20th century physics to come up with new 21st century technologies. Underpopulation will be seen by many countries as their number one threat to economic and national security.
2. High and higher levels of emergent understanding will be completely figured out. Material Science is so important that breakthroughs in it delineate Age Names (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age…). Materials Science is an emergent property of known 20th century physics, but the possible configurations of matter and the resulting parameters of those configurations still are very, very far from being fully explored. This will change. Materials Science and other “contingent” physics fields will be mapped out and understood in very nearly full depth.
3. After about 2070, the pace of Societal Change will begin to slow. Around this time, it is very likely that Earth’s human population will peak. Then it will go down a little and likely oscillate between 9 and 11 billion people for a century or two. Technological progress will also slow, because the low-hanging fruit of contingent physics mapping will be complete, and the only real source of new technologies will be the creative leaps of human inventors and engineers.
We are yet to see if AI can make big creative leaps. I am guessing it can, but that will only mean that this fleshing out of the consequences of known physics will happen faster than without AI.
How Fast Will We “Burn Through” Contingent Physics?
Contingent physics are the areas of physics and science that depend on fundamental physics, but are not fundamental physics. The biggest unknown in this look forward is how fast our species will categorize, analyze, and technologize the consequences of 20th century non-contingent (fundamental) physics. Semiconductor research, wireless transmission by radio and light, materials, food production, energy production, and manufacturing still all have a lot of great new discoveries to make. But with more and more powerful simulations, smarter analytical tools, and more sophisticated categorizations of results, we can expect that most new combinations within these fields will be quantified and made widely known by the 2060s. From then on new discoveries in these fields are sure to be made, but they will become smaller and further in-between. But before 2060, I expect most of these fields will have booming progress as our best tools are brought to bear to squeeze all the blood from these stones.
Medicine and biology seem an especially long contingent physics curve. The unbelievable complexity of even the “simplest” biological systems is like a fractal rabbit hole with no bottom. The quixotic and beautiful design of the simplest cellular organelles, fully apprehended, will bring many people to actual tears of wonder. It is hard for me to even comprehend the full categorization of existing microbiological forms, not to mention novel possibilities, which surely dwarf what already exists.
For this reason, I doubt that medicine and biology will experience any stagnation. The power, the beauty, and the philosophical payoff of studying these fields will continue for many centuries. The biological discoveries made during the year 2052 will likely be fewer than the discoveries made in 25522. The most profound of these will be in longevity research. This will begin to allow humans to hope for much longer lives, especially for their children (see our article “Your Kids Might Live Forever”).
If AI can learn to better understand mathematical formalisms and categorized but general scientific data, then the pathway toward the contingent physics being fairly fully mapped out is even shorter than 2060. But I doubt technologization of that mapping will happen much faster than without AI. It seems that the productization and adoption of new technologies lag breakthroughs by 10-20 years, no matter what. Obviously, there are some exceptions (especially among software), but I do think that this inertia of humans’ ability to propagate products will hold. Cool new product introductions will still abound at the rate of societal expectation into the late 2070s.
In the blog “Roots of Progress” Jason Crawford notes that:
Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that there has been a significant slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress in recent decades—say, for a round number, since about 1970, or the last ~50 years.
According to them, this stagnation has already begun, and perhaps I have noted here the reason for the lack of technological leaps and bounds that we are seeing (the end of fundamental physics progress in the early 1970s).
But I think we have 50 more years of important technological progress to make (even without giant leaps) before we enter the true Great Stagnation. One reason for this optimism is that we are not yet stagnating in terms of GDP. Note that in the following graph GDP has stayed linearly increasing on a log scale (y-axis), meaning GDP has continued growing exponentially to this day.
But once we do start to really slow down our technological progress in the 2060s or 2070s, it will have important effects.
Consequences of the New Stagnation
With no new giant breakthroughs enabled by new fundamental physics discoveries, medium-sized and contingent breakthroughs will still keep economic growth humming for the next 40 or 50 years.
But then there will be an economic double hit. The massive tech leaps won’t be there (outside biological research) and the population won’t be growing. The current economic foundation of most of the countries of the world is growth. Either population growth or productivity growth, and usually both.
Instead, many economies will have to manage the psychological transition to a new stability of economy. No longer will the larger next generation be able to subsidize the welfare of the older generation. As longevity lengthens dramatically, there will be many more retirees than 20 and 30 year old workers. Productivity per person will stagnate starting in the 2060s or 2070s. Our current economic paradigms, addicted to easy answers enabled by endless growth, will simply fail.
What can be done?
A New Answer From Old Civilizations
For 95% of recorded human history, population growth rates were below 1% per year, and many times below 1% per decade. Technological progress (and thus productivity) grew at an even slower rate.
Back nearly 3,000 years ago, people didn’t see population and technology growth as a part of reality. Solomon opined that “there is nothing new under the Sun” because once you categorized most of what is known, you likely weren’t going to be surprised with new knowledge or technology any time soon.
So how did those societies function successfully without growth?
A respect for proven solutions. There was more fear of changing things, because in a place of limited resources, careful balances must be struck between strongly interconnected and complex societal structures. Significant changes to any one part would have unpredictable ripple effects.
More emphasis on making and raising children. Families were simply larger. Children were useful for doing farm work and caring for the older generation.
People moved less. Obviously, travel was more difficult. But opportunities didn’t necessarily abound with travel. Unlike today, when being willing to move far from home multiplies job opportunities, the opposite was typically true back then. Your familial and town connections helped make one successful.
Self-sufficiency. There were almost no government-provided safety nets thousands of years ago.
Obviously re-emphasizing these ways of thinking is going to please some people and displease others. A society with a strong “respect for proven solutions” may be inflexible and slow to adopt new solutions when they do come up. Countries that realize how hugely important each new member of society is may outlaw abortion to help fight the scourge of underpopulation, a move that many will welcome while others won’t.
Less geographical population churn (moving) will make labor less fungible, and this will be a slight drag on the economy. However, more people staying invested in the same communities for longer times will likely help establish stronger ties and more community involvement, with longer-term thinking on things like development and conservation.
As a shrinking productivity growth and shrinking population eat away at the ability of governments to provide welfare safety nets of all types, people and communities at all scales will become more self-sufficient and more focused on the value of care squeezed from each dollar (or yuan or euro). But there is a strong chance more people will fall through the cracks toward extreme poverty regardless. Hopefully the lower geographical population churn will engender stronger community awareness and responsibility to help prevent or at least offset this.
Civilizations such as Rome, Sumer, feudal Britain, and most of Chinese history were not paradises for most of their populations. But they did have long periods of stability without any appreciable technological and population growth. There are some things that we can learn form their ways of life, a-la-carte, that might help us transition to our coming non-growth period.
Maybe 2080-2200 will be a time when humanity catches its breath, focusing not on expansion and growth, but inward3. Maybe we can grow emotionally and spiritually, to be more thoughtful, empathetic, and intentional on longer timescales than we are now.
Because one day, even just using 20th century physics, humanity will leap into the solar system. We will build millions of O’Neil cylinders, giant rotating cylinders 10 miles long constructed from asteroids, living off the solar energy that permeates the space around our sun. There is no impediment, using current physics, to humanity expanding into the trillions or even quadrillions just in our solar system.
We need to be a bit better than we are to survive that largest ever human transition — the one off the Earth.
And we can start preparing now by considering our Old Civilizations.
The quantum nature of electrons, semiconductor band gap theory, a few other fundamental physics breakthroughs.
Assuming no Apocalypse.