The Future of Humanity by Kaku
Ref: Michiel Kaku (2018). The Future of Humanity. Penguin Publishing.
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Summary
World-renowned physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku presents a compelling vision of how humanity may develop a sustainable civilization in outer space. He reveals the developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology that may allow us to terraform and build habitable cities on Mars and beyond. He then journeys out of our solar system and discusses how new technologies such as nanoships, laser sails, and fusion rockets may actually make interstellar travel a possibility. We travel beyond our galaxy, and even beyond our universe, as Kaku investigates some of the hottest topics in science today, including warp drive, wormholes, hyperspace, parallel universes, and the multiverse. Ultimately, he shows us how humans may someday achieve a form of immortality and be able to leave our bodies entirely, laser porting to new havens in space (Amazon).
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Misc Quotes
Self-awareness: the ability to put ourselves inside a simulation of the future, consistent with a goal.
Surveys show that after our basic needs are met, we place a high value on the opinions of our peers. We want to look good, especially in front of the opposite sex. We want the admiration of our circle of friends.
Numerous studies have found that birthrate falls dramatically as a nation industrializes, urbanizes, and educates young girls.
“There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here [at SpaceX]. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.-Elon Musk.
Copernican Principle: there is nothing special about the Earth; it is just a piece of cosmic dust wandering aimlessly through the cosmos. It is just a coincidence that the forces of nature are “tuned” just right.
Parallax: We judge distances by moving our heads. Close objects like trees seem to shift the most, while distant entities like the mountains do not change position at all. But objects immediately next to us that are moving with us also don’t appear to change position. Our brains therefore confuse remote objects, like the moon, with adjacent ones, like the steering wheel in the car, and make us think that both are moving consistently alongside us.
Radioactivity: the nuclear force at the core of the Earth, from long-lived radioactive elements like uranium, that has kept Earth’s core hot for billions of years.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy): Entropy (disorder, chaos, or waste) always increases in a closed system. In this case every machine, every appliance, every apparatus generates waste, in the form of heat.
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—Future Technologies—
Graphene & Carbon Nanotubes
Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science- 200x stronger than steel and stronger even than diamonds.
Graphene conducts electricity.
Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphene rolled into long tubes. They are practically unbreakable and nearly invisible. If you built the suspension for the Brooklyn Bridge out of carbon nanotubes, the bridge would look like it was floating in midair. It is difficult to produce sheets larger than a postage stamp.
Whole cities made from this carbon material may rise from the Martian desert. Buildings may look partially transparent. Space suits could become ultrathin and skintight. Cars would become super energy efficient because they would weigh very little. The entire field of architecture could be turned upside down with the coming of nanotechnology.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI progress has slowed to a crawl in the face of two main hurdles: pattern recognition and common sense.
Energy
When matter and antimatter collide, both are annihilated into pure energy, so the reaction releases energy with 100% efficiency. A nuclear weapon, by contrast, is only 1% efficient; most of the energy inside a H bomb is wasted.
There are several ways in which to release the power of fusion peacefully. One process, called magnetic confinement, involves placing H gas in a large magnetic field the shape of a doughnut and then heating it up to millions of degrees. H nuclei smash into one another and are fused into He nuclei, releasing bursts of nuclear energy. The fusion reactor can be used to heat up a liquid, which is then released through a nozzle, thereby propelling a rocket (or a turbine).
The leading fusion reactor using magnetic confinement at present is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), located in southern France. It is a monstrous machine, 10x bigger than its closest competitor. It weighs 5,110 tons, stands 37’ tall and 64’ in diameter, and has cost more than $14 billion so far. It is expected to attain fusion by 2035 and ultimately produce five hundred megawatts of heat energy (compared to one thousand megawatts of electricity in a standard uranium nuclear power plant). It is hoped that it will be the first fusion reactor to generate more energy than it consumes.
Computing: Chips and Neural Networks
Deep Learning: The process of putting neural networks into a computer.
Neural nets gradually improve by constant repetition, following Hebb’s rule, which states that the more you perform a task, the more the neural pathways for that task are reinforced.
Quantum Computing: Si circuits contain a gate that can either be open or closed to the flow of electrons. Information is stored on the basis of these open or closed circuits. Binary mathematics, which is based on a series of 1’s and 0’s, describes this process: 0 may represent a closed gate, and 1 may represent an open gate. Now consider replacing silicon with a row of individual atoms. Atoms are like tiny magnets, which have a north pole and a south pole. When atoms are placed in a magnetic field, you might suspect that they can be pointing either up or down. In reality, each atom actually points up and down simultaneously until a final measurement is made. In a sense, an electron can be in two states at the same time. This defies common sense, but is the reality according to quantum mechanics. Its advantage is enormous. You can only store so much data if the magnets are pointing up or down. But if each magnet is a mixture of states, you can pack far greater amounts of information onto a tiny cluster of atoms. Each “bit” of information, which can be either 1 or 0, now becomes a “qubit,” a complex mixture of 1’s and 0’s with vastly more storage.
Coherence and Decoherence: Computing on individual atoms can be both a blessing and a curse. While atoms can store an enormous quantity of information, the most minute impurity, vibration, or disturbance could ruin a calculation. It is necessary, but notoriously difficult, to totally isolate the atoms from the outside world. They must reach a state of what is called “coherence,” in which they vibrate in unison. But the slightest interference—say, someone sneezing in the next building—could cause the atoms to vibrate randomly and independently of one another. “Decoherence” is one of the biggest problems we face in the development of quantum computers.
Anti-Aging & Prosthetics
Artificial Retina: For those who are blind, an artificial retina can restore a limited amount of vision. This device can be located either in an external camera or it can be placed directly on the retina. This device translates visual images into electrical impulses that the brain can then translate back into visual imagery. One example, the Argus II, consists of a tiny video camera placed in a person’s glasses. The images are then sent to an artificial retina, which relays the signals to the optic nerve. This device can create images of about 60 pixels, and an improved version now being tested has a resolution of 240 pixels. (By contrast, the human eye can recognize the equivalent of about a million pixels, and a person needs at least 600 pixels to identify faces and familiar objects.) A German company is experimenting with another artificial retina with 1,500 pixels that, if successful, might allow a vision-impaired person to function almost normally.
Vitrification: Nature uses glucose as an antifreeze, thereby lowering the freezing point of blood. So although an animal is frozen in a block of ice, the blood in its veins is still liquid and can still perform basic bodily functions. Scientists have experimented with other kinds of chemical antifreezes in a process they call vitrification, which involves using a combination of chemicals to lower the freezing point so that ice crystals do not form. Although it sounds intriguing, the results have been disappointing so far. Vitrification often has adverse side effects. The chemicals used in the labs are often poisonous and can be lethal. To date, no one has ever been frozen solid, then thawed out, and lived to tell about it.
Aging: The accumulation of errors in our DNA and our cells.
Telomerase: Another clue to the cause of aging might be telomerase, which helps to regulate our biological clock. Every time a cell divides, the tips of the chromosomes, called telomeres, get a bit shorter. Eventually, after ~50-60 divisions, the telomeres become so short that they disappear and the chromosome begins to fall apart, so the cell enters a state of senescence and no longer functions correctly. Thus, there is a limit to how many times a cell can divide, called the Hayflick limit. But it should be pointed out that telomerase has to be regulated very carefully, because cancer cells are also immortal and they use telomerase to attain that immortality. In fact, one of the things that separates cancer cells from normal ones is that they live forever and reproduce without limit, eventually creating the tumors that can kill you. So cancer may be an unwanted byproduct of using telomerase.
Resveratrol: Recently, a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage.
Caloric Restriction: The only method proven to extend the life span of animals, sometimes even doubling it; caloric restriction, or severely limiting the intake of calories in an animal’s diet. On average, animals that eat 30% fewer calories live 30% longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far (the only important animal that has not yet been tested is humans).
Communication
In the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie—all just by thinking.
Medicine
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR): A cheap, efficient, and precise way of editing DNA.
CRISPR technology cuts through a lot of these complications. Actually, the basis of the technology evolved billions of years ago. Scientists were puzzled that bacteria developed very precise mechanisms to defeat an onslaught of viruses. How did bacteria recognize a deadly virus and then disarm it? They found that bacteria were able to recognize the threats because they carried a snippet of the virus’s genetic material. Like a mug shot, the bacteria were able to use it to identify an invading virus. Once the bacteria recognized the genetic string and therefore the virus, it would cut the virus at a very precise point, neutralizing it and stopping the infection in its tracks. Scientists were able to replicate this process—successfully replacing a viral sequence with other types of DNA and inserting that DNA in the target cell—making “genomic surgery” possible. CRISPR rapidly replaced older methods of genetic engineering, making gene editing cleaner, more accurate, and much faster.
The Brain
It may be possible to record the memories of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Then we can place a “brain pacemaker” or “memory chip” on their hippocampus, which will flood it with memories of who they are, where they live, and who their relatives are. The military has taken a serious interest in this. In 2017, the Pentagon announced a $65 million grant to develop a tiny, advanced chip that can analyze a million human neurons as the brain communicates with a computer and forms memories. We will need to study and refine this technique, but by the late twenty-first century, it is conceivable that we might be able to upload complex memories into our brain. In principle, we might be able to transfer skills and abilities, even entire college courses, into our brain, enhancing our capabilities almost without limit. Uploading memories might be the most efficient way to learn entirely new information.
Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology’s (BRAIN) Initiative: Goal is to unravel the neural structure of the brain itself, cell by cell, and ultimately to map the pathways of every neuron in the brain. Since the human brain contains roughly one hundred billion neurons, each connected to about ten thousand other neurons, it at first seems hopeless to create a road map of every neuron. (Even the relatively simple task of mapping the brain of the mosquito involves producing data that can completely fill a room full of CDs from top to bottom.) But computers and robots have radically reduced the time and effort necessary to complete this tedious, herculean task.
Human Connectome Project: Seeks to map and digitize every neuron in the human brain, one day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel. I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.
Schizophrenia: When we talk to ourselves, the left brain (which controls language) consults the prefrontal cortex. But in schizophrenics, the left brain activates without permission from the prefrontal cortex, which is the conscious part of the brain. Since the left brain does not talk to the prefrontal cortex, the schizophrenic thinks the voices in his or her head are real.
Virtual Reality
If drugs are legalized, then many experts estimate that perhaps 5 percent of the human race would become addicted. But the other 95%, seeing how drugs can limit or destroy a person’s life, will steer clear of them, preferring to live in the real world rather than a drug-altered one. Similarly, once virtual reality is perfected, perhaps a similar number of people may prefer to live in cyberspace rather than in the real world, but it is not likely to be an overwhelming number.
Rare Earth Elements
Chinese rare earth industry makes up 97% of the world trade.
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—Nature—
Ecology, DNA, & Evolution
Any two humans chosen at random can differ in their DNA by 0.1%.
Most animals we see around us are very successful and hence had no evolutionary pressure to change. Some animals haven’t changed for millions of years. Precisely because we are weak and clumsy, we were under enormous pressure to acquire skills the other primates lacked. To compensate for our deficiencies, we had to become intelligent.
Extinction Events: Events that lead to "a profound loss of biodiversity."
Organisms inevitably meet one of three fates to changing environments. They can leave that environment, they can adapt to it, or they will die.
Extinction is the norm.
One theory states that the climate in East Africa began to change several million years ago, causing the forests to recede and the grasslands to spread. Our ancestors were forest creatures, so many of them died off when the trees began to disappear. Those who did survive were forced to move from the forests onto the savannah and grasslands. They had to wrench their backs and walk upright, allowing them to see above the grass. (We see evidence of this in our swayback, which puts enormous pressure on the small of our back. This is the reason why back problems are one of the most common health issues facing middle-aged people.) Walking upright had another great advantage: it freed up our hands so we could manipulate tools.-The Future of Humanity by Kaku.
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—The Solar System—
Oort Cloud: a sphere of comets surrounding our entire solar system. Many of them are so far from the sun—up to a few light-years away—that they are largely stationary.
Centauri triple star system, slightly more than four light-years from Earth.
Moon
It is estimated that 600M metric tons of ice may be found in the northern polar region, in a layer that is several yards thick.
Full orbit of the moon: 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes.
There are about 100lbs of O in every 1000lbs of lunar soil.
Using Newton’s laws, you can determine that tidal forces are causing the moon to slowly spiral away from the Earth. Its orbital radius increases by about 1.6” per year.
Venus
The Patm of Venus was found to be almost 100x that of the Earth. The greenhouse effect helps to explain why. Most of the CO2 on the Earth is recycled, dissolving in the oceans and in rocks. But on Venus, the temperature became so high that the oceans boiled off. And instead of dissolving in rocks, the gas was baked out of them. The more carbon dioxide outgassed from the rocks, the hotter the planet got, setting off a feedback loop.
Mars
Gravity on Mars, which is only 40% of the gravity on Earth, and, as on the moon, astronauts would have to exercise vigorously to avoid muscle and bone loss.
It is estimated that, if the ice caps of Mars were completely melted, there would be enough liquid water to fill a planetary ocean fifteen to thirty feet deep.
Moons of the Gas Giants
Europa (Jupiter): Astronomers were thrilled when they discovered that underneath the ice on Europa could be an ocean of liquid water. It is estimated to be 2-3x the volume of Earth’s oceans—our oceans only lie on the surface, while the oceans of Europa make up most of the interior.
Titan (Saturn) is the second-biggest moon in the solar system, next to Jupiter’s Ganymede, and is the only one to have a thick atmosphere.
Enceladus (Saturn), where Geysers of water have been seen erupting from the surface.
Comets
The Kuiper Belt, a region outside Neptune that orbits in the same plane as the planets. The comets in the Kuiper Belt, which include Halley’s comet, travel in ellipses around the sun. They are sometimes called short-period comets, because their orbital periods, or the time it takes for them to complete one cycle around the sun, are measured in decades to centuries.
Black Holes & Wormholes
Wormholes: Collapsed giant stars whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape. Their escape velocity is the speed of light.
Universal Epochs
1st Epoch: The first billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with hot opaque clouds of ionic molecules, too hot for electrons and protons to condense into atoms.
2nd Epoch: A billion years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled down enough so that atoms, stars, and galaxies could emerge from the chaos. Empty space suddenly became crystal clear, and stars lit up the universe for the first time. We are living in this era now.
3rd Epoch: About one hundred billion years after the Big Bang, the stars will have exhausted most of their nuclear fuel. The universe will consist mainly of small red dwarf stars, which burn so slowly that they can shine for trillions of years.
4th Epoch: Trillions of years after the Big Bang, all the stars will finally burn out and the universe will go completely black. Only dead neutron stars and black holes remain.
5th Epoch: Even black holes begin to evaporate and disintegrate, so the universe becomes a sea of nuclear waste and drifting subatomic particles.
Civilization Types
1964: Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev first proposes the Classification of advanced civilizations.
Type 0: Civilization utilizes less than all the energy of the sunlight that falls on it.
There are several challenges as we make the transition from Type 0 to Type I: global warming, bioterrorism, and nuclear proliferation, to name a few.
Type I: Civilization utilizes all the energy of the sunlight that falls on that planet.
In applying the Drake equation to a Type I civilization to estimate how plentiful they might be in the galaxy; it would appear they should be quite common.
Type II: Civilization utilizes all the energy its sun produces.
Dyson Sphere: a gigantic sphere around a star, designed to harvest the energy from its massive amounts of starlight.
Type III: Civilization utilizes the energy of an entire galaxy.
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—Space Exploration—
The SLS/Orion Rocket
The SLS/Orion rocket is scheduled to conduct a manned lunar flyby in the mid-2020s.
The SLS is 322’ tall, can carry a payload of 130 tons, and is designed to attain Earth escape velocity while carrying 4-6 crew members.
The Orion capsule is cramped inside. It is 16’ in diameter and 11’ tall and weighs 57k lbs.
The SLS/Orion rocket will be launched in 2019. It will be fully automatic, carrying no astronauts, but will orbit the moon. Four years later, after a fifty-year gap, astronauts will finally return to the moon. The mission will last three weeks, but it will just orbit around the moon, not land on the lunar surface. This is mainly to test the reliability of the SLS/Orion system rather than to explore the moon. But there is an unexpected twist to NASA’s new plan that surprised many analysts. The SLS/Orion system is actually a warm-up act. It will serve as the main link by which astronauts will leave the Earth and reach outer space, but an entirely new set of rockets will take us to Mars. First, NASA envisions building the Deep Space Gateway, which resembles the International Space Station, except it is smaller and orbits the moon, not the Earth. Astronauts will live on the Deep Space Gateway (now known as the Lunar Orbitan Platform Gateway- LOPG), which will act as a refueling and resupply station for missions to Mars and the asteroids. It will be the basis for a permanent human presence in space. Construction of this lunar space station will begin in 2023 and it will be operational by 2026. Four SLS missions will be required to build it. But the main act is the actual rocket that will send astronauts to Mars. It is an entirely new system, called the Deep Space Transport, which will be constructed mainly in outer space. In 2029, the Deep Space Transport will have its first major test, circling around the moon for three hundred to four hundred days. This will provide valuable information about long-term missions in space. Finally, after rigorous testing, the Deep Space Transport may send astronauts to orbit Mars by 2033.
Space Travel
It takes $10k to put a pound of anything in near-Earth orbit.
Skills and experience include seasoned pilots, engineers, scientists, and doctors.
Estimates of putting an astronaut on Mars are often between $400 and $500 billion in total.
Both Bezos and Musk would like to shift humanity into outer space. While Musk is taking the long view and setting his sights on Mars, Bezos has a more immediate vision of going to the moon.
Exobiology: Study of life on distant worlds with ecosystems different from those found on Earth.
Mining: Robots would collect basic raw materials, construction robots would melt and refine the materials and assemble new parts, and repair robots would mend and maintain themselves and their colleagues without human intervention.
Eventually, we will progress beyond Mars and develop settlements on the asteroids and the moons of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.
Space Physiology
Bone Loss: Astronauts may also lose 1% of their bone mass per month in space. To slow down this loss, they have to exercise at least two hours a day on a treadmill.
Optic Nerve deterioration: A further consequence of weightlessness that wasn’t taken seriously until recently is damage to the optic nerve. In the past, astronauts noted that their eyesight deteriorated after long missions in space. Detailed scans of their eyes show that their optic nerves are often inflamed, probably due to pressure from the fluid of the eye.
Radiation: Being on a two-year interplanetary trip, an astronaut would receive about 200x the radiation of a human on the Earth.
An astronaut’s lifetime risk of developing cancer would rise from 21% to 24%.
Mice exposed to large doses of radiation equivalent to the amount that would be absorbed during a two-year ride through deep space. They found evidence of irreversible brain damage.
Space Travel- Propulsion
Solar Electric Propulsion: Huge solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. This is used to strip away the electrons from a gas (like xenon), creating ions. An electric field then shoots these charged ions out one end of the engine, creating thrust.
Another variation of the Daedalus rocket might be fueled by laser fusion, in which giant laser beams compress a pellet of hydrogen-rich material. This process is called inertial confinement. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, exemplifies this process. Its battery of laser beams—192 gigantic beams in 4,900-foot-long tubes—is the largest in the world. When the laser beams are focused on a tiny sample of hydrogen-rich lithium deuteride, their energy incinerates the surface of the material, resulting in a mini explosion that causes the pellet to collapse and raises its temperature to one hundred million degrees Celsius. This creates a fusion reaction that unleashes five hundred trillion watts of power in a few trillionths of a second.
Instead of a laser beam, a similar process to fusion uses a large bank of electron beams to heat a H-rich pellet. If 250 pellets are detonated per second, enough energy could conceivably be generated for a starship to reach a fraction of the speed of light. However, this design would require a fusion rocket of truly immense size. One version of the Daedalus rocket would weigh fifty-four thousand metric tons and would be about 625’ long, with a maximum velocity of 12% of the speed of light. It is so big it would have to be constructed in outer space.
Rockets & Flight
The amount of fuel you need rises exponentially with the change in velocity, so that enormous amounts of fuel are needed to give an extra boost in speed.
Specific Impulse: Rocket Thrust * time over which rocket fires; measured in seconds.
Tsiolkovsky: Worked out the physics and mathematics of space travel.
Goddard: Built the first prototypes of space rockets.
Wernher von Braun: Took the sketches, dreams, and models of his predecessors and with the support of the German government—and later the United States— created gargantuan rockets that would successfully take us to the moon.
The thicker the atmosphere, the greater the lift and the easier it is to fly in the air.
When a ball moves through the air, it creates turbulence in its wake, small eddy currents that cause the ball to swerve slightly and slow down. For a baseball, these eddy currents are created by the stitching on the ball, which determines its spin. On a golf ball, it is caused by the dimples on its surface. For soccer balls, it is due to the juncture between the plates on its surface. Spinning reduces the eddy currents on the ball’s surface, so it can more accurately slice through the air.
If a baseball is thrown so that it has minimal spin (as in a knuckleball), turbulence is maximized and the ball’s path becomes erratic.
Terraforming
To initiate the process of terraforming, we might inject methane and water vapor into the atmosphere to induce an artificial greenhouse effect. These greenhouse gases would capture sunlight and steadily raise the temperature of the ice caps. As the ice caps melt, they would release trapped water vapor and CO2.
One ambitious method is to artificially generate a magnetic field around Mars. To do this, we would have to place huge superconducting coils around the Martian equator. Using the laws of electromagnetism, we can calculate the amount of energy and materials necessary to produce this band of superconductors. But such a tremendous undertaking is beyond our capabilities in this century.
Space Elevator
2013: The International Academy of Astronautics issued a 350-page report projecting that with enough funding and research, a space elevator capable of carrying multiple twenty-ton payloads might be possible by 2035. Price estimates usually range from $10 billion to $50 billion—a fraction of the $150 billion that went into the International Space Station. Meanwhile, space elevators could reduce the cost of putting payloads into space by a factor of twenty.
Just as a ball on a string does not fall to the floor because of its spin, a space elevator would be kept from collapsing by the centrifugal force of the spinning Earth.
Life in the Universe
My thinking is as follows: If they have the ability to actually reach the planet Earth from hundreds of light-years away, then their technology is much more advanced than ours. In that case, we are arrogant to believe that they would travel trillions of miles to visit a backward civilization with nothing to offer. So for the most part, the aliens would leave us alone, looking at us as a primitive curiosity. Or, as Olaf Stapledon speculated decades ago, perhaps they have a policy not to interfere with primitive civilizations (the Prime Directive). In other words, they might be aware of us but don’t want to influence our development.
If the aliens descended from a race of intelligent dogs, then their language would reflect smells rather than visual images. If they descended from intelligent birds, their language may be based on complex melodies. If they descended from bats or dolphins, their language may use sonar signals. If they descended from insects, they might signal one another via pheromones.
Although we cannot be sure, there is a high probability that life in outer space might begin in the oceans and be composed of C-based molecules. Such chemistry is ideally suited to satisfying two vital criteria for life: the ability to store vast amounts of information, because of its complex molecular structure, and the ability to self-replicate; C has four atomic bonds, which allows it to create long chains of hydrocarbons, which include proteins and DNA. These long carbon DNA chains contain a code in the arrangement of their atoms. These chains occur in two strands, which can unravel and then grab molecules to make a copy of themselves according to this code.
Every year, astronomers narrow down the various components of the Drake equation. We now know that at least one out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has Earth-like planets circling it. According to the equation, we have more than twenty billion such Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
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Religion & Mythology
Christianity: Armageddon; when the forces of good and evil clash for the last time, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear, foretelling the Final Judgment.
Hinduism: There is no final end of days at all. Instead, there is an unending series of cycles, each lasting about eight billion years.
Norse: The Twilight of the Gods is called Ragnarök, the day of reckoning, when the world is blanketed in unending snow and ice and the heavens freeze over. The world witnesses the final battle between the frost giants and the Norse gods of Asgard.
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Relativity, Quantum Theory, String Theory, Multiverse, Inflation
It is essential to realize that at present known physical phenomena, from the Big Bang to the motion of subatomic particles, can be explained by two theories: Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the quantum theory. Together, they represent the bedrock physical laws governing all matter and energy. The first, general relativity, is the theory of the very big: relativity explains the Big Bang, the properties of black holes, and the evolution of the expanding universe. The second is the theory of the very small: the quantum theory describes the properties and motion of atomic and subatomic particles that make possible all the electronic miracles in our living room.
Einstein's theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a light beam, because the speed of light is the ultimate velocity in the universe.
The Standard Model is sometimes called “the theory of almost everything” because it accurately describes the low-energy universe that we see around us. But it cannot be the final theory, for several reasons:
It makes no mention of gravity. Worse, when we combine the Standard Model with Einstein’s theory of gravity, the hybrid theory blows up, giving us nonsense (calculations become infinite, meaning that the theory is useless).
It has a strange collection of particles that seem quite contrived. It has 36 quarks and anti-quarks, a series of Yang-Mills gluons, leptons (electrons and muons), and Higgs bosons.
It has 19 or so free parameters (masses and couplings of particles) that have to be put in by hand. These masses and couplings are not determined by the theory; no one knows why they have these numerical values.
The leading (and only) candidate to solve this problem is something called string theory, which says that all matter and energy in the universe is composed of tiny strings. Each vibration of the string corresponds to a different subatomic particle. So the electron is not really a point particle. If you had a supermicroscope, you would see that it is not a particle at all but a vibrating string. The electron appears to be a point particle only because the string is so tiny. If the string vibrates at a different frequency, it corresponds to a different particle, such as a quark, mu meson, neutrino, photon, and so on. That is why physicists have discovered such a ridiculous number of subatomic particles. There are literally hundreds, all because they are just different vibrations of a tiny string. In this way, string theory can explain the quantum theory of subatomic particles. According to string theory, as the string moves, it forces space-time to curl up exactly as Einstein predicted, and hence it unifies Einstein’s theory and the quantum theory in a very pleasing fashion.
If we have a theory of the universe, then what are its initial conditions? Physicists believe that a “theory of everything” should dictate its own initial state, that is, they would prefer that the initial conditions of the Big Bang somehow emerge from the theory itself. String theory, however, does not tell you which of its many solutions is the correct one for our universe. And, without initial conditions, string theory contains an infinite number of parallel universes, called the multiverse, each one as valid as the next.
One theory is that dark matter is a higher vibration of the superstring. The leading candidate is the superpartner of the photon, which is called the “photino,” or “little photon.” It has all the right properties to be dark matter: it is invisible because it does not interact with light, and yet it has weight and is stable.
The most recent calculations show that this dark energy acts like antigravity and it is pushing the universe apart. The more the universe expands, the more dark energy there is, which causes it to expand even faster.
Even the skeptics are forced to admit that the multiverse idea is consistent with the theory called “inflation,” which is a supercharged version of the old Big Bang theory. In this scenario, just before the Big Bang, there was an explosion called inflation that created the universe in the first 10−33 seconds, much faster than the original theory.
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Future of the Earth
Since the end of the last glacial period about 10ka, the Earth has been gradually warming up. However, over the past half century, the Earth has been heating at an alarming and accelerating rate. We see evidence of this on numerous fronts:
Every major glacier on Earth is receding.
The northern polar ice has thinned by an average of 50% over the past 50 years.
Large parts of Greenland, which is covered by the world’s second-largest ice sheet, are thawing out.
A section of Antarctica the size of Delaware, the Larsen Ice Shelf C, broke off in 2017, and the stability of the ice sheets and ice shelves is now in question.
The last few years have been the hottest ever recorded in human history.
The Earth’s average temperature has increased by about 1.3 degrees Celsius in the past century.
On average, summer is about one week longer than it was in the past.
We are seeing more and more “100-yr events,” such as forest fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes.
Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and founder of the famed Worldwatch Institute, a think tank for the Earth. His organization closely monitors the world’s food supply and the state of the planet. He is worried about another factor: Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers.
Above 100F, leaves and flowers wilt because moisture is being lost faster than the roots can replace it.
There is the danger that, if this global warming accelerates unabated into the coming decades, it could destabilize the nations of the world, create mass starvation, generate mass migration from the coastal areas, and threaten the world economy.
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Chronology
2017: A section of Antarctica the size of Delaware, the Larsen Ice Shelf C, breaks off.
2016: the field of artificial intelligence was electrified by the news that AlphaGo, DeepMind’s computer program, had beat Lee Sedol, the world champion of the ancient game of Go.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
8 Oct, 2015: after years of muddle, vacillation, and indecision, NASA finally declared its long-term goal: to send astronauts to Mars.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
2011: President Barack Obama orders a new “Valentine’s Day massacre.” In one sweeping gesture, he canceled the Constellation program (the replacement for the shuttle), the moon program, and the Mars program. To relieve the tax burden on the public, he defunded these programs in hope that the private sector would make up the difference.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1 Feb, 2003: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; Seven astronauts die when the space shuttle disintegrates as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere over Louisiana. The entire shuttle fleet is grounded for 29 months.
28 Jan, 1986: The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; Seven astronauts die when the space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight over the Atlantic Ocean. The entire Shuttle fleet is grounded for nearly three years.
1981: The space shuttle begins operating.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
The Space Shuttle was capable of sending sixty thousand pounds of payload into orbit and then docking with the International Space Station. Each launch consumed about $1 billion. Sending anything into near-Earth orbit on the shuttle cost roughly $40,000 per pound, which was about four times the cost of other delivery systems. The shuttle was partially reusable. It was capable of sending seven astronauts into space and then flying them back home, like an airplane.
1969-1972: Project Apollo (aka the Apollo Program) succeeds in landing humans on the moon in a three manned spacecraft.
1968-1972: Saturn V, the only rocket ever to carry humans beyond near-Earth orbit, sends 24 astronauts to either land on or fly by the moon in the Apollo Program. The Saturn V stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. It could lift a payload of 310,000 pounds into orbit around the Earth. Most important, it could send large payloads past twenty-five thousand miles per hour, which is the escape velocity of the Earth.
1967: The United States, Soviet Union, and many other nations signed the Outer Space Treaty, which banned nations from claiming ownership of celestial bodies like the moon. It banned nuclear weapons from Earth orbit and from being placed on the moon or elsewhere in space. The testing of these weapons was also prohibited. The Outer Space Treaty, the first and only one of its kind, holds to this day.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1966: an astounding 5.5% of the U.S. federal budget was going into the lunar program.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1964: Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposes the Classification of advanced civilizations (Type 0, I, II, III).
1963: Physicist Roy Kerr discovered that a spinning black hole, if it was moving fast enough, would not necessarily collapse to a pinpoint but to a spinning ring. The ring is stable because centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1961-1966: Project Gemini; the US’ second human spaceflight program; carries a two-astronaut crew on ten separate missions in low earth orbit. Notable astronauts include Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Michael Collins.
1961: When the romantic notion of a Venusian utopia still dominated the public imagination, Carl Sagan made the controversial conjecture that Venus suffered from a runaway greenhouse effect and was devilishly hot. His novel and disturbing theory was that carbon dioxide acts as a one-way street for sunlight. Light can readily enter through the carbon dioxide in Venus’s atmosphere because the gas is transparent. But once the light bounces off the ground, it turns into heat or infrared radiation, which cannot easily escape the atmosphere. The radiation becomes trapped, in a process similar to the way a greenhouse captures sunlight during winter or the way cars heat up in the summer sun. This process happens on the Earth, but it is vastly accelerated on Venus because it is much closer to the sun, and a runaway greenhouse effect was the result.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1961: Astronomer Frank Drake, not satisfied with all the wild speculation about aliens in space, tried to calculate the odds of finding such a civilization. For example, one can start with the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy (about one hundred billion) and then reduce that number by the fraction that have planets around them, then by the fraction of the planets that have life on them, then the fraction that have intelligent life, and so on. By multiplying a string of these fractions, one gets a ballpark figure of the possible number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy. When Frank Drake first proposed this formula, there were so many unknowns that the final results were sheer speculation. Estimates of the number of civilizations in the galaxy ranged from tens of thousands to millions.-The Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1961: The USSR space program reaches its crowning achievement when Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin safely orbits the Earth.
1961: USSR Venera 1 is the first probe to fly past Venus.
1960: USSR Sputnik 5 has the first animals returned safely from space.
7 Oct, 1958- 1963: Project Mercury; the US’ first human spaceflight program carries astronauts in a single manned spacecraft. Notable US Astronauts: Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper.
1959: USSR Lunik 3 is the first rocket to photograph the back side of the moon
1959: USSR Lunik 2 is the first satellite to hit the moon.
1 Oct, 1958: President Dwight Eisenhower creates NASA, insisting on continued civilian oversight of Von Braun and the Militaries rocket programs.
1957: USSR Lunik 1 is the first rocket to fly past the moon.
1957: USSR Sputnik 2 carries the first animal, a dog named Laika, into orbit.
Oct, 1957: USSR Sputnik is launched, the first satellite in orbit.
1956: Clive M. McCay of Cornell University sewed the blood vessels of two rats together, one old and decrepit and the other young and vigorous. He was astonished to find that the old mouse started to look younger, while the reverse happened to the young mouse.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1945: Von Braun and one hundred of his assistants surrendered to the Allies. They, along with three hundred railroad cars of V-2 rockets and parts, were smuggled back to the U.S. This was part of a program, called Operation Paperclip, to debrief and recruit former Nazi scientists. The U.S. Military scrutinized the V-2, which eventually became the basis of the Redstone rocket in the Army, the Vanguard Missile in the Navy, and the Atlas Missile in the Air Force, and von Braun and his assistants had their Nazi records “cleansed.” (the USSR completes designs of an almost exact prototype).-Future of Humanity by Kaku
3 Oct, 1942: The V-2 rocket is successfully launched; a German rocket project led by Wernher von Braun. The V-2 stood forty-six feet tall and weighed 27,600 pounds. It could travel at a blazing speed of 3,580 miles per hour and it achieved a maximum altitude of about sixty miles (the first rocket ever to leave the boundary of the atmosphere and enter outer space). It hit its targets at three times the speed of sound, giving no warning apart from a double cracking noise as it broke the sound barrier. And it had an operational range of two hundred miles. More than three thousand V-2 rockets were launched against the Allies, resulting in nine thousand deaths.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
16 Mar, 1926: Goddard makes history with the first successful launch of a liquid fueled rocket. It rose 41 feet into the air, flew for 2.5 seconds, and landed 184 feet away in a cabbage patch.-The Future of Humanity by Kaku.
Goddard experimented with different types of fuels and realized that powdered fuel is inefficient. His first stroke of brilliance was to replace powdered fuel with liquid fuel, which could be precisely controlled so that it burned cleanly and steadily. He built a rocket with two tanks, one containing a fuel, such as alcohol, and the other tank containing an oxidizer, such as liquid oxygen. These liquids were fed by a series of pipes and valves into the firing chamber, creating a carefully controlled explosion that could propel a rocket. Goddard realized that as the rocket rose into the sky, its fuel tanks were gradually depleted. His next innovation was to introduce multistage rockets that discarded spent fuel tanks and therefore could shed some dead weight along the way, vastly increasing their range and efficiency. And third, he introduced gyroscopes. Once a gyroscope is sent spinning, its axis always points in the same direction, even if you rotate it. For example, if the axis points toward the North Star, it will continue to point in that direction if you turn it upside down. This means that a spaceship, if it were to wander in its trajectory, can alter its rockets to compensate for this motion and return to its original course. Goddard realized he could use gyroscopes to help keep his rockets on target.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1915: Einstein came up with an astonishing explanation. He postulated that space and time, which were once thought to be inert and static, were actually dynamic, like smooth bedsheets that can be bent, stretched, or curved. According to his hypothesis, the Earth does not revolve around the sun because it is pulled by the sun’s gravity, but because the sun warps the space around it. The fabric of space-time pushes on the Earth so that it moves in a curved path around the sun. Simply put, gravity does not pull. Instead, space pushes. Einstein also realized that there was a loophole in his general theory of relativity. The larger a star is, the greater the warping of space-time surrounding it. If a star is heavy enough, it becomes a black hole. The fabric of space-time may actually tear, potentially creating a wormhole, which is a gateway or shortcut through space. This concept, first introduced by Einstein and his student Nathan Rosen in 1935, is today called the Einstein-Rosen bridge.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1900: the official life expectancy in the United States is forty-nine. But two revolutions added decades to that number. First, sanitation improved, which gave us clean water and waste removal and helped to eliminate some of the worst epidemics and plagues, adding about fifteen years to our life expectancy. The next revolution was in medicine. We often take for granted that our ancestors lived in mortal fear of a bestiary of ancient diseases (like tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, polio, whooping cough, and so on). In the postwar era these diseases were largely conquered by antibiotics and vaccines, adding another ten years to our life expectancy. During this time, the reputation of hospitals changed significantly. They became places where real cures for diseases were dispensed.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
Jan, 1610: Galileo made a discovery that would shake the very foundations of the church.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
Galileo believed that science and religion could coexist. He wrote that the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go, while the purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. In other words, science is about natural law, while religion is about ethics, and there is no conflict between them as long as one keeps this distinction in mind.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
1584: Bruno summed up his philosophy, writing, “This space we declare to be infinite…in it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.” Now, more than four hundred years later, roughly four thousand extrasolar planets in the Milky Way have been documented, and the list grows almost daily. (In 2017, NASA listed 4,496 candidate planets, of which 2,330 have been confirmed, discovered by the Kepler spacecraft.)-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
Bruno, Galileo’s predecessor, was burned alive at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600. The stars in the heavens are so numerous, he observed, that our sun must be one of many. Surely these other stars, too, are orbited by a multitude of planets, some of which may even be inhabited by other beings. The church imprisoned him for seven years without trial, then stripped him naked, paraded him through the streets of Rome, tied his tongue with a leather strap, and lashed him to a wooden pillar. He was given one last chance to recant, but he refused to take back his ideas.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
4 Ba: The Core of Mars became inactive and its magnetic field disappeared. Without a magnetic field to protect it against harmful solar rays and flares, the atmosphere was gradually blown into outer space by the solar wind. As the atmospheric pressure dropped, the oceans boiled away.
4 Ba: Eventually, the tumbling of the moon slowed down, until its spinning was locked to the Earth, so that one side of it always faced us. This is called tidal locking.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
14 Ba: At the moment of the Big Bang, approximately one quarter of H fused to make He; all stars are made primarily of H and He gas, roughly in the ratio of four to one, by weight.-Future of Humanity by Kaku.
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