wiki.keithl.com/KakuFuture
The Future of Humanity
Terraforming Marsm Interstellar Travel, Immortality, And Our Destiny Beyond Earth
Michio Kaku 2018, 629.455 KAKU Cedar Mill Library
The media-canonical future, as channeled by a 70yo pop-sci media gadfly and former theoretical physicist. Many acknowledgements of other non-engineer non-inventor non-entrepreneur media pundits. Much focus on "ick factor" reactionary barriers. I mostly skimmed the book, looking for any surprises.
"Futurism" is bunk. There are 8 billion potential inventors on Earth, and somebody somewhere is always surprising us. In March 1948, Arthur C. Clarke's essay "Electronics and Space-flight" was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, debunking large improvements in electronics ... at the same time that Bell Labs was distributing sample transistors (under NDA) to select customers. My own work was "debunked" by ACC as he lay dying, according to Fred Pohl, who turned Clarke's sketchy notes (with the debunk) into the 2008 science fiction novel "The Last Theorem". (Fred's apology letter is somewhere in my files; I told Fred I was thrilled to be a Clarke's first law victim by none other than Clarke himself.
- p1 Prologue, Toba volcanic explosion 75 kya.
p5 Sun expansion to 1.2 AU 5Gy from now
- wp mass loss will expand Earth's orbit to 1.5 AU, tidal drag will reduce it, luminosity will increase 2700x
this assumes no Oort object flyby orbit astroengineering
unnecessary for the expansion of life towards a Kardashev 2 civilization, but given all that energy, why not?
p20 Tsiolkovsky aside
p21-23 Goddard, no mention of Roswell work
- p25 3000 V-2s, 9000 Allies deaths, more slave labor deaths building them
p32 unnamed congressman "no buck rogers, no bucks" ... and no citation, perhaps POOMA.
- p36-xx NASA SLS, Bezos moon, 6% B
- p43 ice on moon
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.330.6003.434
- LCROSS, Cabeus crater near lunar south pole, blasted by spent rocket stage, 6% by mass, top meter or two
- prior radar mistaken
- p47 "The astronauts would have to adjust to the lower gravity on the moon"
- er, no, near-one-gee may be necessary for health, the Moon is 83% zero gee.
- also ignores effects of abrasive lunar dust on equipment
- p54 Mining the heavens - does not discuss deltaV, refining/reduction/processing
p60 Dawn asteroid mission orbiting Ceres since 2015 (hydrazine depleted 2018)
- p62 Mars and Musk
- p67 "failure rates still 1%, fatality rates 3.3%" ... per person, not per mission ... and none in 20 years, so this is not a rate, it is an average heavily biased by the accidents that ended the Silly Spaceplane era.
- p68 problems with zero gee, loss of bone mass, optic damage
- p69 Radiation cancer effects of Mars trip (3% increased cancer risk) compared to zero gee and failure risk
- p70 2016 ... Scientists at UC Irvine ... mice large doses ... brain damage
- no citation, google scholar couldn't find, could find similar work at Loma Linda university
- p71 Deep Space Gateway "will act as refuelling and resupply station for missions to Mars and the asteroids"
no, DSG Lunar Gateway is for technology development and lunar exploration, and makes no sense for a Mars mission
- Delta V from LEO to Mars Hohmann 13.7 km/s, delta V with with boost near Moon 17.1 km/s Delta V
- stop at Gateway ???? but it will be still more total Delta V. Best to spew reaction mass deep in Earth's gravity well.
- p74 Solar electric propulsion - maybe
- p76 Mars the garden planet? No, Mars the dim toxic resourceless deep gravitational energy well, "60% zero gee" relative to healthy Earth gravity
- p83-87 Zubrin
- p92-93 Venus hellhole, dense CO₂, nonsense about gas baked out of rocks leading to 90 bar pressures, no citations
- ...-p108 more stuff about the (in)habitability of other planetary moons.
- p111 "Robots in space" ... random miscellany chapter: CNT, AI, robots, replicators, consciousness, paranoid movies
- p137 Starship
- 140 Laser sails: "5 seconds to Moon, 1.5 hours to Mars, a few days to Pluto", no citations, POMA?
- accelerate for about two minutes
- acceleration = 2 d / t^2 for 2 minutes:
destination |
time (s) |
distance (m) |
avg velocity (m/s) |
Moon |
5 |
3.84e8 |
77e6 (0.25c !!) |
Mars |
5400 |
2.3e11 |
43e6 (0.14c) |
Pluto |
350000 (4d) |
6e12 |
17e6 (0.06c) |
- In other words, innumerate POMA BS
147 "H bombs of the 50s gigantic" ... no, Castle Bravo in 1954 --> 20 tonnes 20MT
- 150-156 more enormous fusion rocket stuff
- 156 space elevators, CNT, enormous engineering problems, late this century (POMA blather)
- 159-166 warp drive, wormhole, Alcubierre drive, Casimir effect, blah blah
Giordano Bruno ... executed for religious heresy, not cosmology
some Bruno ebooks at Multnomah County Library, academia mostly theological, unscientific
- 170 exoplanets, occultation and doppler
175 TRAPPIST-1, 6e-4 L☉, 7 planets
176 Kepler-452b 1800 ly, 1.5 R🜨 / 5 MEarth / 1.9g / 265K (wide variances
- 181 estimate 20% of 100B stars in galaxy have "Earth-like" planets
181 TESS Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, after 5 years: 6977 candidate exoplanets, 402 confirmed as of 15 Nov 2023, now in second extended mission
- 188 dismisses cryonics, 189 dismisses cryonic passengers supported by repair robots
- 189 At present, no human has ever been cloned
- 191 lifespan extension, telomeres, genetic manipulation ... nothing about fixed census of neurons
198 immortality and overpopulation? 5 years after this book was written, the current concern is a population crash
- 203 "... because if you upload your mind into a computer, then you will spend an eternity trapped inside a sterile machine"
Kaku's "some people" seemingly prefer a few more years of unescapable dementia; how can practically unlimited voluntary mobility through a series of increasingly capable uninfected "machines" be worse than that?
209 Revolutionizing Prosthetics (not "revolutionary"
- 211 "record the memories of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease"
213 NRB2 gene improves mental function
218 Rodney Brooks
222 Test tube baby, 1978 Louise Brown, denounced by pundits, now millions of epople
- 226 Sending out signals, fearful analogies
226 Seth Shostak wp, contact with ET by 2025
- 232 assumes ET has stereo eyes, thumbs, language ... unlikely after megayears of techno-evolution and spread between stars. Non-megayear single-planet beings will be underrepresented compared to enduring and expanding populations.
- 244 plunder water from Earth? WHY, when the Earth is 30 km/s deep in the Sun's gravity well, and 11 km/s deep in it's own hole? Compared to the Oort cloud, free ice, ready to ship, with free delivery if ET is patient.
- 248 Tabetha Boyajian KIC 8462852 1400 ly away; partial Dyson shell?
- Sorry, unstable, wrong infrared signature. Do the math, read the journal papers, not National Enquirer
- 257 Kardashev type 2 (entire star energy): "all their machines will create enough infrared heat to make life impossible on their planet"
- bad model - a 100 AU radius shell around the Sun will be quite cold, heating the Earth (compared to 2.7K deep space) by less than 1 degree Kelvin, easily compensated by deflecting some of the Sun's infrared light arriving at Earth.
- 261 prehistoric DNA divergence extrapolated into future - nope, we already know how to create alternate human DNA de novo, and somebody may invent a reason to do so before Kaku or I die of old age.
- 267 von Neumann machines spreading through galaxy
- 268 "laser porting", sending brain connectome as data
- 270-290 Planck energy bafflegab, giant accelerator bafflegab, wormhole bafflegab, quantum bafflegab
- 293 expansion seemingly accelerating ... based on the light we can see now.
- 304 fine tuning - we are where we can be, not where we can't.
Speculation is unbounded, fashionable/popular speculation follows the herd. Kaku writes popular books tuned for the audience at the time of his writing. This 2018 book is already noticeably obsolete in 2024, and what I write about it now, in 2024 will be laughable on 2030. The future isn't what it used to be, and never will.
Peter Drucker said that "The best way to predict the future is to create it".
Abraham Lincoln said "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it"