Diff for "KakuFuture"

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

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1187454

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1186474

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197135

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1187726

  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1185696

• 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:

• 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

  • Giordano Bruno essay, Ohio State astronomy

• 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

more later