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.

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)

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"

KakuFuture (last edited 2024-01-05 22:56:11 by KeithLofstrom)