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.

• 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?
  • acceleration = 2 d / t^2:

more later