The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

by Michio Kaku

Geneticists have noticed the curious fact that any two humans have almost identical DNA. By contrast, any two chimpanzees can have more genetic variation between them than is found in the entire human population. Mathematically, one theory to explain this phenomenon is to assume that, at the time of the explosion, most humans were wiped out, leaving only a handful of us—about two thousand people.

It is as inescapable as the laws of physics that humanity will one day confront some type of extinction-level event.

If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us.

The Earth has already sustained five major extinction cycles, in which up to 90 percent of all life-forms vanished from the Earth. As sure as day follows night, there will be more to come.

The laws of physics are clear; sooner or later we will face global crises that threaten our very existence.

Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the star closest to our sun, Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light-years away from us. Scientists have long conjectured that this star would be one of the first to be explored.

there might be twenty billion Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun-like star in our galaxy alone.

since there are one hundred billion galaxies that can be seen with our instruments, we can estimate how many Earth-sized planets there are in the visible universe: a staggering two billion trillion.

we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.